Boss S01E03

Could Boss be one of the very rare examples of a television show where gratuitous nudity actually detracts from the overall quality of the programme? I'm going to say that the very suggestion is ridiculous, but then again, I'm not a respected US television critic...

As you probably know by now, no episode of Boss would be complete without Kathleen Robertson baring some portion of her flesh. It's become an inevitability: just as the sun rises in the east, so too will Kathleen Robertson bare her nipples on Boss, laments AV Club's Meredith Blake. This week's spontaneous combustion into a Skinemax movie shall be called Public Fuckfest 3: Doggy Style In The Conference Room. For Blake, it was something of a relief that the requisite sex scene arrived early in last night's show and, all things being considered, it was relatively tame.


In other good news, she argues, there are clues emerging which suggest that Kitty is an actual human being, rather than a bespectacled sex robot. At the commercial shoot, Zajac asks Kitty to meet up with him later— most likely for some sex on home plate at Wrigley Field — but she turns him down. Why doesn’t she meet up with him? Zajac’s wife seems nice, and he propositions Kitty while his kids are frolicking a few feet away, which is icky, so perhaps Kitty’s feeling guilty?

The more likely possibility is that Kitty doesn’t want any messy complications messing with her hot sex life. She’d prefer to keep her relationship with Zajac strictly professional, i.e. limited to perfunctory intercourse in public places. Later in the episode, Kitty meets with Alderman Solomou to tell him that Kane won’t support his re-election bid. Dejected, she takes a strange dude home (or, more likely, to the bathroom stall) after sizing up his package. It’s safe to say Kitty has some issues: she’s sexually impulsive, a little self-destructive. She’s still a bit of a cliché—the ball-busting professional woman who can handle anonymous sex but not emotional attachment— but, muses Blake, that’s better than being a cartoon character.

Some commenters have jokingly suggested that there’s a 'nipple quota' on Starz, and it's beginning to look light this might actually be the case. Since Kitty was only partially nude this week, Boss made up for that nipple shortage elsewhere. In the least gratuitous scene, Emma and Darius share a post-coital conversation about the drugs she needs to procure illegally in order to keep the clinic open (Sounds like a great cost-saving measure to me! What could possibly go wrong?). Far more gratuitous were the two prostitutes fondling each other while Kane delivered a completely ridiculous monologue. Then, when Mayor Rutledge’s nurse stripped down to the buff and seduced Kane pretty much out of nowhere, the whole thing lapsed into ridiculous prurient male-fantasy land. Oh look, snarks Blake, it’s a sweet, nurturing, and curvaceous nurse who’s also totally hot for paunchy middle-aged guys. If the point of the endless flesh parade is to show us the mayor has a lot of empty, unfulfilling sexual encounters, we got the message the last 5 times he had an empty, unfulfilling sexual encounter. The nips are not only gratuitous, they’re also a distraction from what should be the show’s main purpose: storytelling.

Over at Hitfix, Alan Sepinwall is in agreement that the show "is very interesting when it's not trying to be impressive." In terms of pure story he thinks there's a lot of meat here: Tom's position and condition, and the performance by Kelsey Grammer; the gubernatorial campaign and the slow peeling of the kinky onion that is Ben Zajac; Sam Miller's investigation into whatever is going on with both the mayor and the O'Hare dig; the chilly condition of the Kane marriage; etc. It runs into trouble, he thinks, when it starts trying to serve you all that tasty meat with an overly elaborate presentation: with the monologues and eyeball close-ups and soft-core sex fantasy scenes that play like a Lewy Body Penthouse Forum hallucination.

Sometimes, all those pieces complement each other, as with Tom's brief aphasia during the meeting with Mac Cullen, and the way he then overcompensated by getting so ugly and vicious with Mac that no one would even remember that he was going on about breads and circuses. Other times, suggests Seppinwall, it has the whiff of desperation, like it's not enough for Boss to be recognized as good if it's not also acknowledged to be Important. It should just learn to trust the material a little more.


Television Series: Boss (S01E03- Listen)
Release Date: October 2011
Actress: Kathleen Robertson, Hannah Ware & Jennifer Mudge
Video Clip Credit: Zorg & Jabby

Kathleen Robertson










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Hannah Ware










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Jennifer Mudge










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