The Client List

The Jennifer Love Hewitt series The Client List has proven to be a big success for Lifetime, giving the "Television for Women" network their biggest hit in the ratings since the 2009 premiere of Drop Dead Diva. The show has proven to be such a hit that Lifetime recently renewed the series for a 2013 second season consisting of 15 episodes.

The show is a retelling of a previous Love Hewitt vehicle for Lifetime, the 2010 television film also titled The Client List, a drama based on a real-life prostitution scandal down in Odessa Texas. Both the film and the series center around the story of an unemployed massage therapist with children to feed that's in desperate need of work and saddled with a husband that is unable to help pay the bills, inspiring the sexy female protagonist to ultimately turn to plying her trade with men looking for sexual satisfaction. While the movie made it explicit that the Love Hewitt character Samantha Horton was working as a prostitute, the Lifetime series has tamed down protagonist Riley Parks and limited her to simply working in a morally-flexible massage parlor and providing her clients with "a little something extra" without really spelling out what all that "extra" entails.

While the show sometimes has Riley focusing less on the "massage" and more on the "therapist" end of her job, featuring sentimental scenes involving Riley talking to her male clientele about what it is that has driven them to seek relief from her, there's still plenty of tantalizing instances of Ms. Hewitt in the kinds of skimpy outfits she's been recently making famous on billboards for the show, and often while rubbing down hard-bodied men who look like they've just stepped out of a men's underwear advertisement. So there's something for everyone.

Ms. Hewitt is ably supported on the show by Boston Public/Grey's Anatomy actress Loretta Divine as the illicit massage parlor's worldly-wise owner, and also the ever-talented TV and film veteran Cybil Shepherd as Riley's slightly sassy southern mother.