‘Sex Box’ holds few goodies
Lots of talk, not much action in new WE series where couples have sex in windowless, soundproof container.
SEX BOX. 10 p.m. Friday, WE tv.
PEOPLE who watch WE tv's new couples-therapy show, "Sex Box," because, well, they like to watch, may be missing the point: There's nothing to see.
Not, at least, until couples emerge from the box — where they have changed, postwhatever, into silky sleepwear — to talk to three therapists about how it all went.
They've been dispatched to the windowless, soundproof box, which looks like a repurposed shipping container, after a brief question-and-answer session established that they have issues.
And such issues.
Expanding on Abraham Maslow's observation that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, "Sex Box" sets out to solve a variety of problems in Friday's premiere, from the commonplace (she's not having orgasms, he doesn't seem to care) to the maybe-not-so-common (he wants to bring another woman into their marriage full time, she's OK with the idea in principle but not while their kids are young).
Press materials for "Sex Box" try to make all this seem scientific, calling "postcoitus a scientifically proven time when people are more trusting and open due to the body's natural release of oxytocin ['cuddle hormone']."
I'd love to see the research that says people who have sex in an onstage box while the studio audience checks its watches do better in therapy, but I think I'll be waiting a long time.
People who take their problems — or Penthouse Forum fantasies — to TV tend to have one thing in common: They like to be watched.
The world won't end if "Sex Box" opens big, but, honestly, I wouldn't give them — or WE — the satisfaction.
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