1 week Ago
Two years since she was first diagnosed with breast cancer, Molly (Michelle Williams) is walking towards recovery. The disease seems to have abated until it all surges back. The cancer has metastasized, spread to her hips and rooted itself all over her body in Stage 4.
However, there’s also a sudden spurt in her as a sexual being. She grudges that her husband Steve (Jay Duplass) is disaffected with her erotic yearning and pulls away at sex. “I want to feel things,” Molly asserts, while he keeps suggesting she must be confused about what she really wants.
Steve is reliable with all the practical, pragmatic needs but tuned out of her desires, the base of her feelings. What does she want in the moment? He can’t fathom her spiked-up libido, passing it off as a phase and refusing to sincerely engage with it. He’s befuddled how she, in her forties and with terminal illness staring at her, can be invested instead in thoughts of sex.
Her marriage may have been functional on a daily basis but has lost all spark. It’s turned dry, passionless; Molly is driven to shake up things, move out of it since Steve is so disinterested. With her body viewed as an anomaly, she rebels.
At couple therapy, all she has on her mind is a hook-up for her twenties. She tries gathering herself, even as her mind is racing with those excited stimulations. In Dying for Sex , writers/creators/showrunners Kim Rosenstock and Liz Meriwether nail a tricky tonal balance.
You grieve for Molly as much as delight in her giddiness, joy of leaning into new experiences and sensations. Even as her life is winding down, an unexplored world is opening up. There’s so much she wants to know and discover for herself, pleasures she never knew could be viable, attainable.
It’s like she’s shedding a thick shell limned with hesitation, taboo and, crucially, the freedom to ask for more. She embarks on a string of hook-ups in fancy hotels and departmental stores. Every beat in these encounters—from tentativeness to absolute thrill, awkwardness to ecstatic affirmation—is marvelously etched in Williams’ radiant, wrenching and lucidly open performance.
BY Debanjan Dhar The cancer’s return compels Molly to take long-deferred plunges without doubting her footing, rethinking what’s acceptable. Her marriage may have the safety nets but has become too unadventurous—no longer a match for Molly’s awakened endless sexual hunger. Her taste for uncharted experiences can’t be met with Steve, who says he can indulge it only by way of pity.
Molly breaks up, entrusting her best friend Nikki (an effervescent, scene-stealing Jenny Slate) with caregiving duties. Nikki may not seem like the best fit initially. She’s terribly disorganized, frequently forgetful, misplacing everything from her phone to essential medical records.
But Nikki wants to be present for Molly, and it’s amazing to see how people can adapt. Nikki puts her whole life on standby, fine with burning down her romantic relationship as well as any career aspiration. All she wants is to be with her best friend as much as possible in the little time they now have.
Through it all—Molly’s expanding sexual interests and repeated health-troughs—Nikki stays. Her unjudging presence encourages Molly, letting her be even more audacious and unstoppable. Here is someone to whom she doesn’t have to overly explain herself.
That itself is a big, freeing force. Molly knows Nikki will always listen, understand and be her biggest cheerleader. Based on Nikki Boyer’s eponymous Wondery podcast, Dying for Sex flutters alive in Williams and Slate’s beautiful, touching and lively chemistry.
They capture the warmth, safety and absolute transparency of a friendship that’s seen it all: each other’s rock-bottom and exultation, both ribbing with good cheer. The show’s vision is grounded in hope and resurgence. A cynical viewer may be expecting a tide of friction and irreconciled hurt and shunted priorities to hit the friendship but Dying for Sex never succumbs to that.
Nikki remains indefatigably cheery and buoyant but Slate also allows you to glimpse strains—the profound fatigue of a caregiver. Tough emotions which Nikki herself has to weather in losing her best friend has to take the backseat to ensure Molly fulfils any final, erratic wish. An actress with a Shakespeare fixation, Nikki is bright, vivacious and unwavering; it’s a joy to watch the friends guide each other through dating apps and vibrators.
The gentle, yet insistent gaze on Molly’s blooming erotic journey is filled with empowering wonder. It has moments of light humor, like her fidgeting cluelessly with a cock cage or her bursting into a monologue on dicks to a stupefied room of fellow cancer patients. But there’s also the blaze in the steady attraction she has with her neighbor (Rob Delaney).
Their exchanges brim with pure electricity, especially in early stretches where the two evade but also implicitly cannot resist each other. As Dying for Sex widens, integrating childhood trauma and surreal mental clarity, it never treats Molly’s sloping to myriad kinks as aberrations—rather as something to revel in. “Sex is a wave,” remarks Molly’s social worker.
It runs an entire gamut and must not be circumscribed to mere orgasm alone. Dying for Sex shows the range with both heat and humor and the loveliest male characters you may have ever seen on TV..
