Anything goes in Bush's America

It was decadence, among other things, that brought down the Roman Empire two thousand years ago. It appears that a shocking new wave of pornographic decadence as well as a crumbling economy and a futile war is helping to bring America down.

A new US series from Time-Warner is designed to replace "The Sopranos" as America's most-watched TV show. This week Time-Warner's principal television production subsidiary, HBO, allowed critics a preview of its latest contribution to American culture.  It left them stunned and almost disbelieving.

"Tell Me You Love Me," is due to go to air in September.

It is about three middle-class American couples who are all being treated for personal problems by the same psychiatrist.  The critics described the series as the most sexually explicit ever shown on the mass media in radically puritan and evangelical America.

The critic for Time-Warner's own flagship magazine, Time, has written: "The sex scenes are so graphic that the viewer cannot help wondering if the actors are, in fact, actually performing their deeds in front of the camera."

In the first episode, the British actress Sonya Walger, is shown peforming masturbation to bring her husband to orgasm, "with organs. angles and fluids, the entire action and all relevant body parts, totally exposed," the Time critic reported.

The executive producer, Cynthia Mort, says, "I wanted a voyeuristic feel. I don't want a show where in the middle of this emotional real moment you have some stupid cutaway to a lamp or something."

Mort declines to say whether the actors actually "do it."

"They are actors first and they will not ask anything of themselves and I will not ask anything of them which they are uncomfortable about doing," she said.

Michelle Borth, an actress involved in some of the intense marital intimacy, says: "We are not porn stars. Our job in any scene, whether it is a fight scene or s sex scene, is to do it authentically."

HBO executive Carolyn Strauss told the critics, "We did not make a decision just to push the envelope. We wanted to be honest about the language of intimacy."

HBO's television network has been losing subscribers since the demise of such shows as "Sex in the City," "Six Feet Under" and "The Sopranos." Other American networks have been attracting viewers away with borderline porn in such shows as "The Tudors" and "Californication," which features X-Files actor David Duchovny in a series of sexual relationships with a whole multitude of women, including one actress who has just been revealed as only sixteen years old.