‘Supersex’ Episode 3 Recap: A Star Is Porn

Rocco Tano would be lousy at a job interview. It’s not that he’s not charming or smart or diligent or loyal — he’s all of those things, at least in the world of the series based on his life. It’s just that if he got the old question about his biggest weakness, he’d have to offer the most clichéd response imaginable: His problem is that he cares too much about his job.

That really is the throughline of “The Beast,” Supersex Episode 3, which chronicles Rocco’s earliest work in porn, leading to his rechristening as Rocco Siffredi. We’ve already seen that his dick is too big for the kind of easy, romantic sex he wished he could have with Sylvie. Now, at a softcore shoot, he’s too eager (read: erect). Then, at a hardcore shoot, he’s also too eager (read: premature ejaculation due to over-fluffing before the shoot). He slinks home from his first film experience with his tail tucked between his legs, as he tells Lucia afterwards.

It’s only after he undergoes several personal trials, like some kind of psychosexual Hercules, that he can perform on command. He learns Lucia is pregnant and struggles to stop her from returning to Pigalle to perform sex work, going so far as to beg her to leave town with him. This, of course, shames her for being a sex worker worse than just about anyone else has done, which is rich coming from Rocco. But he’s acting out of caution for her unborn child, or at least that’s what he believes he’s doing.

Then there’s his brother Tommaso. For some time he’s missing, after his job in Marseille goes murderously awry. The cops terrify Rocco and Lucia while hunting for him. Then he returns, furious with Rocco for spending time with Lucia in his absence and furious with him for demanding she no longer return to Pigalle. A fight scene in which it seems at times that Tommaso will kiss Rocco rather than kill him takes place and everything. However, Tommaso winds up acquiescing to Rocco’s wishes and telling Lucia — who swears she likes it, and whose sexual energy Tommaso had hoped to channel into a dull workaday routine rather than a series of actual lovers — not to return to Pigalle.

Somewhere in there, the pair return home for a confrontation with the Roma bullies, now grown men, who are currently threatening their youngest brother, an older teenager himself now. Tommaso dupes Rocco into showing up at their headquarters alone; it’s a risky maneuver, but coming solo (whether he knew he was doing so or not) is the only thing that could possibly have earned these guys’ respect and thus refused the decades-old family feud. Along the way, Tommaso has what appears to be a final falling out with his mother, in the most covertly incestuous way possible of course.

Rocco even makes up with Sylvie along the way. She attends his sex club a couple of times, watching and even attempting to participate, but it’s too much for her. However, she seems to understand Rocco’s attraction to the lifestyle, and Rocco for his part apologizes to her for his cruelty after their disastrous first time together. I half-expected her to come to Rome with him when he gets the offer to join the big-time production company his mentor Gabriel works for, but it seems that they’re content to part as friends for now.

All of this seems to do the trick for Rocco. He aces his next attempt on set, in large part thanks to the words of his director, who encourages him to think of Eros, “the primary power of sex that we call love.” “That was the first time that someone had called it love,” his voiceover recalls. He locates this power in the bull he watched mate back home, in Lucia riding her bicycle around time, “in my mother’s sacred eyes” (uhhhhh…), and “in my pants, in my pants, in my pants.” He’s found something transcendent.

At a celebratory dinner, he wins the undying admiration of basically the whole cast and crew — except his newfound rival Christoph (Giulio Greco) — by jerking off and cumming on demand in ten seconds flat. This proves to Gabriel that the lad has mastery of the beast inside himself, not the other way around. Drawing a surname from a character played by iconic French cool guy Alain Delon, Gabriel and company rechristen their rising star “Rocco Siffredi.” The rest is porn history.

If Supersex has a problem at this point, it’s similar to Rocco’s: It hasn’t quite mastered the animal within. It has the spirit, obviously, the willingness to go there, whether there is Rocco’s mountain of childhood trauma or the show’s many explicit sex scenes. In a variety of ways this is not a forgiving climate for a show revolving in large part around how quickly a man does or doesn’t get an erection or ejaculate, much less for one willing to show so much of the process on screen in such explicit, if not actually graphic, detail. In a world where the filming of The Idol was all but ruled a sex offense by the press and the public, that Supersex even exists is exciting.

But that doesn’t forgive some of its soap-operatic excesses. The plot beats can get predictable: Tell me you couldn’t see Tommaso accusing Rocco and Lucia of sleeping together coming from a mile away, for example. Other times they seem to come and go as the needs of the show require them to: Weren’t the Corsicans after Rocco, and weren’t the cops after Tommaso? Meanwhile, writer-creator Francesca Manieri and director Francesco Carrozzini rely too heavily on the same set-ups for the creation of drama: If you made a drinking game where you took a shot every time the camera lingers on someone’s wide or flat or tear-swollen eyes as they stare at someone else doing something they don’t want them to do, I hope you have a very strong liver.

Still, there remains much to recommend Supersex if you’re interested in its core subject: the power of sex. I’ve never seen a television series this fixated on that one specific area of human experience, in those terms. I think they’re onto something, frankly. Sure, we may not all become world-famous porn stars as a result of those first pubescent stirrings of lust the way Rocco did. But something fundamental in us changes at that point, introducing an entirely new set of priorities into lives previously concerned with, I dunno, paleontology or Sailor Moon. It’s huge, basic driver of human behavior, even if it only becomes the driver of all our behavior for a very few of us. Supersex, and the character of Rocco, respect that power. They both ask how, or if, it can be controlled.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.