Recap of the First Episode of ‘Dying for Sex’: Exploring Themes of Death and Female Empowerment.

Terminally horny is a diagnosis that many might have labeled themselves with at some point. The intense desire for sex can feel overwhelming, like a starvation of the mind and body. Dying for Sex, the FX/Hulu dramedy by Elizabeth Merriwether and Kim Rosenstock, former New Girl colleagues, follows a woman facing a terminal diagnosis while also enduring insatiable sexual cravings. This juxtaposition creates a unique premise that delves into the complexities of desire and mortality.

Portrayed by Michelle Williams, the protagonist Molly grapples with undefined aspects of her life, a reflection of her underlying issues. Two years post a preventive double mastectomy for breast cancer, her relationship with her husband Steve, a renowned science writer played by Jay Duplass, has become devoid of intimacy. Steve’s focus on caring for Molly has inadvertently neglected their physical connection, leaving Molly feeling profoundly unfulfilled.

Moreover, a distressing revelation during a tense therapy session exacerbates Molly’s situation. Her doctor, portrayed by David Rasche, discloses that the persistent hip pain signifies a metastasized and untreatable stage IV cancer in her bones. As the doctor grimly states, there is no stage V, emphasizing the gravity of Molly’s deteriorating health condition.

Even as she flees across the street to a bodega to process her thoughts with a cheap Mountain Dew knockoff instead of with her cloying, sexless husband, she’s still thinking about sex. The memory of a guy going down on her in her 20s (she’s around 40 I think) haunts her; it was the best, she says, that she’s ever felt, even though she didn’t finish because they were interrupted.

In fact, it turns out she’s never finished: She tells Sonya (Esco Jouléy), her palliative care counselor, that she’s never had an orgasm with another person. Maybe this is related to what Steve insists her entire fixation on sex at this moment is related to, her rape by her mother’s boyfriend at age 7. But for Molly, maybe craving sex the way you crave food and water has more to do with the fact that it fucking sucks for the person who says they love you more than anyone in the world not to touch you sexually for years at a time, because your breasts remind him of death.

At the bodega, Molly bumps into her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), an actor who happens to be passing by in her car. (Semi-employed actors with cars in New York City? This may be the most unrealistic thing in the whole show.) A free spirit with a real hey-I’m-walkin’-here streak when people cross her, she comforts Molly in a way Steve simply can’t. They share the bad soda (Steve later chews her out for drinking it), she lets Molly smoke (ditto), she listens to Molly’s story of getting eaten out in her 20s (“I did not think you were gonna say that,” Nikki stammers). 

At one point Nikki stands up, apologizes, and bursts into loud screaming sobs in an tremendously accurate way — the exact timbre of someone who’s been given bad news and knows their job is to help someone else deal with it, but they have to barf it out of their own system first. It’s crackerjack acting by Slate, in a role that could easily read as manic pixie dream bestie in lesser hands.

Molly crashes at Nikki’s, which is actually the apartment of her relatively new boyfriend, Noah (Kelvin Yu). Noah’s a handsome drummer in the New York Philharmonic, who (in a delightfully pointed bit of writing) has a teenage daughter he gets to see once a week between timpani practices. (A lot of manchildren and womenchildren in this show!)

She does come back to Steve, with predictably disastrous results. When she bulldozes past his defenses to go down on him, he starts sobbing with grief mid-blowjob. (Her post-mastectomy fake breasts crush his spirit, you see.) When he all but commandeers her next-steps meeting with her doctor, she explodes. “It’s my life, it’s my death. It’s mine.” 

Afterwards, she talks to Sonya, the palliative care counselor, who responds to Molly’s out-of-nowhere comment about never having had an orgasm with enthusiasm. It’s something for her bucket list! That’s when Molly notices a leather necklace around Sonya’s neck, and puts together that she’s into BDSM. “What does that feel like?” Molly asks. 

“Thank you for not asking if it hurts,” Sonya replies. Recognizing that the unfamiliar is not inherently evil is the vital first step of any journey into kink.

It’s this conversation more than any other that gives Molly the courage to leave Steve, choosing her BFF Nikki to be her companion in her final months or years. Right on cue, Nikki gets in another public screaming match with a stranger — the kind of liveliness that makes Molly such a fan of hers to begin with.

Dying for Sex is much more about the sex than the dying. At least that’s how I see it. As widespread as cancer is — and the Musk/Trump/RFK regime is shuttering research and treatment programs quickly enough to ensure it will become more widespread than ever, thanks fellas — it’s not as widespread, I suspect, as people who’ve found themselves in sexually unfulfilling relationships. When Molly tells Nikki that Steve hasn’t touched her in three years…that’s a jail sentence, that’s what that is. 

The trap here is when the other person in the relationship, whether they mean well or not-tries to convince you that sex isn’t, in fact, all that important. You don’t really want sex, they’ll argue, implicitly or explicitly — you want to process childhood trauma, or to ignore adult problems, or to act out, or to punish your partner, or because you don’t see you can get that same sense of intimacy in non-sexual ways no problem. You definitely don’t want to have sex because sex fucking rules and is very fucking important to you and your sense of self-worth and well-being and joy. No, that would be immature of you, and frankly kind of selfish. Dying for Sex wisely advises its viewers who feel sex is important to never, ever, for any reason, let anyone convince you that no it isn’t.

It’s also a tremendous showcase for the talents of Jenny Slate, who does more cool and insightful shit about getting awful news during that one scene outside the bodega than I’ve seen in any TV show this year not called Adolescence. Throughout it, her comedic timing doesn’t lose a millisecond. She really does seem like the kind of friend whose boobs would contain magical calming properties, as she and Molly agree they do. 

(A quick note before we continue: This show is based on the true story of Molly Kochan, who told much of it on a podcast of the same name co-hosted with her friend Nikki Boyer, an executive producer on the show. But the television series is not the podcast, and it’s certainly not the actual real lives of Kochan and Boyer. As with any adaptation, these reviews reflect the show and the characters as they exist on screen, not the source material or the flesh-and-blood people who lived it.)

Yet for all its reliance on the finely observed details of human interaction, both inside and outside the bedroom, there’s an element of unreality to the proceedings. Part of that is its nature as a sitcom-length dramedy: There’s gotta be a joke every 90 seconds or so, and by god the story and the characters will do whatever it takes to hit that mark. (This is an anti-comedy bias of mine, I freely admit.)

But it also has to do with the character of Molly. White, thin, blonde, and beautiful, she has a smart, successful, attentive (except in one important way) husband who dotes on her. She has a quirky yet dependable friend who does the same. She has no job or calling the show seems to even find worth mentioning, yet she has no apparent worries whatsoever in terms of insurance or medical debt.

Molly has just gotten the worst hand she can possibly be dealt, and that’s true regardless of your socioeconomic status. But her situation is unusual, and the show doesn’t seem interested in examining this. Maybe it’ll get around to it — it’s early yet. But I get the bad feeling that this show is gonna be, ugh, life-affirming, and I’m not sure exploring the ways in which even dying itself is easier on the white and wealthy than it is on others jibes with that overall vibe. (It’s probably going to be easier to get laid looking like Michelle Williams than it might be otherwise, too.)

That said, there’s something honestly admirable about a show that asks its audience to embrace a woman who jilts her husband for being too nice and caring, while not wanting sex enough. That’s pretty much the inverse of what the classic ideal husband delivers, and what the classic ideal wife wants. But pleasure is important, truly and sincerely, much more so than society typically allows us to admit and embrace. Life is too short for anyone to live otherwise — much too short, in Molly’s case. Dying for Sex essentially asks the audience how willing they are to prioritize their own pleasure in far less dire circumstances. That’s a hard question, no pun intended, to answer.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.