*OK, it's fishy sex (and I don't mean the kind you have with your ex when you've had six ''Pacific Sunset" martinis, but actual sex between fish and crustaceans).
If you haven't seen the creatively off-balance and weirdly sexy show, Green Porno, stop now and go check out the first season in full on the Sundance Channel's site. Season 2 debuts next Wednesday (see teaser above), April 1, and you need to be prepared! This is not your typical TV fare (and I would venture that it's pretty wacky even for the Internets, where all episodes are also available).
Both seasons star Isabella Rossellini in flagrante delicto- in Season 1 decked out in colorful costumes as male Arachnids (spiders), Diptera (house flies), Coleoptera (fireflies), Hymenoptera (bees), Gastropods (snails) and others. In Season 2, Isabella takes on the seas, impersonating male (and hermaphrodite and asexual) angler fish, whales, starfish, limpets and barnacles, and points out their unique mating and reproductive behavior. Visually, it's minimalist-deconstructed gorgeous, with lots of tongue-in-cheek humor delivered in Isabella's sexy Italian accent.
The inspiration for the show is Isabella's own passion for animals and Redford's Sundance Channel decree to bring green shows to the general public. "Redford had this idea- to bring together artists interested in the environment and let them free. He really wants to expand film, and our ideas of it, and now we have an outlet. The Internet is the perfect format for short film, " says Isabella. Each Green Porno episode is two minutes long or shorter.
Isabella says she does what she can for the environment; eating organic (both for health and environmental reasons) and driving a hybrid car, but credits her personal interest in science, and her fascination with the natural world as the driving impetus behind her particularly peculiar show. "My father [Italian director Roberto Rossellini) was very interested in science, and so am I," she says. "A lot of people have no passion about animals, but I do," she continues. "But really I'm not trying to do anything more than make people laugh and get more interested."
Though humor and playfulness is certainly part of the DNA of Green Porno, the underlying message seems to encourage humans to put ourselves in the place of the other animals that we share the planet with, as Isabella does as part of her elaborate costuming and acting for the series. "I think we are learning about the infinite vanity of our species," she says. " What is interesting is the difference between the older and younger generation's relationship to nature. The older generation sees nature as resilient, whereas younger people see that nature is fragile, you can lose species forever. I hope the new generation has a new morality [about nature] and will be more effective in protecting the environment- they realize that we are not the only ones who occupy the Earth.
Isabella and Sundance plan to continue with the series and she is already writing future episodes for the next installment, "Bon Appetit," which will look at the sex lives of animals humans like to eat.