There are a lot of breasts on display in the half-hour pilot of “Californication,” the new series on Showtime that starts Monday, and I think it’s fair to say the show, which harks back to sun-soaked 1970s film classics like “Shampoo,” would be a mere shadow of itself without them.

To be precise, there are eight of them to be seen, i.e., a pair about every seven-and-a-half minutes, and not a disappointment in the bunch. But then, why would there be? They belong to women who have been on the planet less than half as long as Hank (David Duchovny), a writer too busy sampling their wares to waste time staring at a computer. There is even a novel erotic frisson when the bearer of the youngest breasts of all, Mia (Madeline Zima), punches him in the face (twice) while on her way to a smiling, nicely understated orgasm. It turns out there’s a reason for her bedroom fisticuffs, but I won’t give that away here.

Like all writers on big screen and small, Hank — surname “Moody” — is blocked, because otherwise he’d just be sitting in his room writing, and where would be the fun in that? Still, there’s no doubt that he is a writer, because even though he doesn’t write anything, he drinks, smokes, and fights. He also uses words such as “predicate” and says “I concur,” rather than “I agree,” to his 12-year-old daughter, Becca (Madeleine Martin). He also drops “quid pro quo” into the conversation while bedding a blonde.

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“Never mind,” he answers.

I just read a novel (Lionel Shriver’s “The Post-Birthday World”) in which a well-educated woman falls head-over-heels for a British snooker champion who quit school when he was 12. Whenever she drops a reference to something vaguely academic or uses a foreign phrase and he asks her what it means, she says, “Never mind.” He gets pretty annoyed about it after a while.

The story about Hank is this. Once he was a writer in “a little place they like to call New York City,” as he puts it to a woman from the Valley whom he’s putting down at impressively vicious length over dinner with his agent, Charlie (Evan Handler), and another woman. In New York he wrote a critically acclaimed novel called “God Hates Us All” and Hollywood came calling. So Hank, with long-time girlfriend Karen (Natascha McElhone) and their daughter Becca in tow, decamped to Los Angeles, the glittering capital of self-prostitution — New York remaining in this formulation the worldwide headquarters of moral rectitude and artistic integrity.

Before long, “God Hates Us All” has been turned into a hideous but successful romantic comedy called “A Crazy Thing Called Love,” Hank renews contact with his inner Wild Man — no Barton Fink, he — and Karen leaves him for a rich, boring drone who promises her eternal comfort and security. Now only Becca, a ghoulish ‘tween, binds Karen and Hank together.

With all the swapping of the child back and forth, Karen sees enough of Hank to have a general idea of how many women he’s sleeping with. Sleeping with women is one of Hank’s ways of telling Karen he still loves her. Another is telling her he loves her and asking her to marry him. (They never officially tied the knot.)

Of course, it’s also his way of having a good time, along with the general carousing and just enjoying the fact that he’s rich, drives a flashy sports car, wears $350 jeans and $900 shades, and is more articulate than anyone around him. It’s a pretty good life, if you can get it. The big pull-quote from the episode is, “I’m disgusted with my life and myself, but I’m not unhappy about it.”

If you extended this opening episode by 10 minutes and filled those minutes with sex with a bit more nudity thrown in, “Californication” would truly live up to its title. It would be that rare, perhaps unknown entity: soft-core pornography with a good story line.

As it stands, it’s actually a lot of fun. The actors are all good. Mr. Duchovny has his bad-boy role down cold, Ms. McElhone proves a worthy foil, and Ms. Zima, with her slippery come-hither blue eyes under dark, wavy tresses, is particularly enjoyable as Mia, the mischievous young woman who turns out to be a 16-year-old girl. Of course, Hank overestimated her age when he slept with her, and I think we’re supposed to believe he wouldn’t have gone ahead had he known the truth. But now that the deed is done… Right from the start, “Californication” wants us to get on board with a guy who’s having a dissolute, irresponsible blast, and frankly it does a damn good job of it. Getting on board is no problem at all. And no one, not even Karen, really seems to mind. In fact, they all get a vicarious kick out of it, just as we’re supposed to.

At the same time, the program makes it clear that deep down Hank is really a good guy, even if he’s a little self-obsessed. (He sneaks into a theater to watch his own movie and then goes into a bookstore to read his own book.) When he finds out his daughter is at a wild, junior “Entourage”-style party she’s way too young for, he goes in to rescue her, which he does by throwing her over his shoulder and bearing her off. (What a guy!) When someone starts talking on his cell phone during a movie, Hank is there to tell him to shut up — and finally, beat him up. (What a guy!) Etc.

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“Weeds,” back Monday for a third season on Showtime, begins, as before, with the 1960s song about people living in ittybitty suburban boxes while leading itty-bitty perfect lives, etc. In the meantime the lives brought under the magnifying glass in the show itself are in chaos, and never more so than in this season’s opener.

I must be getting old and gray and full of sleep, because I remember previously enjoying “Weeds” in an anything-goes way, but I was amazed by how dumb, vicious, vacuous, nihilistic, and completely unfunny this episode was. There were cartoon Armenian drug dealers and cartoon black drug dealers, and people were either ripping one another off or just casually dropping even the most elementary of responsibilities, like permitting a 12-year-old whose feet can’t reach the pedals to drive a minivan by himself. Mary-Louise Parker floated around in a cloud of unknowing, there being nothing better in the script, which was full of Tarantino-esque inanities, for her to do. Except, perhaps, to insist on a rewrite.

bbernhard@nysun.com