Jacky St. James had a meteoric rise over the last four years in Adult Entertainment, with many successful bondage and incest films for New Sensations/Digital Sin, especially her "Emma Marx" series. Many of these were shown in bowdlerized (soft-X instead of explicit XXX) versions on Showtime cable, so this transition to a soft made-for-cable sex series is a natural progression.
The good news is that Jackie's glossy direction holds up quite well without the tedious penetration sequences and inevitable (in hardcore) money shots. The bad news is that her central premise underpinning this series, snuck in at the tail-end of this pilot episode, remains lame and unconvincing.
The microcosmic saga of our appealing heroine Ashlyn Yennie, a repressed, aimless young woman who ends up landing a barista gig in a new town for the beginning of a new life, is promising enough to constitute the opener for a "straight", mainstream series. But Jacky is selling BDSM to a general, uninformed public, much as the fabulously successful "Shades" books (and now movies) do. So in the finale the usual heavy-handed voice-over narration (the voice of authority as penned by Jacky for all her movies) imposes the central notion that for a young woman the route to true freedom is through submission to another's will (usually a guy, though Jacky is not averse to Lesbian sagas on the same theme).
I've heard and watched her present this argument over a dozen times now, and it is never convincing. The "empowerment" through recognition that you are making a positive effort to let go and submit sounds more like Goebbels Nazi propaganda or Islamic State recruitment videos than the pleasant, life-style advice in which St. James packages it. Just as rape fantasies are a prime source of material for porn, though self-censorship had that tack peak in the '70s in both XXX films and mainstream movies like "Straw Dogs" and "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing", the currently hot fantasy of being handcuffed, blindfolded, gagged and then subjected to light forms of S&M is a natural. How Jacky gets impressionable folks to believe this nonsense (at some level -I'm not claiming she incites people to go from fantasy to enlisting as slaves)7 is beyond me. Perhaps she's preying on folks who think Elvis is still in some building (hiding out), ghosts and UFOs are real, and that Trump would make a great prexy.
Filtering into the cast famous and instantly recognizable porn stars like Skin Diamond (who's acting is quite good here, and who was spectacular as a slave in B. Skow's porn feature "Control") and Richie Calhoun (Jacky's favorite male BDSM player) is nothing new for cable - recall Zane's Sex Chronicles on Cinemax nearly a decade ago which routinely featured top talent like Jada Fire and Lexington Steele. The resulting package is eminently watchable, but strictly a shuck.