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Show:		6.0
Picture:		7.0
Sound:		7.0
Extras:		1.0
Score:		6.0

Director(s):	John Fawcett
Writer(s):	Noel S. Baker, Shelley Eriksen, Karen Hill, Karen McClellan
Starring:	Rachael Crawford • Adam Harrington • Rachel Wilson • Jeff Seymour • Balazs Koos • Jennie Raymond • Steve Boyle
Genre:	Comedy • Drama
Release Date:	November 10, 2009

List Price:	DVD - $17.49
Amazon:

Sex sells. If the average marketing campaign in the United States can convince you of anything, it’s that. Equal parts Kinsey and Ally McBeal, Show Me Yours dances along that fine line separating sexual promiscuity and exploration. So why didn’t Show Me Yours ever get the American attention such a sex-oriented feature would typically garner? Even after the first episode it’s abundantly clear that sex is the order of the day, after all, it’s at the dead center of the plot. For whatever reason, the age of Canadian-to-American television pipeline seems to have dried up. Show Me Yours may have found an American outlet via Oxygen (you know, the other channel aimed primarily at women), but it never found the audience it really deserved.

Dr. Kate Langford (Rachael Crawford) studies sex from the psychological angle. Her ideas are fresh and she even has a book deal in the works. When the contrasting anthropological views of Dr. Benjamin Chase (Adam Harrington), based on his long-running study of apes in Africa, are introduced into her studies, Rachael discovers she has a new, unwelcome partner for her book. The two strive to find a compromise between whose views receive dominant treatment in any given appointment with their interviewees, but more often than not the two butt heads and the side effects tend to bubble over into their personal lives.

Without the acted out inner monologue of Kate the show would suffer horribly. The mechanism operates in roughly the same way many of the Ally McBeal sequences did. We receive brief insights into how Kate is thinking as she interviews each of the subjects in her sexual study and places herself at the scene of each instance. At first, within the first scene of the pilot episode, the entire concept feels like a cheap independent film ploy – but then it keeps happening. Instead of being a parlor trick it becomes one of the primary modes of exposition for revealing the past sexual encounters or current fantasies of Kate. Sometimes the audience can’t tell if what they’re seeing is reality or in Kate’s mind, though eventually you begin to realize that both are equally valid ways of telling a story about interpreting and learning about sex drives.

Another strong characteristic of the show is its banter. The dialogue jogs at a quick clip and the chemistry between the primary players never fails to provide at least a smirk to the audience’s lips. Crawford and Harrington create excellent rapport between their characters and the side players pull their weight as well. There’s a sense of “Will they? Won’t They?” between Kate and Ben but were it not for the admiral performances of the pair’s outside romantic interests, the whole issue of potential chemistry would be moot. Rachel Wilson, Jeff Seymour, Jennie Raymond, Alberta Watson and Steve Boyle make up the supporting cast and each provides a better than could be expected turn considering the low recognition of the show.

It really is disappointing that such a well-written show could simply fly under the radar and then disappear completely. Show Me Yours deserved a better fate than secondary-cable network obscurity, but that’s what it got. If you’re looking for a show to break into (albeit only for two seasons), this is a surprisingly good choice. Here’s hoping that someone will do the same for other neglected Canadian gems like jPod and all the others that have just fallen by the wayside.

DVD Bonus Features

None. The set is barebones, but considering it came and went between 2004 and 2005 and is just now getting its major US DVD release, are you really that surprised? Ah well, it has about 6 hours worth of episodes so fans will take what they can get while newcomers will get an intro without any expository explanation from the show’s creators. At any rate, the show has just enough to make the series worth a glance.