In “Dying for Sex,” Cancer and Kink Are Just the Beginning

The scariest unknown for women with cancer, after the disease itself, can be their husbands—a staggering number of whom abandon their wives in the wake of a diagnosis. From the outside, then, Molly (Michelle Williams), the forty-year-old protagonist of the new dramedy “Dying for Sex,” would seem to be one of the lucky ones. Her husband, Steve (Jay Duplass), dedicated himself to her care when she developed breast cancer years earlier; as soon as her illness recurs, at the start of the series, this time in metastatic form, he’s eager to snap back into supportive-spouse mode. But he’s no longer the partner she needs: Molly craves physical intimacy, and Steve hasn’t touched her in years. After she tries to give him a blow job, he breaks down in tears and confesses that her breasts remind him of death. She moves out of their home so quickly she practically leaves cartoon fumes behind her. “I don’t want to die with him,” she tells her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), shortly thereafter. “I want to die with you.”

The FX/Hulu miniseries, based on a true story that was first told in a podcast of the same name, has a morbid, somewhat off-putting hook: a woman with terminal cancer looks to get laid while she still can. I was skeptical that, with such a premise, the show would take illness seriously, but it turns out that its creators, Elizabeth Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock, take everything seriously. Molly’s quest for erotic fulfillment is rendered with the utmost sensitivity—and with a resolve to model best practices with respect to sex positivity, trauma recovery, and patient empowerment, among other issues. “Dying for Sex” is, in fact, conscientious to the point of being a boner-kill.

It’s also something of a Trojan horse. The first half of the eight-episode series focusses primarily on Molly’s sexcapades in a picturesque New York City: newly freed from her ten-year marriage, she turns to strangers for gratification and soon runs into complications. She impulsively checks into a hotel and invites a man whom she spots in the elevator up to her room, only to disinvite him when she realizes she doesn’t want to explain her mastectomy scars. Later, she brings a twentysomething (Marcello Hernandez) into her bed and finds that she doesn’t have answers to his questions about how to please her. To add insult to injury, he tells her he seeks out older women precisely because they tend to know what they want. When Molly confides in her palliative-care social worker, Sonya (Esco Jouléy), she gets some more harsh truths. “You early millennials are so tragic,” Sonya says. “You think sex is just penetration and orgasms. Why? Because that’s what Samantha said?” (Speaking as a fellow elder millennial, I received my erotic tutelage from Miranda, thank you very much.)

But, in its second half, the series deepens wonderfully. (Major spoilers ahead.) If its early chapters contend with the symptoms of Molly’s sexual dissatisfaction, the latter ones explore the root causes—namely, an incident of sexual abuse at age seven. Intrusive memories of her molester, who appears as a man with a blurred face, lead her to dissociate during sex. These interruptions also prevent her from achieving the No. 1 item on her bucket list: to be present enough during sex to orgasm with a partner for the first time in her life. Molly’s aspiration is something many people take for granted, and its banality poignantly underscores all that the assault has cost her. When Sonya urges her to journal about her fears, Molly writes of her abuser, “I think he knew he was taking away love for me.”

The rest of the show is a thrilling unmooring from heterosexual convention. After a confrontation with a neighbor (Rob Delaney) leads to a kinky, humiliation-based hookup, Molly pursues a newfound desire to dominate men. She discovers untapped facets of her sexuality in scenes featuring some truly fearless performances—most notably by Conrad Ricamora as an enthusiastic participant in pup play—none of which involve penetration. She also embarks on a relationship with Delaney’s unnamed character that’s loving but pointedly bereft of commitment. “Neighbor Guy,” as he’s saved on Molly’s phone, could be a perverted first cousin of Delaney’s character in the rom-com “Catastrophe,” one who shares the same irresistible mix of goofy forthrightness and self-deprecating vulnerability. (After an early night together, Neighbor Guy tells Molly, “I’m gonna do something that neither of us want, which is talk about my feelings.”) Delaney and Williams—whose wry delivery has been underrated since her “Dawson’s Creek” days—keep the series from tipping over into darkness and render their characters’ slightly rushed emotional beats believable. The credulity-straining penultimate episode, in which the pair are given free rein by the night staff at the hospital to go to town on each other, is saved by their chemistry alone. Near dawn, Molly finally achieves her goal—in a moving, unusually muted sequence that stands in contrast to pornographic depictions of climactic rapture—then sends her neighbor on his way. They’re compatible in ways she and Steve never were, but she doesn’t want to die with him, either.

Instead, the loved one who witnesses her final moments is Nikki, a flighty, TMI-prone theatre actress who has to grow up fast to take on the round-the-clock work of Molly’s care. Their all-consuming, boundaryless friendship is the backbone of the series, which has an admirable allergy to cancer-drama clichés. Perhaps for that reason, its flashes of didacticism—as when Sonya, who sometimes comes across more like a genie than a social worker, educates Nikki on racial disparities in pain management, and when a hospice nurse runs through the stages of dying at length, with insufferable cheer—rankle sharply. These scenes have all the charm and energy of an informational pamphlet, devitalizing a tale that’s otherwise about tying up loose ends in beautifully unexpected fashion. But the show also allows more singular dynamics to bloom. At one point, as Molly’s condition deteriorates, she derisively conjures up the kind of tragic (and generic) end-of-life love story she imagines Neighbor Guy wants, with autumnal walks on which he tenderly plucks fallen leaves from her hair. “No leaves in your hair,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Just keep kicking me in the dick.” His counteroffer punctures the fantasy instantly—and is equally romantic, in its way. ♦