'The Client List' Creator Reveals the Origin of Lifetime's Best Bad Show

In its original incarnation, The Client List was one of Lifetime’s specialties: a titillating TV movie about a woman caught in a precarious situation fraught with high stakes and high melodrama. The woman in this case was Samantha Horton (Jennifer Love Hewitt), and her precarious situation involved taking a job at a massage parlor to pay the bills and discovering that the male clients demanded a little something extra from the female employees. Thanks to the risqué subject matter, The Client List pulled in strong numbers following its premiere in 2010, and led the network to consider turning it into a full-fledged series.

When the show debuted two years later, the name and lead actress remained intact, but a lot had changed. Instead of Samantha Horton, Hewitt played Riley Parks, who finds a job at a day spa called The Rub after her husband ditches her and their two kids. And while the Rub’s staff sometimes go above and beyond the call of duty to satisfy their clients, they never venture down the dark roads that Sam did in the movie. In fact, the mood on the episodic version of The Client List was often buoyant, as series creator Jordan Budde turned what had been a cautionary tale into a frothy soap opera. Hewitt attacked her role with gusto as well, bringing lots of attitude to a character that often wore very little clothing. As part of Yahoo TV’s “30 Best Bad Shows of the Last 30 Years” countdown, Budde, who didn’t oversee the show during its full two-season run, spoke with us about how Hewitt filmed those massage sequences and her real-life romance with co-star (now husband) Brian Hallisay.

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Suzanne Martin wrote the TV movie version of The Client List. How did you get involved with the series?
Suzanne had just created Hot in Cleveland at the time, so she wasn’t available. My agent said, “Lifetime is looking to make a TV series out of this TV movie. Why don’t you go in and pitch?” So I watched the TV movie and I thought, “There’s no way this is a series!” First of all, at the end of the movie, the main character is a drug addict and loses her family. Her whole life fell apart, and it was super depressing. At face value, it seemed like the story was over. But I slept on it, and came up with an idea: Have her husband leave her, and she’d be a sympathetic character you’d care about and understand why she had to go work in a massage parlor. I met with Jennifer and her producing team and pitched that idea and they loved it. She wasn’t originally going to be in the TV show, she just wanted to be a producer. But when I wrote the pilot, she read it and really loved it. Once she was on-board, we got a straight to series order.

To quote Al Pacino, just when she thought she was out, you pulled her back in.
She knew it was a juicy part. She got a Golden Globe nomination for the TV movie, so she knew it was right for her and she wanted to do something sexy and fun. We’re both from Texas, so we had that in common. Then we got Cybill Shepherd to reprise the role of her mom, which was harder than you think. The network wasn’t sure if they wanted her, and I was like, “Who else is it going to be? She’s the best person ever!” Originally, they didn’t want it to be connected to the movie, so I wrote a completely new version with new characters, names and situations. It had a different title: it was called Rub. Then at the last minute, they changed their mind and said, “No, we want it to be The Client List again.”

Part of the appeal of the show is the soapy tone; there’s a lot of drama, but it’s done with a light touch.
We wanted to have fun with it. It’s on the edge; it’s campy sometimes, because what’s happening is so outrageous. It was really funny shooting those massage scenes, because there were all these hot guys and Jennifer Love Hewitt with that body of hers in a room. And the stakes were high! She had to make this job work, because she had two kids to take care of. Interestingly, women really related to that. We were scared women were going to be turned off, and think she was a big whore. But they were like, “I would do it for my kids, too!” And the guy viewers got off on the fantasy of it. For viewers, it was an interesting balance between being disgusted that she had to do it, but intrigued at the same time.

How did Jennifer approach the massage scenes in particular? Those scenes provide the signature moments of the series.
She’s a very smart actress, and she’s been doing this a long time. Even in the pilot, she wanted to take it slow, and not jump in. She wanted to tease the audience that it was kind of outrageous. She had a lot of input in her outfits. She was very excited about that: what outfits she should wear, and when she should wear them. Some scenes went so much further. There was one sequence that was so sexy and intense, that I thought, “We can never show this!” She was crawling on top of the guy, and it was really, really hot. We had to cut it. The network was really scared of the sexual content. They’d want less sex, and then the next week they’d want more. The corporate people from New York would be like, “What is she really doing? Is it a blow job, or it is a hand job?” It was always tricky, because they were very nervous. And we did try to find the humor in awkward moments, like whether a client was actually looking for sex or if she misunderstood him.

Did she have any input in casting the guys she’d be massaging?
She had approval on all the casting, so we’d find the guys and send her their tapes. When we got really busy shooting, she didn’t do that as much, but at first she was very involved: [she’d say] “Yes,” “No,” “I don’t like him,” or “I don’t think that’ll work.” At first we got a lot of criticism because the guys were all so good looking! We were like, “We’re TV, we’re trying to have fun.” Later on, we tried to cast more real guys, but the network said, “No, we want really hot guys!” There were a lot of discussions about who the guys should be and what they should look like. Everyone had different ideas of what was hot or interesting. It was pretty funny after a while. And viewers were like, “We don’t care, we want to see some hot guys.”

When we were casting [her love interest], Jennifer was single, and very, very ready to meet a guy. So our casting sessions were hilarious, because every hot guy in town was coming in to audition for that role and flirting with her, and she was just loving it. And it all worked out for her — she found a husband out of it! That romance [with Brian] was happening behind the scenes during the first season. Interestingly, Colin [Egglesfield] was her character’s love interest for a while on the show, so I think the audience was thinking that was who she really liked. Behind the scenes, we all knew what was going on with Brian. I’m happy for her; she’d been single a long time and Brian is a great guy.

Looking back, what are your feelings about The Client List?
They’re mixed. It was a good and bad experience for me. TV moves so quickly, some parts don’t work out quite like you wanted. I personally thought the show was going to do a lot better; I thought it had breakout potential because the subject matter was sexy. It did okay, but we were expecting to do really great. I think the show could have gone a long, long time. We had some more stories to tell, so it’s a shame we didn’t get a chance. I’d like to work with Jennifer again. She’s very talented and a force of nature. I had a weird thought one time: someone should make a musical out of it, like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. That could really be fun! Put it on Broadway. [Laughs]