“The Gang Gets Satirized and Doesn’t Like It” The Good Fight S04E04: The Celluloid Dungeon

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May 192026
 

“The Gang Gets Satirized and Doesn’t Like It” is S04E04 of the legal comedy-drama TV series The Good Fight, aired May 7, 2020.

One of the law firm’s clients is upset because he believes he is being caricatured in a popular play, C*cksucker in Chains. He says he wants them to “gawker” it, which basically means “Somebody’s talking about me in a way I don’t like, and I’m rich enough to shut them up.”

The play was written by a former employee of the law firm, and the characters and relationships do bear a carnivalesque likeness. Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), the series’ lead, is caricatured as a lawyer who rips off her business suit to reveal a dominatrix outfit beneath. The caricature of Diane’s boss, a black man, rips off his business suit to reveal an antebellum slave costume, and is rapturously dominated by the lawyer-dominatrix, including bullwhipping and anal penetration with a dildo (off camera).

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Secret Life of a Dominatrix (2024): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Mar 132026
 
Anna (Ashley Dougherty) in session with May (Mariel Molino)

Secret Life of a Dominatrix is a 2024 made-for-TV movie directed by Gabby Revilla Lugo and starring Mariel Molino and Andrew Biernat.

Secret Life is clearly post-Fifty Shades as the inciting incident is a group of women reading an erotic novel in a book club, and it also draws on the Netflix “female-centric thriller” genre. Generically, it’s an heir to the tradition of the direct-to-cable or direct-to-video erotic thrillers and melodramas of the 1990s: female subjectivity and sexual development, upper-bourgeois setting, the acute anxiety of sex and danger in a post-HIV world, sex scenes that stay well-within the lines of an R rating.

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High Maintenance S03E05 “Payday”: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Feb 162026
 

High Maintenance is a comedy-drama series about a marijuana dealer, known only as “The Guy”, who encounters various people in the New York City area in the course of his business.

This episode, “Payday” (aired February 17, 2019), opens with a mock-kidnapping of a woman, Doc Lee (Margaret Cho), by a group of lesbians who drag her into a van and group-dominate her while a woman drives the van around town, all to celebrate her 50th birthday. Doc’s partner, Ayasha (Hye Yun Park), joins in. (I wonder if this was inspired by Patrick Califia’s short story “The Birthday Party”.) Later, Doc and her partner join the women at a bar for drinks. It’s all very fun and normalized for these people.

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CSI:Vegas S02E01 “She’s Gone”: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jan 012026
 

The revival series CSI: Vegas starts its second season with a dead sex worker, unsurprisingly. One of the first lines of dialog is a CSI looking at the bondage gear and saying, “The more things change, huh?” The cast of characters is mostly new, but the dynamic is largely the same.

The victim is pro dominatrix Lynn Zobrist, stabbed in her home with piece of a broken mirror. The perpetrator also took the time to drag all of the furniture out of her dungeon, cover the walls, floor and ceiling with glued-on mirrors, and leave Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” playing on repeat. Her housekeeper described her as “sad” and alone except for her clients.

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Law & Order Special Victims Unit S24E16 “The Presence of Absence”: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Dec 162025
 

Air date: March 23, 2023, Director: Norberto Barba, Writer: Brendan Feeney

Two women, Zoe Greene and Jenna Scott, are in a nightclub. Jenna is pushing hard for Zoe to date again after the death of her husband. Jenna introduces Zoe to a dating app and gets her to connect to “Klaus Darcy”. Zoe’s online relationship with Klaus escalates to sexting, a little D&S, and gift exchanges, like lingerie. (Zoe mentions that she and her late husband used to get “a little freaky”.)

Zoe sets up a meeting with Klaus at a hotel room, including bondage with her late husband’s neckties. She’s wearing black lingerie and a collar with an O ring. The text messages tell her to pose by the window, and she answers “Yes, sir.”

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CSI series finale “Immortality”: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Dec 032025
 

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation series finale “Immortality”

A suicide bombing in a casino brings the gang back together for one last case. Never mind that Willows is now an FBI agent and has a conflict of interest because she owns the casino, and Grissom left law enforcement to become a maritime vigilante.

One of the pieces of debris from the bomb vest is a square of metal marked “LHK”, which Grissom recognizes as the monogram of “Lady Heather Kessler”. (She used her real last name as a pro-domme?)

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Dying for Sex S01E06: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Nov 162025
 

Dying for Sex S01E06 “Happy Holidays”

Niki, Sonya and Molly celebrate.

After Molly, Niki and Sonya celebrate the one-year anniversary of Molly’s cancer return, she has another dom-sub session with Neighbor Guy. Along the way, Molly gets turned on with him, but her anxiety returns, represented by a vision of a man with a blurry face. She partially opens up to Neighbor Guy about her childhood sexual abuse, and that she’s never had an orgasm with another person. She tells him she wants to try to orgasm with him, and he’s eager to help.

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Dying for Sex S01E05: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Nov 062025
 
Molly and Neighbor Guy, post-scene

In S01E05, “My Pet”, Molly continues seeing (and dominating) Neighbor Guy, and starts seeing Pet, a man into puppyplay, complete with costume and collar. However, she hasn’t told either of them about her cancer. She orders Neighbor Guy to finish himself off and goes into the bathroom to finish herself off with a vibrator.

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