The first thing Molly, the protagonist of the new FX dramedy Dying for Sex, does after learning she has incurable cancer is run to the bodega for a green plastic two-liter of generic diet soda. Then she lights up a menthol cigarette. Across the street, her husband Steve, who nursed Molly through her first fight with breast cancer a few years earlier, sits bewildered in the office of their couples therapist. When Molly’s oncologist called with the awful news, they had been arguing about her longing for sex and his refusal to touch her.
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Molly, played with impish vivacity and quiet resolve by Michelle Williams, bears little resemblance to the Hollywood archetype of the beautiful young woman dying of cancer. Neither a doomed dream girl like Ali MacGraw in Love Story nor a driven genius struck down in her prime like Florence Pugh in the latest Love Story riff, We Live in Time, she’s no vehicle for some devoted man’s epiphanies about what really matters. Despite her terminal diagnosis, Molly’s story rarely plays like a tragedy. It is, instead, a brutally frank, disarmingly raunchy, often uproariously funny rejoinder to the perfect-patient narrative—an affirmation of life through the insistence that there’s no wrong way to face the certain death that ultimately awaits us all.
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The title Dying for Sex evokes trashy reality series like Sex Sent Me to the ER, but the show takes its name from the acclaimed podcast that the real Molly Kochan recorded with her best friend, Nikki Boyer (an executive producer of the adaptation), about Kochan’s radical response to her Stage IV diagnosis. Rather than resign herself to a chaste marriage with a husband who treated her as a patient more than a lover, she left him and embarked upon a sexual odyssey. By the time she died, in 2019, she had explored her desires with more partners than most people would rack up in 10 lifetimes.
In the brilliantly cast show, Molly briefly tries to make it work with Steve (a concerned yet condescending Jay Duplass). But when he bursts into tears as she goes down on him, she realizes that living the rest of her life on her own terms will mean parting ways with him. So she moves out and recruits Nikki (a radiantly flustered Jenny Slate), a theater actress who’s finally settling down with a sweet single dad (Kelvin Yu), to be her caretaker. “I wanna die with you,” Molly tells Nikki. The request will upend Nikki’s life, and she knows it, but she loves Molly too much to consider saying no.
Convinced she’s squandered her 40ish years on earth, Molly must decide what to do with her newfound freedom. A breakthrough comes in an appointment with Sonya (Esco Jouléy), a cool, young palliative-care social worker. “Everybody has a bucket list,” Sonya insists. “I’ve never even had an orgasm with another person,” Molly blurts out. “And now I’m gonna die.” So begins said bucket list.
With Nikki and Sonya as her wingwomen and support system, Molly throws herself into hookups. She discovers an appetite for dominance, and her fumblings lead to a moving encounter with an experienced top. She isn’t looking for romantic love but accidentally finds it with the man in the apartment across the hall. A slovenly dreamboat known only as Neighbor Guy (a gloriously game Rob Delaney), he takes prurient pleasure when Molly scolds him for eating in the elevator.
Dying for Sex co-creators Kim Rosenstock (Only Murders in the Building, GLOW) and Elizabeth Meriwether (The Dropout), who worked together on New Girl, have a track record of blending tones and outsize characters in a way that reads as honest about life’s absurdities, rather than contrived. This series is their deftest tightrope walk yet. Scenes where Molly struggles to reconcile with a mom, Gail (Sissy Spacek), whose former boyfriend abused Molly when she was a child comfortably coexist with a raunchy scene where Molly’s—enthusiastically consensual—attempt to kick Neighbor Guy in the crotch lands her in the hospital. Viewers who never thought to wonder about the toxicity of post-chemo urine will be graphically enlightened.
It would probably be impossible to puncture pieties around cancer, sex, and death without a few missteps. In a concession to Hollywood norms, the show makes its dying woman unfeasibly gorgeous all the way to hospice. Molly’s relationship with the health care system is a bit fantastical. Money isn’t an issue. Sonya doesn’t hesitate to take her patient to a sex party. A doctor’s (David Rasche) brusqueness is a chance for Molly to flex her domme muscles more than a sign of overwork.
But it would be misguided to begrudge the show its creative license, and specifically its refusal to fixate on the bureaucratic nightmare that is being gravely ill in America, when so many of its enormous swings connect. Mirroring Molly’s openness, Rosenstock, Meriwether, and Williams explode clichéd depictions of common human experiences that are perennially misrepresented in pop culture, from BDSM to the process of “active dying.” The dialogue is equally sharp in funny moments (Molly longs to be “one of those fully realized women who have sex while wearing jewelry”) and painful ones (Gail: “I’m the one who let him ruin you.” Molly: “I’m not ruined!”). Nikki’s perspective is a crucial foil to Molly’s; we sense the effort she has to put into being the kind of person a terminally ill friend can rely on. In giving the love between these two singular women the same emotional weight as any ill-fated romance, Dying for Sex becomes the rare cancer story that celebrates life in all its perverse idiosyncracies without shrinking from the specter of death.