It’s been almost four years since season two of Starz’s criminally under-looked Steven Soderbergh-produced anthology The Girlfriend Experience. While the wait has been painful, the COVID-delayed third installment has finally arrived, and so far, has yet to disappoint. Based on Soderbergh’s 2009 film of the same name, which follows a high-end Manhattan call girl played by Sasha Grey, each season of the series follows different women in various settings who navigate the transactional world of sex. The spectacular first season, directed and written by Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan, focused on Christine (Riley Keough), a law student who leads a secret life as a call girl; and the fairly disappointing season two centered on two unconnected storylines that were split between directors, with Kerrigan’s half about the blackmailing of a powerful DC politician and Seimetz’s part about a former escort who enters the Witness Protection Program after agreeing to testify against her abusive boyfriend. In the first season without Seimetz and Kerrigan behind the camera, filmmaker Anja Marquardt has taken the reins as she explores sex and desire through a psychological and analytical perspective.
Season three follows Iris (Julia Goldani Telles), a twenty-something American neuroscience major who enters the London tech world after she is hired as a neuro-researcher by a startup called NGM to study human behavior and predictive analysis. NGM gathers data to form predictions that translate into applications that give people exactly what they want, not just what they need. Simultaneously, she begins to explore transactional relationships by working as a high-end escort for a company called “The V.” Setting her boundaries and booking luxurious dates through a voice on the other end of the phone, having private lunches with London’s wealthiest, and seducing her clients, Iris plays the role of a superficial partner under the alias “Cassie,” providing clients with emotional and sexual relationships at a high price, in order to decode who these people really are. She studies each of her clients, taking note through recorded sessions, in which she documents details and observations of the people she sleeps with. Unlike the previous seasons, Iris’ job at NGM works in tandem with her work at The V, with her sex work as a GFE allowing her to delve deeper into how desire and behavior operate, which in turn translates into benefitting the research she does at her day job.
Telles is perfectly cast, giving a brilliant and magnetic performance as the blank and stoic leading lady who is the beating heart of the series. Through a more technical lens, Marquardt provides a refreshing perspective to the chilling world of the Girlfriend Experience, choosing to focus on a woman’s journey toward experiencing a new type of connection with the people she has relations with. Like the previous two installments, the third is equally sleek and detached, with a minimalistic setting that creates a meticulous and often bleak atmosphere that viewers of the prior seasons will be familiar with and that positively contributes to Marquardt’s storytelling of exploring sex through technology.
From the first two episodes (out of ten, which will debut on Starz in the Spring), it’s still too early to tell what Marquardt has in store for the rest of Iris’ narrative, but these half-hour episodes are gripping enough to make us want to continue watching. Although still not reaching the first season’s level of greatness, with season three, Marquardt’s reinvention so far succeeds at continuing the provocative show’s streak of being one of the boldest shows on television in recent years.
