For massage practitioners, the television series The Client List is a bit of an example. It never seems to help when I list the dozens of negative police dramas I had to endure during my many years in law enforcement, but interestingly I never heard cops complain about them.
What we did notice were the news stories of police misconduct, because we often caught an earful for what may have happened 1, miles away. The original television movie on the Lifetime channel was allegedly based on an actual mom in Odessa, Texas, who turned to prostitution to pay the bills. This situation eventually leads her to providing extras in the spa for the larger tips they provide. Though I know all too well that this scenario probably exists somewhere, the notion that the movie, or series, parallels any real story seems not to be the case.
The real-life story was once thought to be based on Cynthia Martinez, a woman whose tragic fall had a few parallels to the plot of the original movie.
According to what I could uncover, Martinez allegedly moved into Dallas in order to provide her kids with a better quality public school system. Apparently Hewitt owns the rights to her story, so finding out much about her has been challenging. Massage practitioners have every right to be upset about this representation of our profession, but having said that, I suspect that most doctors, lawyers, and other professions misrepresented on television sometimes have the right to feel the same way.
Unfortunately, television is little more than a source for news, shows that represent themselves as news, and various stories that do little other than provide us with a short escape from our own reality. Interestingly, when I tried to track down the advertisers for The Client List, it became clear that the target audience was women under 49 years of age.
