Cancer isn’t funny. Erotic kinks are often smirked at in movies and television, almost never portrayed with humor that also respects what participants get out of them.
“Dying for Sex,” then, is a f—king miracle.
To call the FX/Hulu limited series a sitcom would be to diminish the healing positivity it lavishes on both title subjects. Yet laugh-out-loud comedic it consistently is. Poignant and adorable too. Empowering if that’s what you want from it, but not insistent in that regard.
Any tears the show will bring are eminently earned. And there’s a good chance it’ll get you hot.
Adapted from Nikki Boyer’s Wondery podcast about her best friend Molly Kochan’s final months, the show is overseen by the “New Girl” brain trust of Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether. The latter also created “The Dropout,” which won its star Amanda Seyfried an Emmy Award. So it’s little surprise that Meriwether’s follow-up project may boast the finest work Michelle Williams has ever done.
Molly is a woman in her 40s who still hasn’t processed an abusive incident from her childhood, but has more immediate concerns to cope with. Her caretaker-identifying husband Steve (Jay Duplass) hasn’t been able to touch her for three years, since she survived a bout of breast cancer.
Or so she thought. Molly gets a call from her oncologist during a couples therapy session; that pain in her hip means the cancer is back, metastasized and ain’t going away this time.
Devastated and bewildered, Molly soon locates a final purpose: To have that orgasm with a partner she’s never experienced. She leaves Steve — he blames it on a rare side effect from her medicine — and plunges into New York’s craps table of a dating market.
It’s difficult to recall any actor giving as much in-the-moment believability as Williams delivers in these eight half hours. We feel Molly’s every doubt, hope, disappointment and laugh, sometimes all in the same encounter. Williams’ voiceover is an unerring readout of wry observation and distracting — or is it focusing? — desire. Her drive is unstoppable, yet Williams gets it in gear with a beguiling combination of humor and yearning.
Pain and fear are always inches away from her medicated fingertips, too. Self-hatred flares up but shame, quite wonderfully, remains an unknown commodity (no “Babygirl” regrets here; no time for ‘em anyway). Whatever else you might want to do to Molly — or she wishes someone might — the main impulse is to just hug the woman and lie that it’s going to be all right.
Molly doesn’t quite lose that sympathetic quality when she finally discovers what really turns her on, and that makes her exponentially more intriguing. The guy who lives across the hall from her new apartment is noisy and careless with garbage. She angrily calls him on it. He likes that. And after years of being turned on whenever her husband scolded her, Molly realizes she does, too.
Played with sad sack aplomb by Rob Delaney, Neighbor Guy isn’t the only masochist in dominant Molly’s burgeoning stable, but he is the most important one. Their connection grows beyond all tease and denial; the games they play not only become great fun for all involved (that includes us voyeurs on this side of the screen), they lead to remarkable, affectionate intimacy. The penultimate episode may have the most unusual extended lovemaking scene ever put on TV. It’s definitely one of the most satisfying.
That said, Molly’s most important relationship is not with Neighbor but with her best friend Nikki. Obviously based on Boyer and played by an all-in Jenny Slate, Nikki is a warm hurricane of upfront emotions, self-sacrificing support and a bit too much horny, vicarious thrill-and-anger sharing. She’s a lot to take and a little idealized, but Slate gives Nikki enough grounding funk and insight to move her beyond manic pixie advocate toward unforced force of life.
Nikki’s an actress, by the way, which is Molly’s default explanation whenever someone asks why her friend’s so animated. It’s a good excuse to get some Shakespeare in there, too.
Molly’s support system includes her veteran cancer doctor Jerry (David Rasche), who learns things he hadn’t known before from these challenging, loving women. Palliative care advisor Sonya (Esco Jouley) is a bondage enthusiast who’s more than eager to guide Molly through her single-item bucket list. There are assorted humorous nurses and a hospice counsellor who’s weirdly enthusiastic.
But dying can’t be all great, as Sissy Spacek’s appearances as Molly’s problematic mom — she’s the drug-addled parent who’s skeezy boyfriend seduced seven-year-old Molly, after all — tend to remind us. But even she steps up before it’s too late, with Spacek calibrating guilt, denial and whatever parental concern such a character can muster with shrewd professionalism.
Like Molly, we viewers can be accused of concentrating on the sex more than the dying part of the story, and who can blame us? To paraphrase the enlightened Jerry, we’re not made of stone. But medical complications dog our heroine’s adventures and Rosenstock, Meriwether and their team give those and, inevitably, The Reaper their dramatic due.
Balancing dead serious with the amusingly quirky, linking relief with the surreal, they more-or-less persuade us that a sweet by-and-by is not only possible but worth watching. Conflicting feelings abound, enriching an ending as they properly should.
Perhaps, though, the final smart move “Dying for Sex” makes is not trying too hard to suggest that giving up the ghost will feel as good as a mutual orgasm with someone you really like.
“Dying for Sex” premieres Friday, April 4, on Hulu.