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Women with sexual desires usually have been played on TV series for the humor, casting the thirst for sex as something that is traumatic and as a mask of old trauma, or as a substitute for some unfulfilled need — but, for the most part, not much fun.
This year, though, such projects as “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” and “Dying for Sex” treated the desires of women over 40 with maturity, respect and, yes, humor, but the laugh with your friend kind and not the laugh at kind. It’s a rather revolutionary concept right now to acknowledge that women have a sexual appetite — and “Dying for Sex” mixes in the fact that the woman at the center of the story, Molly, is also dealing with terminal cancer.
Showrunners and veteran comedy writers Elizabeth Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock adapted the series from Molly Kochan and Nikki Boyer’s podcast, which dealt frankly with Kochan’s cancer and her concurrent sexual awakening, and her and Boyer’s enduring friendship. Kochan died in 2019.
In the eight-episode series, Molly (played by Michelle Williams, who seems brilliantly liberated in this role) and Nikki (Jenny Slate, who channels her comic abilities into heartbreaking emotion) navigate the breakup of Molly’s marriage; Molly’s medical needs and care; and her journey through discovering the whole panoply of sex acts, sexuality, fetishes and other things that some may think deviant but are treated with respect and non-judgment by the writers, actors and director Shannon Murphy.
“Honestly, one of the most amazing things about Molly — she either knew she had limited time, or that’s just who she was — but she just did not have judgment about the people that she came into contact with. And that was so beautiful and refreshing for them to meet somebody that wasn’t approaching it from a place of shame,” says Meriwether.
And “Dying for Sex” is quite funny, too. But Meriwether notes that it was very important that she and Rosenstock never made fun of anybody’s wants. “You know, it’s OK to laugh about the moment and the fact that we’re humans and that we’re awkward, but to never make fun of the sort of strange things that we all desire.”
It was the podcast that ignited Meriwether and Rosenstock.
“I feel like this show is actually about everything, and I can’t believe we have the opportunity to tell a story about two women in their 40s and their bodies, and we could talk about sex and life and death and friendship and try to get all of this into one story on screen,” says Rosenstock. “It was like a checklist of all the things that you’re used to hearing that people don’t want to see. And then just the basic concept of somebody having a sexual awakening while their body is dying was just completely contradictory. And yet, when you listen to the story, it makes complete sense.”
Nikki is cast as a chaotic mess of an underachieving actor. Yet the series skewers any audience expectations about, well, everything. In an early scene, Molly unknowingly records herself on her laptop masturbating and the video gets held for cyber ransom. When Nikki rushes over to help, the first thing she says when seeing the recording is “You are so beautiful!” It’s both hilarious and extremely touching.
“Molly chooses Nikki as her caregiver because they see each other as they truly are, and want to be seen,” says Rosenstock. “She sees Nikki as her rock. And no one has seen Nikki that way, except Molly. Sees her as somebody who’s capable of showing up and loving in this way and taking care of her. And I don’t think anyone else would have seen Nikki that way. So, that was something that was important for us in telling this story.”
They also praise their intimacy coordinator, Claire Warden, and Murphy for “knowing exactly where to put the camera,” says Rosenstock.
There is a lot of frank show and tell of penises as well, and Meriwether and Rosenstock praise the “bravery” of the men in the cast for being vulnerable and open, including Zack Robidas (whose fetish is penis cages), Rob Delaney (with whom Williams discovers her inner dominatrix) and Conrad Ricamora, who plays the man whose fetish is to dress and act as a dog. Meriwether and Rosenstock both recall the funny moment when Ricamora was on set — in his dog costume — and found out he was nominated for a Drama League Award for his performances in “Oh, Mary!” and “Here Lies Love.”
“Going into it, I was like, how are we going to find people to do these roles?” says Meriwether. “And I think every single person who we cast was one of the first people that we offered it to. A lot of the actors and crew actually had personal experiences with cancer and were kind of doing the show as a way of processing those experiences. I was really also moved by the bravery of all of the actors to do those kind of off-center sex scenes — and not just perform them, but perform them with empathy.”
The series’ acting corps reads like a dream team: Besides Williams and Slate, the cast comprises such heavyweights as Kelvin Yu, Jay Duplass, Sissy Spacek, Esco Jouley and David Rasche. “Having these actors approach everything from a place of truth allowed us then to see if we needed to recalibrate something in a scene or in the writing,” says Rosenstock. “And they were always a really good barometer for that.”
They both praise Williams and Slate, the main couple that the whole series hangs on. “I don’t think Michelle Williams is capable of a dishonest moment,” says Rosenstock.
“The amazing thing is that we didn’t get pushback from FX. We got, in fact, the opposite, which was support. But I feel like everybody knew going in what it was, and at no point did they want to pull back from that. And I do think that Michelle was a huge part of that … because of her faith in it, and her fearlessness and her just integrity as an artist. It lifted everybody.”
English (US) ·