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Last night Lifetime: Television For Room-Temperature Wine Drinkers debuted its newest series, The Client List, a supposedly sexy and scandalous show about a gal (Jennifer Love Hewitt) who joins the oldest profession (sort of) to make ends meet in these tough economic times.
The Client List was originally a movie cooked up by the network back in 2010, supposedly inspired by the whole Eliot Spitzer/Ashley Dupré hullabaloo. But the movie, and the subsequent TV show, don't muchl resemble that high-class scandal, instead firmly rooting themselves in the 99 percent tales of sweet-talkin', hard-workin' Texan moms who just gotta do what they gotta do to protect their families. On the show, Hewitt plays Riley, a wife and mother of two whose construction worker husband has been out of work for months while the bank keeps calling about the dang mortgage. So Riley goes out and pounds the pavement looking for work as a massage therapist, seeing as she's got the training and all.
Luckily she runs into an old friend who's driving a fancy car and looking fabulous and who tells her to come on by the massage parlor where she works, a dumpy on the outside/nice on the inside joint called The Rub (ew) that's owned by none other than Loretta Devine. Riley, all pert and perky as she is, is hired right away and the family celebrates. Or at least seems to. Trouble is, when Riley comes home after her first day she discovers that her hunky hubby has left her, taken all his clothes and left a note and hit the road, so now she's all alone with her two small kids (and her mom, Cybil Shepherd) and needs money more than ever. And that's how she begins providing The Rub's most elite service, for which she gets substantial tips. Yes, this is a Lifetime series that's essentially about handjobs. It's as awkward as it sounds.