‘American Gigolo’ Episode 6 Recap: Any Given Sunday

I’ve been thinking about this, and I’m kind of at a loss: What’s so American about American Gigolo, anyway? The adjective implies a sort of national universality about Julian Kaye’s escapades, or a uniquely American characteristic thereof. But as far as I can tell, he’s just some poor sap who fell bass-ackwards into sex work and thence into a wrongful murder conviction, and who’s now struggling to piece together exactly how and why both things happened to him. It’s tough to see his life, as portrayed in this series, as anything emblematic of any larger, America-wide concerns. He’s just some patsy, and remains so.

This episode affords us a look back into the life of Detective Sunday, and the picture it paints is not pretty. In the space of 24 hours, her brother Andy OD’s; she coerces a false confession out of Julian Kaye; and her partner Rachel leaves her without saying a word. No wonder this case weighs so heavily on her conscience — it’s effectively the lynchpin of her entire existence. “I had a lotta shit going on in my life at the time, but that’s no excuse,” she tells him now, before asking “Why did you confess? I’m good in a room, but I’m not that good.” She underestimates either the power of cops to extract false confessions, or Julian’s habitually guilty conscience.

We also learn some pertinent facts about Julian himself. Remember the neighbor to whom his mother pimped him out, despite later claiming that she sold him to Olga in order to rescue him from said neighbor? Turns out that neighbor was their landlord, leaving Julian’s mom no choice, unless they both wanted to end up homeless. A horrible situation, indicative of how Julian has spent his life coasting from one crisis to the next, and a key piece of the puzzle of his origin story.

Which is not to say his young life was entirely without succor. There was his teenage girlfriend Lisa Beck, whose death by suicide is still treated as a mystery, especially since his old madam Olga made sure to deposit info on Lisa in Julian’s car the day of her murder. Now, everybody involved is curious about the circumstances of her death, given the pointedly coincidental way in which it came back up years later. It’s still not clear to me how Lisa’s passing connects to all the other mysteries in which Julian is embroiled. Perhaps she was killed by another person, who decided to frame Julian because he’d be one of the few voices speaking up in the dead girl’s defense?

Another surprising high point of teenage Julian’s existence? None other than legendary character actor M. Emmet Walsh, who cameos as a semi-friendly old geezer in the trailer park who offers to teach Julian how to repair cars. It’s a welcome respite from the onslaught of the trailer park’s bullies, who spend their days listening to “Ghost Rider” by Suicide and extorting Julian’s lunch money. 

Back in the present, the walls continue to close in around the murder of kiddy-diddling teacher Elizabeth Shannonhouse, who’d been having an “affair” with Michelle and Richard Stratton’s son Colin. (He’s actually Julian’s biological son, of course, which by now everybody knows.) Colin is currently being held by McGregor, Panish’s lieutenant; Panish asks Richard for counterfeit money to pay the ransom, only for Richard to insist that the ransom be paid in full with legitimate funds. 

Meanwhile, Michelle tells Sunday about Panish’s involvement, while insisting that both Julian and their son Colin are innocent. When she returns home, she learns about the McGregor situation, leaving her in the lurch.

In the end, Julian is set free by Sunday, who no longer sees him as a suspect in the Shannohouse murder, knowing what she knows about the other players’ involvement. She decides to interrogate Isabelle, Julian’s childhood friend turned pimp. 

Julian returns home to his apartment, where his friendly landlord Lizzy, who picks him up from prison, offers him a gun — an offer he declines. But when Isabelle, his childhood friend turned pimp, pops up in his apartment unannounced, perhaps he wishes he decided differently.

Or maybe not! It’s hard to tell. That’s the problem with American Gigolo at the moment: It’s so tied up with this weird not-quite-a-whodunnit murder mystery — after all, we know perfectly well that Panish killed that teacher and has been scrambling to cover it up ever since — that it’s hard to derive much character work of interest from the drama that results. 

Even though it’s barely been a couple of episodes, the show feels a world away from the one that depicted Julian’s first return to hooking, where he had sex with that rich woman in a dive-bar bathroom, then coached her through returning to the high-school reunion where she was bound to be grilled about her involvement in the drunk-driving death of her high-school boyfriend. Ever since, there have been no clients to speak of, no further glimpse into the gigolo lifestyle — just murder-mystery shit of the sort you can find in all kinds of TV dramas not named after a seminal (no point intended) psycho-sexual thriller by Paul Schrader. I hope things will turn around, but I fear that “pleasant but insignificant” may be the highest level to which the show can currently aspire.
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.