Image from 'The Ex List'
 
 
 
 
Taking an approach that is increasingly common in contemporary fiction series television, the new CBS series The Ex List uses titillating and sensationalistic material to draw viewers in to a show that makes morally conservative points.

Based on an Israeli TV series and employing a gimmicky premise in the manner of its popular lead-in series, The Ghost Whisperer, the new CBS TV series The Ex List (Fridays at 9 PM EDT) follows an increasingly popular trend of using sexually charged or grim subject matter to make morally conservative points.

The major subplot of the premiere episode exemplified this quite vividly. A girlfriend of the protagonist has a certain portion of her body hair shaved off in order to bring some new excitement to her marriage, but her husband is appalled. He points out that she should in fact be very disturbed if he found it a turn-on for her to resemble a preadolescent girl in that way.

The episode spends a significant amount of time on this hairy issue, yet despite the rather startiling vulgarity, the point of it is rather conservative: the husband says that he’d love his wife no matter how she looked, and what he hated about it was to see her defacing herself.

The main story has a similar effect, without the excessive vulgarity, although it is heavy on nonmarital sexual activity. The protagonist, a nice but rather intense thirty-one-year-old female, wants to get married because a psychic told her if she doesn’t do so within a year it will never happen, and the further twist is that she has already met and dated the man she’s "supposed" to marry, but doesn’t know which one it is.

So, each week she will try on another "ex" until the show is canceled. In the premiere episode, she gets back together with a small-time rock singer with whom she previously broke up on his birthday. He forgives her and responds positively to her overtures, and in fact is annoyingly needy toward her. The final twist, which I won’t reveal here, is both plausible and poetically just.

Overall, the show’s gimmick seems serviceable, especially since its successful lead-in program is equally gimmicky. Whether The Ex List will succeed with audiences will depend greatly on whether the writers can come up with sufficiently interesting situations week after week—and whether they have the good sense to retain the sensible morality behind the show’s thick surface of vulgarity.