5/2/2021
The intersection of sex work and corporate sterility is where Starz’s
The Girlfriend Experience has set up shop. The half-hour anthology drama has jumped from city to city and industry to industry in its first three iterations a white-shoe law firm in Season 1 (starring Riley Keough), a GOP fundraising outfit (featuring Louisa Krause) and a government safe house (with Carmen Ejogo) in the bifurcated Season 2 but its chilly minimalism and airless, increasingly claustrophobic tone have been series-defining constants. At this juncture more a riff on than an adaptation of the 2009 Steven Soderbergh film,
The Girlfriend Experience has been, since its debut in 2016, one of TV’s most compelling meditations on the alienation of work (in any field) and the ways in which many of us prefer impersonal mechanisms to the human touch.