Anything Goes, Wearily

The emergence of the visionary and provocative television of the 1990s and 2000s, the period that gave us The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Larry Sanders Show, owed a great deal to HBO, whose narrowcast distribution model and welcome appetite for risk helped make such programming possible. More recently, the premium network has found distinction with Show Me A Hero, True Detective, and Chernobyl. Sex Diaries, however, HBO’s new series of 30-minute documentaries about the sex lives of Brooklyn hipsters on the make, is a much more cynical enterprise.