‘Dying for Sex’: Your Classic Hangout Show About A Cancer Patient Trying to Get Off As Much As She Can, While She Still Can

The tragic glamor of a fatal disease diagnosis is a pop cultural go-to. Unlike death by misadventure, a terminal illness gives the patient the time and space to change their life, which can be as simple as being less of a doormat (The Big C) or as elaborate as going on a globetrotting adventure (Joe Versus the Volcano). Dying for Sex falls somewhere in the middle, and is probably TV’s most moving meditation on friendship, love, pleasure, pain, death and life that ALSO includes orgasm torture and puppy play.

Dying for Sex, adapted from the podcast of the same name, stars Michelle Williams as Molly. Two years into her remission from successful breast cancer treatment, Molly feels a pain in her hip that turns out to be a recurrence of her cancer, now metastasized to her bones. She can tell that her husband Steve (Jay Duplass) is, in a way, excited to step back in to his role as her caretaker, but she wants to return to the subject they were discussing with their therapist when the call came through about her biopsy: that they haven’t had sex since her original diagnosis. Her attempt to go down on him later that day ends when she puts his hand on her (new) breast and he starts crying because it makes him think about her death, leading Molly to wonder, “What if that’s the last time I have sex? Half a blow job that made him cry?” 

The first episode tells us a lot about Molly’s sexual history — an encounter from her 20s she still thinks about wistfully; a traumatic violation in her early childhood — and by the time it ends, Molly has told her social worker Sonya (Esco Jouley) that she’s never had an orgasm with another person, and told Steve she doesn’t want to die with him. Instead, Molly tentatively asks to die with her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate), though she knows it’s a lot to ask. “Yeah, let’s do it,” Nikki tells her. “Die with me.” Before that happens, though, Molly’s determined to have an orgasm with someone else, and embarks on a quest to figure out what she likes. All eight episodes drop on Hulu (under the FX banner) April 4th.

This is obviously a noisy title and concept, likely to get people in the door who otherwise might find the story of a woman living with incurable cancer kind of, you know, sad. Molly is like a one-woman Sex and the City, aiming for the bravado of Samantha but more often landing around the haplessness of Miranda. The adaptation comes from New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether, and while I won’t call Molly “adorkable,” there are some similarities.

Molly fantasizes about hooking up with a sweaty male model type she encounters in a hotel elevator, pulling out his AirPods with her mouth. Testing her tolerance for the biggest vibrator she’s ever used involves screening a particularly sweet (and non-sexual) scene between Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in Speed. After a trip to a sex party convinces her she wants to try domination, she gets on a kink-forward app and meets Hooper (Zack Robidas), a be-vested finance guy who figured out he was into orgasm torture while canvassing for Obama; she later tells Nikki Hooper’s penis was so big that putting it in a cock cage, at his request, required her to stuff it in like a sweat sock. Molly’s domination mentor (Robby Hoffman) closes the episode by telling her own partner to disrobe “and put on the movie Minions.” After her many years of unwilling abstinence, Molly’s open curiosity about the mostly-submerged iceberg of sexuality makes these scenes as winning and funny as they are… anthropological?

Much like Sex and the City, however, what initially presents as the unbridled pursuit of id drifts into feelings for one exceptional partner — in Molly’s case, a neighbor guy who’s only ever called Neighbor Guy (Rob Delaney). Neither of them seems to have known before they met each other that they might be into S&M (though a series premiere scene in which Molly finds Steve’s disappointment and anger at her “hot” hints at what may later, no pun intended, come); but their progression from complaints about common areas to consensual humiliation foreplay to real intimacy is carefully and touchingly paced. Anyone who followed Delaney on Twitter in its golden age knows that “hairy civil servant enraptured by a tiny, bossy woman” is basically the role he was born to play; he more than holds his own opposite multiple Oscar nominee Williams. 

Joining Molly part of the way through her cancer journey — a phrase she’s on record disliking — lets the show elide some elements of her story without feeling incomplete, at least to me. I can imagine a hypothetical viewer who wishes we learned more about Steve’s perspective on Molly’s sexual investigations; couldn’t be me. A visit from Molly’s mostly estranged mother Gail (Sissy Spacek) resurfaces the issues that separated them: the sexual assault in Molly’s childhood was perpetrated by Gail’s then-boyfriend, and Molly’s inability to reassure Gail to her satisfaction that Molly doesn’t blame her led Molly to decide limiting contact was the healthier option. Spacek gives a lived-in performance in her comparatively short screen time, and the way the show represents the lingering presence of Molly’s assailant in her mind — as a blurry-faced apparition whenever she gets close to feeling real sexual love — effectively fills in the gaps. 

The show peppers in just enough story about the Kafkaesque hell that is managing a cancer patient’s care in a for-profit health insurance system, and Slate is convincing playing Nikki as someone ready to protect Molly from hassle — with her own body, if necessary. The system doesn’t have to be this forbidding, complicated or dehumanizing; a caretaker shouldn’t have to take on so much that her own family members get concerned that she’s not letting anyone take care of her. Molly describes Nikki, in the first episode, as having been a “flake” throughout the decades they’ve known each other, so the way Nikki selflessly steps up to do all the work Molly’s treatment involves might not be credible if not for Slate’s delicate, tender and fierce performance. In the latter half of the season, Nikki gets a speech about the meaning of having Molly’s bloodstains on Nikki’s clothes that encapsulates the show’s portrayal of true platonic love’s transformative power. Though another scene, in which Molly chases a disclosure to Nikki about her childhood sexual abuse with a stress fart, gets us there too. 

Shannen Doherty, like Molly, also battled breast cancer that spread to her bones, and spent her last months “driven by her desire to prove that she (could) work despite her cancer diagnosis.” Doherty needed to work to stay current on her SAG-AFTRA health insurance so that she could receive treatment without going bankrupt. Molly is a lot more fortunate: After leaving Steve, she asks him to leave her on his health insurance, and cashes out her 401(k) since now they know she’s “not going to get old,” and apparently she had enough in it to bankroll her life without any other source of income. 

Having the means to rent an apartment — even a sparsely furnished one — in which Molly can get up to all kinds of sexual shenanigans and that has a Neighbor Guy across the hall who looks like Rob Delaney is a privilege the show rarely notes. Maybe half the moments in which social worker Sonya or oncologist Dr. Pankowitz (David Rasche) act like Molly is the most special patient either of them has ever met could have been repurposed to acknowledge Molly’s financial privilege. But the thing is, Michelle Williams is so good as Molly — witty, graceful, frustrated, furious, so alive even when she’s dying — that she nearly always makes you see her the way Sonya and Dr. Pankowitz do. 

In short: this is a show you should fuck with.