Product Details

• Actors: Michelle Borth, Tim DeKay, Adam Scott, David Selby, Sonya Walger
• Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 4
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Hbo Home Video
• DVD Release Date: February 12, 2008
• Run Time: 60 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000VTHYAE
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #9,705 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

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  Movies & TV > Television > TV Series By Letter > T > Tell Me You Love Me

• For more information about "Tell Me You Love Me - The Complete First Season" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

This 10-episode first season of HBO's drama, Tell Me You Love Me, is a semi-sexy romp into the world of coupledom, though in total it casts a depressed glow on the possibility of long-term connection. In it, three couples plus their endearing shared therapist, May (Jane Alexander), feud over various issues arisen due to marriage, aging, differing sexual desires, and sheer boredom. Episodes rotate couples' scenarios and are spliced with scenes showing each seeking refuge in May's office. The youngest pair, sous chef Jaime (Michelle Borth) and her fiancé Hugo (Luke Ferrell Kirby), break their engagement over feared infidelity, while Jaime lands pretty boy Nick (Ian Somerhalder) to temporarily ease her pain over the broken commitment. Thirty-somethings, Pawlik (Adam Scott) and Carolyn (Sonya Walger), struggle to get pregnant. As their situation escalates they detest what they recognize in each other as parental traits they've both worked so hard to avoid. The most riveting and mature situation develops as Dave (Tim DeKay) and Katie (Ally Parker) realize that after 13 years of marriage and kids they're incapable of having sex. DeKay and Parker make an eerily convincing acting team, mirroring oodles of couples who lack passion but don't know how to fix it. Dave and Katie most successfully ask the core question of whether or not marriage can truly work. Here, sex and love are separated into two distinct categories. Failed intimacy abounds as emotional overload and stress sets in for each team of lovers. The first several episodes set up the dilemmas and are rife with fighting and despair; midway through, relief comes as Dave and Katie take their therapist's advice and have some nights alone with no kids. Similarly, Jaime gives Hugo a break after he nearly overdoses. Episodes nine and ten are the juiciest, as one begins to wonder who will stay split up and who will weather the desperation. Carolyn reconsiders her anxiety-inducing job, while we see Katie and Dave still crumbling under tension as they remodel their already-perfect house yet again. Throughout, sex scenes amongst the two sexually active couples provide some respite from the bickering, though they mostly illustrate how sex serves as both sanctuary and escape. Tell Me You Love Me shows marriage as an uphill battle, though seemingly this means to inspire viewers to assess their own relationships for preservation. --Trinie Dalton

Product Description

Sex. Life. This is the story of three couples trying to stay afloat - and one woman's efforts to show them how to do it. HBO's newest adult drama series explores issues of intimacy - through the point of view of a 20-something couple, prenumpital concerns and fidelity are examined, while the series' 30-something couple confront their failed attempts to start a family, coping with the effects it has on their sex life. And after two kids and 12 years of marriage, a couple in their early 40s question why their love and devotion hasn't translated into physical intimacy in nearly a year. Tell Me You Love Me explores the telling, everyday moments that can make or break a couple's commitment to one another, both emotionally and physically.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Big and Different, November 13, 2007

By	Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Much hyped and sensitively written HBO series analyzing the marital and other problems of three couples, plus their therapist's own back story in what most people would consider late, late middle age. You'll be surprised to see the vigor with which Jane Alexander puts into her fervent love scenes with David Selby (yes, from DARK SHADOWS). Alexander has never struck me as being much of a softcore type, but here she looks great and she puts everything she has into it, a risky move for the former head of the NEA which might get her into trouble with her former constituency, but I think the risky work she does here gives her more credibility, and flows neatly into the scenes she has with her clients. In a way it will remind you of Lorraine Bracco treating Tony in THE SOPRANOS and cynical minds will assume that TELL ME YOU LOVE ME is like Dr. Melfi on ecstasy, but give the show a chance, it definitely has its own rhythm, and you won't pick up on it right away if you're used to the rough and tumble rapidfire cutting of most US made hourlongs.

Here the pace is positively molasses, Ingmar Bergman style, long, long scenes of domestic life interspersed with some pretty amazing bedroom scenes (what they call "random play" on Facebook). You won't believe you're watching this on TV. But it's all mixed in with hours and hours of nothing at all, in which it's up to the actors to convince us that there are real people behind those insertions and releases. Some of the actors are better than others, though none is really horrible. At first I wondered, how did they talk these actors into having such realistic sex scenes? Did they recruit them from porn movies? But I recognized some of them from other legitimate work and I guess the answer is, they went for the gusto of it. Dave and Katie are pushing forty, they've stopped making love and just live for their children and homelife, always repaving the patio et cetera. Their little girl has started having her period even though she's ten. Ally Walker plays Katie, the dissatisfied wife who wonders where all the romance went in her marriage, while Sherry Stringfield from ER plays Rita, her no nonsense pal. La Stringfield still acts as though she were the undisputed star of the show (in fact of the entire entertainment world), but she is pared back to the point where you can actually believe it. Tim DeKay is the husband who prefers to bring himself off under the covers rather than face another go round with his wife. It's bleak and miserable.

Adam Scott and Sonya Walger play a somewhat younger couple, Pawlik and Carolyn. They make love by the clock so that Carolyn can fulfill her dream of getting pregnant. But petulant Pawlik doesn't like being made to perform at gunpoint, so he starts balking and expressing his deep dislike of his wife. She's quite a piece of work and the script does little to soften her up. More power to the actress who plays her because this is a tough part to play.

Finally there is Jaime, a young sous chef at a trendy restaurant, torn between two good looking guys, incapable of being faithful to either. It was really this girl who plays her whom I thought initially wasn't as much an actress as an inflatable doll with a helium voice. Poor Jaime can't keep her clothes on for twenty minutes at a time. One of the boys in her life is played by former LOST star Ian Somerhalder, the other by some other dude. One is called Nick, the other Hugo. I can't remember now who is who, but stand back folks because, as it turns out, Michelle Borth as Jaime is the one who really wins your heart by the end of the season's run. I began to see why she was the way she was, and credit Miss Borth for a sensitive unfolding of real depth.

The show is slow, no doubt about it, and goes to some painful places. Will the unabashed focus on sexuality make it an audience winner? Hard to say, but it was well worth trying out! Give it a chance, you might learn something! I did, about Ian Somerhalder...

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Starts great, but then..., June 25, 2008

By	G. Scot Shelley (Raleigh, NC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I love HBO shows so when I found this on sale for $19.99 I grabbed it. I wouldn't recommend paying more than about $30 for it - if I'd paid more I would have been very disappointed. I haven't had an experience with a show like this before - by the second episode I thought it was one of the best TV shows I'd ever seen, up there with "Six Feet Under". It was fascinating to see a very realistic view of four different relationships, shown very realistically, even including very real sex scenes. That somehow made the couples even more human. By about the seventh episode I got tired of the characters' slow, meandering everyday lives, and the whining. I started thinking the sex scenes were just interfering with the progress of the story, and I realized, it's difficult to maintain interest in very realistic lives when you're living one yourself every day. I guess I learned I enjoy more drama and excitement in a TV show than I realized.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars HBO's latest ground breaker, November 26, 2007

By	Tracy Vest (Northern California) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Earlier this year, HBO offered yet another ground breaking series - this one revolving around marital strife and therapy. Opting for realism, the stories are interspersed with intensive therapy sessions, some of the most realistic and explicit intimate scenes ever presented on television, and the daily routine of couples in three stages of relationships (four if you count therapist May played by Jane Alexander and her husband of 43 years, played by David Selby).

David and Katie (Tim DeKay and Ally Walker from "Profiler") have been married 12 years and have grown so far apart that they are not longer intimate. Katie wants therapy to repair their distance while David just wants to skate by and pretend everything is okay. Palek and Carolyn (Adam Scott and Sonya Walger) are yuppies who have everything they could ever want except for a baby (though Palek wonders if he even wants that). Jamie and Hugo (Michelle Borth and Luke Ferrell Kirby) are an engaged couple who break up early on due to Jamie's trust issues with Hugo's fidelity. But soon another man enters her life (Ian Somerhalder, the brother from "Lost" who loved his sister a little too much), forcing Jamie to face the truth about her own past.

Extras include reactions to story lines by real life couples (which really don't add much), as well as behind the scenes and the usual making of shorts. It's a heavy series and oftentimes depressing; there is nothing light to the storylines, in fact viewers will wonder if any therapist can save some of these crumbling relationships.