It’s hard to make cancer funny. It’s almost as tricky, for different reasons, to make someone’s search for sexual fulfillment narratively compelling.
FX’s “Dying for Sex” manages to do both.
The limited series, co-created by Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether, stars Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate as real-life friends Molly Kochan, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer in 2015, and Nikki Boyer, who supports her right up till the end in her twin quests to explore her sexual needs and die on her own terms. Based on the popular 2020 podcast of the same name, in which the two women discussed Kochan’s sexual escapades (and leaving her 13-year marriage), the show juggles health, humor and horniness with brilliant assists from guest stars Rob Delaney, Jay Duplass, Esco Jouléy, Robby Hoffman and Sissy Spacek. It’s a weirdly good time.
It’s almost easier to say what “Dying for Sex” isn’t than to capture what it is. Cancer carries with it certain expectations. And when your hero is a 40-something terminal patient who leaves her marriage to explore sex as a life-giving force, it takes real narrative dexterity to avoid the kind of storytelling that strains to piously represent marginalized experience or otherwise instruct. “Dying for Sex” shares with its eccentric hero a resolute and almost principled refusal to represent in this way. The story Williams and Slate deliver here isn’t a “cancer journey” in the usual sense of the term. Nor, despite the ambient feminism, is it a manifesto about female liberation. It isn’t about caretaking or trauma or expanding conventional definitions of sex, even though it capably covers all that and more. Nor, despite plenty of opportunities, does the show have much to say about our health-care system. (Molly’s medical team is largely great.)
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“Dying for Sex” isn’t even, strictly speaking, about female friendship writ large. The duo at the show’s core is charming and boundaryless and so singular that their relationship becomes smeary, irreducible. Their exhausting and exhaustive approach to Molly’s plan for her life (and death) does not and cannot scale.
The result is tonally original; this is a first-rate comedy about dying. A sad one, as comedies go (you will weep), but a comedy nonetheless. Even the finale, which ends just as you would expect, is titled “It’s Not That Serious.” And while there’s plenty of gallows humor — the gusto with which a hospice nurse recites the stages of death, the show’s brief and savage anthropology of cancer groups (the Stage 1s want nothing to do with the Stage 4s) — the show sidesteps cynicism. And the principals are too caught up in the tragedy and hope of the moment to indulge in much social commentary.
Fans of the podcast will notice minor but telling differences between the real Kochan, who died in 2019, and the show version (who I’ll refer to as Molly for the sake of clarity). Kochan had already spent years battling the disease when she was re-diagnosed and declared terminal. On the podcast, she describes receiving the call from her doctor while in a couples’ counseling session and her husband’s response to the news — a request, to their therapist, that they get back to why he’s so angry.
Kochan wasn’t especially bitter about it. “I left my husband today” is the name of her very brief blog post on the subject. (Also brief is her last entry, titled “I HAVE DIED.”) The matter-of-factness is typical. So is the lack of any prescriptive advice. She defaults toward broad-minded curiosity — about everyone, including her many hookups (and their many kinks and fetishes) but also the well-intentioned people who “dropped out” of her life as she was dying: “I realized that people are going to do whatever they’re going to do regardless of what they want to want. Even me,” she wrote in her final note.
Neither sentimental nor saintly, Kochan is funny, and the show badly needed her humor to translate for the script to work. (It does.) The “Dying for Sex” writers preserve and sharpen some of her edges, even modifying the aforementioned scene, in which Kochan learns the cancer has metastasized, so as to make Molly less sympathetic and her husband less of a jerk. During the encounter, which is still set in a therapist’s office, Molly interrupts husband Steve’s (Jay Duplass, Duplassing like he’s never Duplassed before) monologue about how good an ally he is to his female colleagues to reiterate that she wants them to erotically reconnect now that he’s no longer her caretaker.
When the doctor’s phone call interrupts the session with her diagnosis, Steve reverts immediately to that caretaker role. He’s not a jerk — he certainly doesn’t direct the therapist back to the topic of his anger — but one does sense relief. As a writing choice, this one makes clear how “Dying for Sex” works: no bad guys.
As if to drive the point home, the show introduces us to Molly (the cancer patient with whom we’ve been narratively conditioned to sympathize) as she’s reeling from the diagnosis and acting up. Molly abandons the therapy session and uses Steve’s credit card to book an expensive hotel room, intending to have sex with someone else. Shortly thereafter, she leaves him and lands on Nikki’s doorstep. Undaunted by the news that Nikki has just moved in with her new boyfriend (and his daughter!) and scored a role in a play she loves, Molly asks Nikki if she can die with her instead.
Those are aren’t especially virtuous choices, but (as written) they swiftly set Molly up as a fascinating but thoroughly imperfect character. Those closest to her must roll with her impulsivity and need as well as her charm, stoicism and broad-mindedness. And Nikki does. But shepherding a cancer patient through treatment and grief and old sexual trauma — and the pursuit of sexual satisfaction — isn’t easy. Nikki loses virtually everything over the course of the series; Slate starts to literally droop under the weight of all her character takes on, but never in Molly’s presence. The labor she puts into keeping things light and meeting Molly exactly where she is — burying her own grief as best she can — puts a heroic twist on the comedy. Every laugh makes it more of a love story.
My one criticism of a script that largely appreciates humans in all their flawed complexity is that it paints too saintly a picture of Nikki while leaning fearlessly into Molly’s flaws. A charming, disorganized firecracker with an atrocious temper and no filter to speak of (Slate is a delight), Nikki’s endless patience with Molly — even when she infects her laptop with viruses while chatting with sketchy cam guys — stretches credulity.
Williams, always a powerhouse, captures Molly’s arc from overall-wearing cancer patient to warm, be-stilettoed domme with wicked charisma and exquisite sensitivity. She humanizes Molly’s single-mindedness (which isn’t always attractive) and makes apparently contradictory qualities seem compatible. Molly’s settled, uncompromising firmness on certain fronts coexists with her trembling hope, her risk-taking and her many small, extremely entertaining epiphanies.
I would dwell on Delaney’s wild chemistry with Williams as Molly (he plays her misanthropic neighbor), but I don’t want to give too much away. Suffice to say Delaney has rarely been better, and this is one of those shows where everyone vibes a little with everyone else. Molly’s winsome promiscuity somehow informs the tone of the whole production. As one character puts it while trying to disabuse her of the “early millennial” notion that sex is just about penetration and orgasms, “Sex is a wave. No, sex, sex is a mindset. Sex is the nonlinear emergent phenomenon that arises when two or more beings, they touch energy fields.”
It says something, though I’m not sure what, that I’ve deleted many similar paragraphs in the course of writing this review — about an unforgettable discussion of topping, a cataclysmic bit of erotic slapstick and a brutal mother-daughter exchange about guilt. Spoilers all but also evidence of what this hilarious, heavy, gentle, genre-bending Mixmaster of a show can do.
Dying for Sex premieres Friday; all eight episodes will be available for streaming on FX/Hulu.
