Oh how the body keeps the score in “Dying for Sex,” an eight-episode FX dramedy, arriving Friday on Hulu, about a woman with terminal cancer. And if the big mort is near, maybe some petite mort is in order.
Michelle Williams stars as Molly, who is sitting in an inert couple’s therapy session with her mild husband (Jay Duplass) when she answers a call from her doctor. Her cancer is back, and it’s Stage 4. She walks out of the office and out of her sexless marriage and into the loving embrace of her BFF (Jenny Slate) and a world of unbridled sexual exploration.
Well, bridled a little, in that Molly engages in some bondage play as the show goes on. Her medication is making her horny, but also, simply being alive is itself a horn-inducing endeavor. She experiments with everything, starting with a marathon masturbation session where she tries a variety of vibrators and erotica: a cam guy, a nature documentary, the movie “Speed.” She has never really tried to figure out what she likes, and she’s never had an orgasm with a partner. She wants both of those things to change, and she can’t waste any more time.
“You’re going to be dead in five years,” she tells herself. “Nothing matters.” Might as well hit on the guy in the elevator.
Might as well swipe and swipe and have all kinds of interesting encounters. She’s not looking for love, she’s looking for pleasure — though she finds a bit of both. She unlocks her inner domme and gets the rush of her life by (consensually) kicking her neighbor (Rob Delaney) squarely in the penis. Unfortunately, this act also breaks her hip; the cancer is in her bones.
“Dying” is based on a true story and adapted from the nonfiction podcast of the same name, which was created by the real-life Molly, Molly Kochan, and her best friend, Nikki Boyer, who is a producer on this show. (Kochan died in 2019.) The TV series was created by Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether, and it lives and dies by Williams’s performance.
Williams nails the paradox at the center of the show: As Molly’s body grows weaker, her self-possession grows stronger. She’s so frail — but also not.
“Pain is political; pleasure is political,” says Sonya (Esco Jouléy), Molly’s palliative care social worker and sage. The medical care one receives, the sexual attentiveness one enjoys, the perceived legitimacy of one’s ideas — these are all woven together.
The show has a little fun with actual politics too, though.
“So when did you figure out that you liked orgasm torture?” Molly asks a playmate.
“Probably when I was canvassing for Obama, like ’06,” he says.
Later, while enjoying some humiliation play in her neighbor’s apartment, Molly picks up a photo. “Is this your dad?” she spits. “How did such an attractive man produce such a [expletive] like you?”
“That’s not my dad,” he says. “That’s Bill DeBlasio.”
Cancer is what ends Molly’s life, but being sexually abused as a 7-year-old by her mother’s boyfriend is what poisoned it. She’s haunted by the abuse. The man’s ghostly figure appears in her peripheral vision while she’s hooking up, and her relationship with her mother (Sissy Spacek) is fraught at best. Molly has to accept having cancer and she has to reject the shame of abuse. She practices telling people — partners, doctors — how, when, where and with what they are allowed to touch her. Among her last words are “my body did a good job.”
For all the ways “Dying for Sex” is transgressive and audacious in its frankness about pain and pleasure, it can also feel awfully generic. Slate’s Nikki is an actress, so of course the play she’s in is eye-rollingly pretentious; she’s disorganized and chaotic, so of course she has a giant black hole of a purse. Repressed, self-conscious straight white women getting Sherpa-ed into liberation through the enlightened guidance of queer characters felt a little fresher on “Shrill” or “Somebody Somewhere.”
But as Sherpas go, “Dying” has a great one: Jouléy is an understated knockout as Sonya, who feels like a real person while other characters, like Nikki, feel more like characters. Delaney’s performance has the perfect amount of sexual and social charisma — he towers over Williams, but it is she who dominates him, and we’re never afraid for Molly’s safety even as she becomes weaker and weaker in his presence.
In the finale, Paula Pell plays a hospice worker who explains to Molly how dying works, what it will feel like, how her body will know what to do. It’s an extraordinary monologue in a lot of ways, unfussy but not coldly clinical, demystifying but also in its way mystical. What’s more ordinary than having a body, than having sex, than dying? Or maybe, what’s more extraordinary?
