Satisfaction is an Australian television drama about the private lives and the jobs of high-class sex workers. Writer-producer Roger Simpson made it with producer Andy Walker and executive producer Kim Vecera. It was filmed in Melbourne, inside the fictional up-market brothel called 232, and it follows five high-class escorts plus management as they juggle clients, ambition, secrecy, and feeling. It premiered on the subscription channel Showcase, then reached free-to-air homes in Ireland on TV3 and 3e, and in New Zealand on TV2. Production on season three began in June 2009. The season started airing in December 2009. On 31 December 2010, TV Tonight reported the series officially cancelled, so season three is the last. The sex workers and the managers on screen are adults. Chloe has a fourteen-year-old daughter. That is a family plot, not a sex plot: Chloe tells her she works in a casino, and she knows the lie will not last.
The ensemble: labor, performance, and the intimacy business
The show does not stay on one pair of eyes. The ensemble treats sex work as labor, as performance, and as an intimacy business at the same time. Mel is pursued by Nick, the owner of 232, while Nick’s daughter Natalie manages the house, so family and workplace power stay tangled. Tippi is a bright young blonde woman who takes creative-writing classes between bookings. Lauren, an older receptionist, wavers between leaving the desk and becoming a sex worker herself.
Heather works as a dominatrix. She is a lesbian, and her partner Ally badly wants a baby. The series folds Heather’s professional SM into a queer domestic story instead of using Domme work as a one-note tease. The title is doing more than pointing at orgasm. It is also the job of keeping a work identity and a private life in the same week.
Critics, a warm bath, and a class echo
Australian critics largely welcomed the show. The West Australian praised fleshed-out characters and drama that works, and a script sharp enough to dodge easy sex-industry clichés. It has glamour, and it does not tell the Pretty Woman fairy tale about the job. TV Tonight compared watching it to sinking into a warm bath with good champagne: high-end prostitution drama, played with empathy. The irony is that it was mainly there for Foxtel subscribers, a class echo of the clients on screen.
After its 2008 Australian release the series sold to more than thirty countries, which says there was export demand for a polished brothel ensemble. Critics argued you could watch sex-industry stories without swallowing a Hollywood Cinderella myth.
The Melbourne bench, and the other Satisfaction
Beyond the main ensemble, guest and recurring roles drew on Melbourne’s drama pool. Names in the record include Andrew Blackman, Arianthe Galani, Benjamin McNair, Dan Spielman, Danielle Carter, Ditch Davey, Georgina Naidu, Heather Mitchell, Jeremy Stanford, Jonny Pasvolsky, Paul Denny, Penny McNamee, Richard Davies, Ryan Johnson, and Steve Mouzakis, in single episodes or in more than one. That list is mainstream television infrastructure, not a fringe softcore product. The casting depth is industry-standard.
A U.S. series also titled Satisfaction debuted in 2014. It touched escorting too, and it is a different show. If you want Heather’s dominatrix arc, or the brothel at 232, stay with the Showcase series made in Melbourne. It is not an SM tutorial. It puts paid power-exchange labor on screen as one job among other jobs, which prestige television still rarely does.
