Michelle Ashford’s drama about the researchers who put sex under the lamp is handsome, well acted and cleverer than its subject suggests. It is at its best in the basement with Sheen and Caplan, and it weakens whenever it leaves them for the suburbs.
Michelle Ashford’s programme, drawn from Thomas Maier’s book, tells the story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who set out to measure what happens to the human body during sex. The easy version of this would be a run of tasteful nudity with a bow tie in the corner. Ashford has done something harder: she has made a drama about work. The sex is there, but the scenes that hold are the ones about who gets funded, who gets credited and who is allowed to watch.
Michael Sheen plays Masters as a man who has decided that feeling is a form of error. He speaks in short, complete sentences, holds his cigarette like an instrument, and looks at a naked woman the way a surveyor looks at a field. The performance gives the audience almost nothing to like for several hours, and at least one review found the pilot cold for that reason. We think the cold is the point. Every small crack in the man, a hand left a moment too long on a shoulder, a lie told to his wife, registers because the surface around it is so smooth.
Lizzy Caplan is the reason to keep watching. Her Virginia Johnson walks into the hospital knowing more about the subject than any of the men studying it, and Caplan plays her as practical rather than knowing, a woman who has worked out how the world runs and has stopped being offended by it. When she tells Masters that women sometimes pretend, and he stares at her as if she has reported a new element, we laughed out loud, then realised the programme had just made its whole argument in one exchange. He has the machines. She has the information.
The look is careful without being fussy. Ane Crabtree’s costumes do a lot of the character work: Virginia in fitted blouses and pencil skirts a shade brighter than anyone else’s, Libby Masters in the soft pastels of a magazine advertisement, Bill in the same dark suit and bow tie in every scene as if he had bought a dozen. Michael Penn’s music is light, jazzy and slightly mischievous, and the title sequence, all fruit and pistons and trains entering tunnels, promises a programme funnier than the one we get.
Because it is not, quite. The trouble is the house. Caitlin FitzGerald is good as Libby, and the early stretch in which Bill lets his wife believe their childlessness is her fault, when he knows it is his, made us properly angry with him. But the writers keep returning to the marriage as if it owed them a second show, and the suburban scenes, all cocktails and casseroles, feel borrowed from other period dramas. Nicholas D’Agosto’s Ethan Haas, a young doctor who wants Virginia to want him, is written as a plot device in a white coat. Every time the story leaves the lab, the pulse drops.
Then it goes back to the lab and picks up again. Annaleigh Ashford’s Betty DiMello, the prostitute who helps recruit the first volunteers, is the one supporting character who talks to Masters as an equal, and the programme is sharper whenever she is on screen. Margo Martindale turns up as Miss Horchow and takes what she is given and keeps it. The episodes in which volunteers are wired to machines and asked to carry on regardless are shot with a straight face that is funnier and sadder than any wink would have been.
It ran four seasons, forty-six hours, and the first is the one to see. The later runs spend more time on the two of them and less on the work, and the programme wanders. But that first year, two clever people in a basement counting heartbeats and pretending not to notice each other, is proper drama, and Sheen and Caplan are well matched.
Watch it at home, two or three episodes at a sitting, and do not be put off by the pilot’s chill. Each episode runs an hour and the first season is twelve of them. Bring someone you can argue with about whether Masters is a monster.
