New and returning TV: 'Girlfriend Experience,' 'Catastrophe,' 'Dice,' 'The Detour'

Hollywood loves a hooker story, but if you're looking for sexual frankness, you'll find more in two new comedies - and one returning one - than in The Girlfriend Experience, an indie-style drama premiering Sunday on Starz in two back-to-back episodes.

Grim, claustrophobic, and only occasionally riveting, the show, inspired by Steven Soderbergh's 2009 film, stars Riley Keough (Mad Max: Fury Road) as the kind of sex worker in whom people who pay for sex (or make TV shows) most want to believe: the beautiful young woman working her way through law school and making lots of money while indulging her own sexual desires.

The six half-hour episodes I saw sometimes ended in a tease, but The Girlfriend Experience doesn't stint on the sex so much as sanitize it. Keough's character, Christine, hooks up with plenty of men.

All are older, some much older, but the camera is far less interested in what time might have wrought on their bodies than in what it hasn't yet done to hers. If Christine ever feels revulsion, or even just difficulty feigning desire, we're as much in the dark as her johns are.

Created, written, and directed by natural-lighting fans Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz (who also plays Christine's sister), the show doesn't glamorize prostitution, or even make it all that interesting.

Keough, in whose eyes you might be tempted to see her grandfather, Elvis Presley, gives a finely tuned performance that's as artistic as its setting, but beyond wondering at one point whether she might be a sociopath, Christine remains as much a mystery to herself as to me.

But, then, maybe I just prefer sex to be less sterile.

Or at least funnier.

Catastrophe, a British comedy that returns to Amazon on Friday for a second hilarious season, and TBS's The Detour, which makes its official debut in two back-to-back episodes on Monday after being previewed during the network's NCAA coverage, are comedies about couples with children who haven't yet been dissuaded from engaging in the activity that made them parents in the first place.

Showtime's Dice, which premieres Sunday after the Season 5 opener of House of Lies, stars comedian Andrew Dice Clay as some version of himself and devotes its second episode both to guest star Adrien Brody (The Pianist) and to Dice's response to discovering that his girlfriend, Carmen (Natasha Leggero), had, in a magazine quiz, failed to describe their sexual relationship as "boiling."

(For Clay fans, or those who would rather skip the premiere, which isn't nearly as funny as the Brody episode, all six episodes of Dice will be released at once on Showtime's streaming services and on Showtime On Demand.)

"We were worried there wasn't enough sex" in the second season of Catastrophe, star and co-creator Sharon Horgan told reporters in January.

"And then we watched it," said her costar and cocreator Rob Delaney.

"And then . . . we were like, 'Oh, no. I think we've maybe put too much sex in it because people that have been married that long don't have that much sex,' " Horgan said.

There's a time jump in Season 2 that brings characters Sharon and Rob to the point where their creators originally planned to start the show, before deciding they'd like to see more about how they met. (The first season, already on Amazon, introduces Sharon, an Irish woman living in London, whose fling with Rob, a visiting American, has lasting consequences.)

"We wanted to show the horror of a marriage in progress," Delaney said.

Horror it may be, but it's also funny and smart, and, yes, even sexy.

Carrie Fisher, who makes a return trip as Rob's mother from Boston, is not to be missed.

The Detour, created by spouses (and Daily Show veterans) Jason Jones and Samantha Bee and starring Jones and Natalie Zea (Justified), takes a marriage in progress and sends it on a road trip.

(On Wednesday, TBS announced it had picked up a second, 13-episode season, which, along with the network's earlier announcement that Bee's Monday comedy, Full Frontal, was expanding to 39 weeks, should keep both busy for a while.)

The Detour may try too hard in places - "Why are we in Penis-ylvania?" asks the son (Liam Carroll), who, like his mother (Zea) thought the family was flying, not driving, to their Florida vacation - but the wackiness is balanced by the genuine moments its characters share, which include a surprisingly straightforward explanation to their kids of how sex actually works.

In what may or may not be an homage to The Affair, The Detour is framed by a police interrogation and involves flashbacks.

After four episodes, I wasn't clear where it was headed but was still enjoying the ride.

graye@phillynews.com
215-854-5950