Welcome to Chippendales is television at its slickest. Until this week, every episode has been a satisfying mix of magnetic performances, winking humor, and glorious cheeseball dance numbers — all tinged with the expectation of a slow-building, spectacular downfall. The blustery dialogue — particularly the bombast of Nick’s artistic vision and Steve’s solemn calls for loyalty — has made the show inherently hilarious. What are these guys even talking about? It’s not life and death. It’s just a strip club!
In “Leeches,” though, the show turns a dark corner. The ego war between Nick and Steve remains as laughable as ever, and yet it’s simply not funny anymore. Backbiting at the club is different from humiliation on national TV. Hating your enemies is different from burning down their houses. Somehow, it actually is life and death now. Things go so far south so fast that you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Chippendales is a highly successful chain of strip clubs run by two men who have never been more rich, famous, and fulfilled than they are in the present moment.
At the sold-out grand opening of Chippendales East, Steve is like a kid in a candy store — if the bonbons were famous people, antique Chippendales chairs (for VIPs), and a line out the door as long as a Manhattan block. Nick and Denise decide to open the show with “Hunkerstein,” the same dizzying act that Steve torpedoed a few episodes ago — albeit in a self-sabotaging hissy fit. But in a glitzy New York club, with its stadium seating and state-of-the-art top-of-the-line everything, the genius of “Hunkerstein” is undeniable. The “man”-ster’s body parts fly hilariously through the air. There are original songs and a production value to rival Broadway. The crowd loves it. Even Steve loves it.
Sadly, Nick’s not there to witness the adoration for himself. Instead, he’s holed up backstage snorting coke, listening to arias on max volume to drown out the stage noise, and staring to the heavens like he’s praying for acclaim. Before the show, he tells Bradford and Denise that he’s worried the audience won’t see the intentionality behind the campiness, but it’s his tortured-artist routine that proves, once again, that Welcome to Chippendales is at its campiest when no one is taking off their clothes at all.
Steve swallows his pride and goes backstage to shake the hand of the man who brought erotic male dancing to NYC’s unsleeping streets. But Nick can’t help himself. He simply must remind Steve that “Hunkerstein” was the number that killed their partnership in Los Angeles. When Steve proffers an olive branch, Nick needles away at his old boss. In search of an apology? An “attaboy”? What is it that Nick is hoping to accomplish in this moment?
He goes out into the alley, where a wintry mix is gently falling (snow two ways). Steve has never seen snow before. New York is the only place he has been outside of California and Bombay. Like a benevolent older brother, Nick teaches his old foe how to pack a snowball, and it’s not long before they’re ducking each other’s icy ammo. Is this how men with the emotional intelligence of adolescent boys heal? No, of course not. It’s how they bully each other under the pretense of play. Nick pelts Steve with snowballs until Steve throws him against a wall. He walks away a little more broken and upset than when he arrived at the club, which is, come to think of it, exactly what Nick wanted to accomplish.
Still, there’s much to be excited about in Steve’s life. Nick’s an unrelenting bully, but he is going to make them both a ton of cash. And back in L.A., Irene has made French toast for breakfast. And, oh yeah, she’s pregnant. Listen, I understand I may have developed a small reputation for wanting to see Kumail Nanjiani shirtless, but I do think it’s notable that we’ve seen nearly naked men gyrating and Denise and Nick with multiple partners but never the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Banerjee. In fact, we haven’t seen them exchange more than a chaste-ass lip peck, and now I’m supposed to believe Irene is pregnant? Show me the receipts.
Anywho, the New York money is sure to come in handy, because on top of soon needing a nanny, Steve urgently needs a lawyer. He’s being sued for racial discrimination over his VIP-card scheme — the one inspired by Steve’s own experience of racial discrimination. It feels like one of those moments in a series based on a true story that you hope was a creative flourish, not what really happened. (Alas, it happened.) When Irene finds out what Steve did, she treats Steve to a brutal dressing down about good and bad people. “We don’t do things like this,” she tells him, seemingly unaware of why Otis quit.
For his part, Steve seems genuinely pained to admit his own conduct — almost like it’s the first time he’s recognizing the enormity of it, which is hard to believe. The first scene of the first episode of Welcome to Chippendales opens with a racist assault on Steve. By the end of this episode, he’ll order Ray to retaliate against a business rival who dismisses him as an “immigrant.” Steve is a complicated man, clearly, but not a blinkered one.
Still, that’s a personal consideration, and this is business. With the brand on the cusp of becoming synonymous with racism, it’s worth asking who is a liability to whom here. Is it Nick, whose creative tunnel vision threatens the club’s bottom line? Or is it Steve, whose greedy, zero-steps-ahead thinking is sure to open the club to more and worse criticism as time goes on? Some people aren’t meant to be rich, his mother told him — a line that felt ominous even as she said it years ago. Steve has been trying and conniving to get rich for so long that he can’t stop trying and conniving even though he’s already eating French toast in a home adorned with columns, fountains, and bronze reproductions of Old World statues.
Not that things are smooth sailing in the Big Apple either. Halfway through “Leeches,” it seems possible that infighting and insult-hurling are simply endemic to Chippendales. Nick and Denise are as close as ever, but Denise and Bradford’s relationship is frosty. She doesn’t like the anodyne corporate offices he has secured for them, and she’s right — it’s giving small, regional branch of a midsize bank. Plus Nick and Bradford are a PSA for how much PDA is too much in an intimate office setting.
It should be good news when Phil Donahue calls to say he wants to put New York’s new nightlife sensation on the biggest show on daytime television. But good news is never good news here — 14 million people are watching (including Steve, Irene, and the dance crew of Chippendales West) when Nick appears onscreen to take all the credit for Steve’s big gamble. Phil calls him “Mr. Chippendales,” a nickname with all its implications of grandeur that could not be more perfectly suited to the task of destroying Steve’s sense of self-worth.
Irene is able to talk Steve down, but when it happens again on The Mike Douglas Show, she’s not there to stop him. Steve tells Nick to quit the moniker. Nick responds by calling himself “Mr. Chippendales” more frequently and loudly on every channel on the dial. The only thing more pathetic than Nick’s sad victory lap — he genuinely seems to forget that Chippendales only exists because of Steve’s money and ambition — is Steve’s attempt to reclaim the throne for himself.
He books himself on the Los Angeles local news to set the record straight, but there’s no makeup on hand for brown skin. And Steve is predictably terrible on TV — stiff, timorous, ill at ease. His answers are short and involve explaining to the host that people generally keep their keys on key rings. Steve’s not Mr. Chippendales. He’s Mr. Monopoly with a Rolex instead of a monocle — a silent figure who knows where the money is. It’s a mercy that the show doesn’t subject us to the entire painful five-minute segment.
In the aftermath, Ray does his best to raise Steve’s spirits, but it’s impossible. Plus it’s not really this show’s MO. When things get bad for Steve, he prefers to make them worse. He instructs Ray to pull over outside of the Electric Tomato so he can confront the club’s owner, who has had the audacity to add male stripping to the Monday-night calendar. It turns ugly fast, especially because everyone in the nightclub industry has already seen a smooth-talking white guy on Sally Jessy Raphael and Merv Griffin saying he’s the man behind Chippendales. The Electric Tomato owner calls Steve an “immigrant,” which he means as an insult.
To Ray’s credit, he understands quickly that Steve’s not being facetious or even metaphorical when he tells him to burn the Electric Tomato to the ground. Steve even invokes the ridiculous oath of loyalty Ray made to him, as though Ray could have possibly envisioned arson among his handyman duties. For reasons so far unexplained, though, Ray does it. He lights the match or chucks the Molotov cocktail or damages the gas line or whatever.
The idea, I think, is that this is the moment when Steve finally broke bad, but as an inflection point, it feels a little random to me. Was he not broken when he started handing out “whites only” cards? What about when Steve verbally abused his best employees so badly that they set up their own shop 3,000 miles away? Or when he discriminated against Otis, a hardworking man who admired him because he was a “brown-skinned brother” who was “making shit happen for himself”?
Then again, when a life is this riddled with extremely objectionable conduct, it’s worth considering the possibility that he was never good in the first place.