Submission: Season One (2016) – Review

Television is rapidly changing, the days of Lucy and Desi Arnaz sleeping in separate beds is long behind us, but with networks like HBO, AMC, Cinemax and Showtime doing their best to grind NBC, ABC, and CBC into the dust with a slew of adult-oriented content that change seems to be speeding up, and I for one couldn’t be happier. There will always be a place for the latest sitcom, or whatever incarnation of C.S.I. is currently airing, but it’s on premium cable stations that new ground is being broken and while Game of Thrones was a mega-hit for HBO and Showtime had its long-running serial killer show Dexter we also got a very interesting show from Jacky St. James and Paul Fishbein called Submission, an entry that would try and push the envelope just a little further.

Co-creator Jacky St. James, a well-known writer/director of pornographic movies, saw the hype surrounding the book and movie Fifty Shades of Grey and was rather put out by it, to her that was not a proper depiction of the BDSM lifestyle, citing that it “Passed off an abusive relationship as an honest interpretation of the BDSM lifestyle.” So with this Showtime series, she hopes to inform and educate people on what is a healthy and consensual relationship in the world of bondage and submission, and will deal with realistic portrayals of such people. The series’ central character is Ashley Pendleton (Ashlynn Yennie), a young woman who escapes a terrible relationship, one whose poor sex abilities were about to put her in a sleep-induced coma, and to the darker side of sexuality. Ashley is the audience identification figure, but unlike say Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey, she’s actually heard of a butt plug.

Though it’s possible her ex-boyfriend never has.

After a nasty scene with her ex Ashley takes up her best friend Jules (Victoria Levine) offer to share her place in the small town of Ivy; it seems like a quaint place but then she is a bit taken aback when on her first day she witnesses the owner of the local coffee shop having sex in the backroom of his establishment. Raif (Kevin Nelson), the coffee shop owner, offers Ashley a job, and which she gladly takes because this is clearly a place with a great working environment.  It’s when she meets Dylan (Raylin Joy), who is to be one of her roommates with Jules, that things get a bit tense because it turns out that Dyan is the selfsame woman that Ashley saw Raif screwing earlier. Dylan is a free-spirited sexual dynamo whose kinky side is far beyond just having sex in public places. It should be noted that she’s not limited to men as she seduces one oblivious dude’s girlfriend into a lesbian tryst in the coffee shop bathroom, but her real paying gig is procuring girls who will sexually submit to the mysterious Elliot (Justin Berti).

Kind of a “personal shopper” for the kinky inclined.

Things get interesting when Ashley comes across the book “Slave” by local erotic fiction author Nolan Keats that Dylan left lying out. The sexual submission of the book’s protagonist lights a fire inside Ashley, sparking her into masturbatory fantasies, and she becomes obsessed with finding out who this reclusive author is.

Did I mention that her friend Jules is having a lesbian affair with her married boss Scarlet (Nika Khitrova)? So far I’ve probably given you the impression that Jacky St. James’s Submission is full of sex and nothing else, which is what one could expect from a series about sexual submission, but there is a lot more going on here; I’d say this show is kind of a cross between Sex & the City and The Story of O. The biggest hurdle the show has is putting in the seemingly required three sex scenes into each thirty-minute episode, with such a time constriction some things are going to suffer.

Suffer, but not in a good way.

The men of the show are pretty much two-dimensional caricatures, making them fairly uninteresting, as most of the screen time not spent on sex focuses on the women and their needs and desires; this is not necessarily a bad thing but a little balance could help make the show connect with a wider audience. For me, the stand-out character in the series isn’t protagonist Ashley Pendleton but the much more complicated Dylan, played beautifully by Raylin Joy, who some will know by her adult star nom de plume Skin Diamond. Dylan’s relationship with Elliot, and the tense dynamic between her and the somewhat naïve Ashley, is what makes this show work and that Raylin is an award-winning porn star should not overshadow the fact of just how good she is in this role.  Raylin’s earlier college training and love of Shakespeare and Ancient Greek Theater clearly shows through here and Dylan’s character arc throughout the first season is by far the more interesting one on display.

And her skills as a sex performer are of course unparalleled.

Is Submission pornography or erotica? This is a question I’m sure some people will ask and as the sex on screen is fairly graphic – no penetration is seen but almost everything else is – it’s a fair question. As mentioned before writer-director Jacky St. James has kind of a mission statement with this series, which is not something you’d get in an average porn movie, and the show is not populated solely by porn stars trying to branch out. Lead actress Ashlynn Yennie has been on everything from True Blood to NCIS and though she is one of the “legitimate” actors Ashlynn doesn’t shy away from the intense sexual scenes depicted in this show, I can’t say that all the actresses/actors give stellar performances, then again. I’d like to point out that I’ve seen a lot worse on higher profile shows.

There’s just a lot of nudity here, thus a bit more distracting.

What is unclear is if we will ever see a second season because even though ratings did improve over the six-episode run they were certainly not of a calibre to guarantee a return engagement, and that is a shame because Jacky St. James has managed to produce a quality show that gives an honest glimpse into a world that many people look at with either mild curiosity or outright disgust, but I found the honesty of this show refreshing and more on point than anything you got in an episode of Sex and the City. Whether Submission returns for another season or falls under the ratings axe it be known that once upon a time there was an incredibly hot show – steamingly hot at times – that gave us a nice collection of characters that were full of both flaws and good hearts and which challenged late-night television.

Note: This is certainly not a show for the prudish at heart.