Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate make Dying for Sex a funny, tender comedy-drama worth watching. The writing is sometimes too pleased with its frankness, but Molly and Nikki’s friendship gives the terminal-illness story its emotional weight.
Dying for Sex is a warm, frank comedy-drama worth watching, although some of its characters deserve more attention. Molly Kochan has terminal cancer and wants to explore sexual pleasure, a premise writers Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether approach with welcome curiosity. They allow her to want something beyond comfort, reconciliation or the chance to reassure everyone around her. Occasionally the series seems rather pleased with its own openness, but Michelle Williams gives Molly enough weight to keep that from becoming the whole point.
Williams makes Molly’s sexual curiosity feel like a recognisable human appetite, even with illness complicating our response to it. The comedy does not require her to become an endlessly game heroine whom we must applaud for every new experience. Kink gets a welcome degree of playfulness, and sex is permitted to be funny without the people seeking it automatically becoming the joke. That matters in a story where the protagonist could easily be reduced to a diagnosis or a lesson in making the most of things.
Jenny Slate’s Nikki Boyer gives the series another person worth caring about, and the ease between the two actors is its chief pleasure. Their friendship carries enough feeling to compete with Molly’s sexual discoveries for our attention, and the series lets it do so. We were moved by the tenderness in Molly and Nikki’s scenes together, because Williams and Slate make their closeness convincing without asking us to admire it. We do not spend those scenes waiting for the sex story to resume.
Directors Shannon Murphy and Chris Teague are strongest when they trust that relationship to hold our attention. Daniel Vecchione’s cinematography serves the intimacy of the performances, keeping the emphasis where it belongs. Michael Bricker’s production design is similarly unobtrusive; the surroundings do not compete with Molly and Nikki for attention. Neither contribution calls for much admiration on its own, but their restraint helps the scenes between Williams and Slate feel comfortable rather than insistently significant.
Editors Jon Philpot, Laura Weinberg, Jon Higgins and Steve Welch have to move between erotic comedy and the knowledge of terminal illness without making either feel like an interruption. For the most part, the changes of tone are easy to follow and give the friendship room to develop. Ariel Marx’s music is most effective in the gentler passages, though the actors remain the reason those passages affect us. The story has eight episodes in which to accommodate its competing interests.
A little more attention to Molly outside her sexual exploration would have made the writing stronger. There are stretches where curiosity about what she might try next takes precedence over curiosity about the rest of her life. Williams compensates for some of that, but the less developed supporting characters cannot all be rescued by performance. The occasional flippant moment also feels like an attempt to hurry us past an uncomfortable feeling before it has been properly considered.
A comedy about terminal illness has to let us laugh without suggesting that laughter has made the illness manageable. Here the approach mostly makes sense: Molly remains capable of curiosity and pleasure, and those things deserve attention without becoming evidence of exceptional courage. Anyone seeking a rounded account of her life may find the emphasis restrictive. We recommend it for Williams and Slate, provided the bluntness about sex is part of the appeal.
