We get a bit more backstory with Iris: Her father has early-onset dementia, which makes her need for extra cash and her willingness to cross the Atlantic for a job more understandable. They’re never meant to be conventionally likable, either they move according to their internal rhythms, whose beats are largely muted to us. The Girlfriend Experience has always held its protagonists at arm’s length - we never learn much about them, and their motivations are more to be inferred than nailed down. That’s a wasted premise, but the new season’s biggest disappointment is its grating lead character. Sarah Jones Documentary About Sex Industry Sparks Backlash, Laverne Cox Exits Citing "Outrage" In fact, Iris occupies a fairly traditional line of sex work: Other than the ratings and reviews that her customers leave her, there’s not much that someone like her wouldn’t be doing moonlighting in 1992. But Marquadt seems uninterested in how sex work on the ground would be affected by the invisible algorithms that rule our lives - and that her protagonist is helping to create. Tech has upended the nature of sex work in a hundred and one ways - a reality smartly explored in, for example, the 2018 thriller Cam, which tackled both the skewed incentives in the internet-based gig economy and the next-level cyber-stalking that too-attached customers might pursue. It’s the first of many credulity-straining details that make Marquadt’s stab at the series, at least based on the first five episodes, a frustrating follow-up. In their VR simulation, the older woman (Talisa Garcia) evaluating Iris can’t be sure that the face the applicant is presenting is her own she apparently doesn’t know what Iris looks like at all. Iris’ entry into sex work begins in a sci-fi-esque white void, where her interview for the escort agency takes place. At this juncture more a riff on than an adaptation of the 2009 Steven Soderbergh film, The Girlfriend Experience has been, since its debut in 2016, one of TV’s most compelling meditations on the alienation of work (in any field) and the ways in which many of us prefer impersonal mechanisms to the human touch. The half-hour anthology drama has jumped from city to city and industry to industry in its first three iterations - a white-shoe law firm in Season 1 (starring Riley Keough), a GOP fundraising outfit (featuring Louisa Krause) and a government safe house (with Carmen Ejogo) in the bifurcated Season 2 - but its chilly minimalism and airless, increasingly claustrophobic tone have been series-defining constants.
The intersection of sex work and corporate sterility is where Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience has set up shop.
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