Have you been recognized more after the HBO show?

Definitely, yeah. I mean, now it's like, people are walking up to me and actually—

Calling you Palek.

Yeah, stuff like that, and wanting to talk about the show, wondering if that's really my dick.

Is it?

No! For the first couple weeks I just wanted to walk around with a t-shirt that said, "It's prosthetic."

Did they give you that option, or did they want you to be naked first and you said "no, I won't do that," and then they compromised?

I think for the most explicit scenes, my thinking was if it's real, it crosses a line into documentary.

The girls don't get prosthetic breasts, though.

No, those are all prosthetic. The whole show is actually CGI. I don't know if you know that.

It's motion capture, isn't it. Gollum has nothing on you guys.

The dude that plays Gollum plays every character in the show. He deserves like, four Emmys.

While we admit to enjoying the prospect of motion-capture Olivier Andy Serkis covered in a green-dotted body stocking and attempting to physically manifest a half-dozen sexually alienated urbanites, we really think Scott deserves credit where credit is due: That's all him and some molded latex up there, bringing emotional resonance to a scene that requires him to jerk off into a plastic cup with the help of some phoned-in verbal encouragement from his wife.

• Meet Adam F*%#@ng Scott [BlackBook]

· Report: Oscar-hopeful, artsy-fartsy films may have limited commercial appeal. [Variety]
· Cameron Diaz hopes that America's tastes continue to deteriorate to the point that her new holiday special, Shrek the Halls, will take its rightful place alongside the Frosties, Rudolphs and Charlie Browns of the end-of-year TV-special season, becoming a new Christmastime tradition. [THR]
· Ray Winstone's CGI-tightened belly continues to be popular at the foreign box office. [Variety]

Fain Sutter, a 38-year-old Internet developer who has been married for nine years, has been a faithful viewer of the first four episodes. But his wife, a hedge fund analyst, refuses to watch the show with him.

The couple, both 38 and parents, recently had an explosive argument over the show with friends.

"She finds it too depressing," said Sutter. "But the writing is insightful and hits on so many issues that are relevant. You see similarities in your own life and in the relationships of friends. There are definitely a lot of layers."

"We fight over it," he said. "I tend to like shows that are very introspective and make you look at yourself and your life. But some people are turned off by stuff that's too raw like that."

It's not hard to see why his wife might be put off by his obsession with the show, as the characters closest to their age are the only ones not copulating like weasels dipped in Spanish Fly at every act break, enduring an utterly depressing, yearlong dry spell induced by the libido-dampening drudgery of parenthood. Then again, if Tell Me holds any message for its viewers, it's that even the most explosive of disagreements can be momentarily put aside in favor of some good, old-fashioned, make-sure-you-tell-that-therapist- how-good-I-just-gave-it-to-you screwing.

• HBO Sex Series Sparks Rifts, Heat in Married Couples [ABC News]
• Previously: Pondering The 'Tell Me' Question: How Much Fucking Do We Really Need To See? [Defamer]

• Cavemen [ABC.com]
• Previously: Confrontational Caveman Exposes 'The View' Co-Host's Prejudice [Defamer]

Even so, a lot of people in the industry don't buy the idea that some films require actors to engage in the real thing. Scott Winant, a director of the Showtime series "Californication," which also uses sex as a narrative device, said that what makes the scene is the emotions conveyed in the acting, not the act. Real sex, he said, "doesn't necessarily communicate the emotion of the sexual moment. It's more effective to work with great actors who can identify with a sexual moment through the acting."

We're sure that Winant wasn't referring specifically to the Tell Me cast, who altogether seem more than capable of identifying with a sexual moment even with a director interrupting them with notes like, "Hey, Adam, would you mind shifting to the right just a touch? We're really going to lose our sense of the emotional truth of you desperately trying to knock up Sonia if that shadow obscures your balls. Thanks, buddy, now back to the boning, you're really in a groove there"; he was merely demonstrating pride in the performances on his own show, where seasoned vets like Evan Handler prove each week that they don't need to actually show their areolas being yanked off during a nipple-clamp mishap to have the scene resonate with a realism-craving audience.

• It Isn't a Real Sex Scene? I Still Need a Cigarette [NY TImes]
• Previously: Sexagenarians Finally Get To Shut Up And Screw On 'Tell Me You Love Me' [Defamer]

While we briefly thought that last night's scene in which frequently de-pantsed, possibly infertile star Sonya Walger attempts to dirty-talk frustrated partner Adam Scott through the arduous process of harvesting a sperm sample from the stunt-cock that made such a memorable debut in the series premiere might represent the episode's erotic high-point, we knew that the producers were holding back for a bigger finish. And they delivered: all of our voyeuristic buttons were pushed as we heard vaguely Mirrenesque therapist Dr. Foster sternly demand, "Fuck me!" of the husband with whom she had been recently bickering, then go on to prove in the ensuing moments of tangled sexagenarian limbs and thrusting buttocks you could bounce an AARP card off of that the show will open-mindedly afford its white-haired folks the same opportunities to explicitly screw away their interpersonal problems as it does its younger, more self-absorbed twenty-and thirtysomethings.

• Previously: The Ladies Of 'The View' Discuss HBO's Porntastic New Relationship Drama [Defamer]

Apparently, the explicit sexual content simultaneously repels and titillates the ladies of The View, who spent some time on this morning's program trying to delicately explain to their audience just how "very clear" and "like a porno" the series' presentation of its sexual content is, and in the process exposed at least one rookie co-host's ignorance of exotic positions like "doing it in the passenger seat of a car so that we can momentarily ignore our differing viewpoints on monogamy."

And while we're on the subject, we'll open the floor to a reader's question about the premiere episode's, um, climactic -handjob scene:

honestly, in the jerk-off sequence on sunday's show, i thought it was a fake cock. has this been discussed at all?

We haven't yet performed the Googling necessary to provide any kind of definitive answer, but our suspicion is that a trick phallus capable of ejaculating stunt-semen at the command of an off-camera fuck-propmaster was used to spare the actor from the penis-punishing exertion of multiple takes, but we encourage our commenters to offer their better-informed theories on the scene's execution.

• The View [ABC.com]
• Previously: Report: HBO's Long-Missing Fucking Found On New Series 'Tell Me You Love Me' [Defamer]

Bosoms and things: That's not exactly a plot summary of "Tell Me," but it's not a bad place to start. Because that's where many viewers will start. Whatever else it may or may not be, "Tell Me," at least in its current form, will set a new precedent for prime-time TV when it has its premiere Sept. 9:

No previous series, on pay cable or anywhere else, has dared show anything even close to this much skin; the climax, if you will, of the first episode finds a woman (Sonya Walger) in her 30s masturbating her husband (Adam Scott) to orgasm, with the entire act and all relevant body parts plainly visible. Even Jane Alexander — yes, that Jane Alexander, the snow-domed, regally poised 67-year-old former chief of the National Endowment for the Arts — drops trousers for some frisky senior sex. [...]

Now faced with promoting the series, the network is doing a 180, pretending that the sex doesn't matter, as if only perverts and rich, aging comedy writers won't be able to see that "Tell Me" is not about smokin' sex but rather intimacy and trust and other topics familiar to anyone who's ever endured couples therapy.

As HBO Entertainment President Carolyn Strauss said in an interview, "The point isn't to be prurient. The point is to show the language of intimacy."

Or, as Mort told me: "I didn't realize people would be so focused on the sex." (An experiment: Try to read that quote aloud in the mirror without breaking a smile.)

Look for a conflicted HBO to struggle a bit in discovering the elusive sweet-spot between prurience and restraint, between sweaty porking and the committed lovemaking; soon, their first attempt at treading this fine line will reach reporters, a press kit containing a neoprene model of the pilot's signature, explicit hand-job and a mocked-up copy of Shaved Sexagenarians in Heat, but which arrives in a box labeled: "Tell Me You Love Me: Come For The Fucking, But Stay to Learn The Language of Intimacy."

• HBO gets raw — or is it raunchy? — with sexually explicit 'Tell Me You Love Me' [LAT]
• Previously: Overthinking 'Entourage' II: Where's All The Fucking? [Defamer]