Dying for Sex

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Cue eye roll … and ACTION!

This was my director’s note on the opening scene of Hulu's limited series "Dying for Sex," a Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether creation based on a popular podcast by the same name.

The series opens with Molly Kochan (Michelle Williams as a breast-cancer survivor) in a couples counseling session where husband Steve (Jay Deplass as a self-described male feminist) drones on about why he can’t “suddenly” become the lover Molly needs now that she's cancer free and how her "needs" are unresolved sexual trauma from childhood. Molly, on the other hand, is silent. Or would be if the creators didn’t rely on the show’s main conceit (and the reason for my note): the voice over.

This opening scene establishes the two main themes of “Dying for Sex” — The internal struggle against life’s typecasting of us as two-dimensional caricatures defined by our circumstances, and society’s expectations and insistence that women be both sexually alluring and chaste at the same time. The therapist's office, while heavy-handed, is a perfect metaphor for highlighting how these two themes are epic battles, too often taking place within quite conversations where the "unsaid" is left to rot where it falls. Or should be if it wasn’t for that narrator patiently explaining to the viewer what’s so obvious on Michelle Williams’ face, a brilliant actress that embodies this character so deeply that her internal dialogue needs no voice; the internal struggle is evident in the desperate tension in her eyes, facial expressions and body language. She is in a battle for her life, both figuratively and literally. And it shows. No voice over needed.

I had heard great things about “Dying for Sex, “ now steaming on Hulu. Rated 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, the show surprised me by relying on the voice over crutch so early, leaving me to believe it was going to be another Hallmark saccharin-sweet "with an edge" suburban heterosexual woman's fantasy rom-com. Think “50 Shades of Grey”.

I was dead wrong (pardon the pun).

Interrupting the Hallmark-esque therapy session, Molly's doctor calls with news that her cancer is back. It's stage four, incurable. Suddenly, Molly now faces the very real possibility that she will never escape the world's need for her to be the predictable woman, chastely, patiently, quietly and politely remaining a background character to Steve's brave, masculine protagonist, self — a professional who was literally born into the role of savior, while Molly dies quietly in the background in her supporting role as "Female with Cancer".

Here, the creators flip the script having Molly abandon the constraints of the therapy session as an obvious metaphor to abandoning the expected Hallmark script to meet her friend Nikki (the hilarious Jenny Slate) across the street at the neighborhood bodega where the sexual fantasy that played in the backgrond of her mind in the first few moments of the first episode, now demands center stage. It's here that the creators introduce the second conceit of "Dying for Sex": women as three dimensional, richly drawn, sexual beings in contrast to the two-dimensionality of man's new role as sex object.

Molly embarks on a sexual quest to achieve what has been for her an elusive goal: achieving orgasm with another person. This quest takes her into the unchartered waters (for television and for herself) of exploratory, unapologetic, imaginative sex where a woman's desire can't be restrained but a man's can be collared, manipulated, and denied.

The sexual adventures may seem tame, even predictable, for those of us in "alternative" lifestyles. But middle-America may not be ready for the "shocking" scenes of female dominance and male exhibitionism and subservience. It's a delicious twisting of the norms for broadcast tv, and it's much watch television, America. Even though its through the splayed fingers of your right hand, while the other clutches your pearls.

4 out of 5 stars.