Dying for Sex

Plot

Molly starts the series ten years into an unhappy marriage with her husband, Steve, a pompous journalist; she is also inhibited by the traumatic effects of her mother's boyfriend forcing oral sex from her at the age of seven. Her doctor calls her during a couple's therapy session with Steve to say that a biopsy they had taken on her hip showed stage IV metastatic breast cancer that had infiltrated her bones, brain, and liver; she responds by leaving the therapy session to buy a two-liter bottle of white-label diet soda and menthol cigarettes at a bodega across the street. She calls her friend Nikki, who is overwhelmed by the news. Her hormonal anti-cancer drug tamoxifen increases her libido, and Molly attempts to give her husband fellatio in their kitchen, only for him to start crying as her breasts reminded him of her death. At the hospital, she tells counselor Sonya that she had never had an orgasm with another person, and their conversation inspires Molly to leave Steve and explore her sexuality.

In the second episode, Molly signs up for a dating app and is pleased to receive multiple dick pics. At a subsequent hospital visit, she is told the doctors will induce menopause. On her way out, she invites an app user to a hotel, but backs out after seeing him; she then does the same for a guy in an elevator, but rescinds the invitation after opting not to risk having to explain her mastectomy scars. Once there, she orders a vibrator and orgasms to Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in Speed, a clownfish entering and exiting a coral reef, and in front of a male webcam model, the last of which infects Nikki's laptop with viruses. She then throws her overheating vibrator into an ice bucket. The man promptly blackmails her, prompting her to call Nikki and then Steve; the latter shames Molly, prompting her to gather her possessions and leave him immediately, and later moving in with Nikki. Steve hands Molly's medical records to Nikki, who promptly loses them.

While debriefing with Nikki at a bar, she leaves in an Uber with a patron, who prematurely ejaculates on their way to have sex; the driver dumps them at a highway divider. Having attended a stage IV cancer group in episode three, she visits a group for those with curable cancer but is ejected to avoid disconcerting its members. Following an abortive encounter with an inexperienced 25-year-old, Molly starts masturbating and hears her neighbor also doing so; aroused at the thought that he is doing so to her, she orgasms. The pair subsequently run into each other while he's emptying his trash in the hallway; she orders him to pick it up, moves both of them to run to their rooms and masturbate, and Molly denies him permission to ejaculate. Molly later enters his apartment and orders him to masturbate. At his request, she kicks him in the penis, and the movement causes her femur to snap. Molly begins searching for submissive males online, and finds Hooper, a successful Wall Street trader into penis humiliation and penis cages; she tries to mock his penis but struggles as she considers it beautiful.

Cast

Main

Michelle Williams as Molly Kochan

Jenny Slate as Nikki Boyer

Recurring

David Rasche as Dr. Pankowitz, Molly's oncologist

Esco Jouléy as Sonya, Molly's palliative care social worker

Sissy Spacek as Gail, Molly's mother

Kelvin Yu as Noah, Nikki's partner

Jay Duplass as Steve, Molly's husband

Rob Delaney as Neighbor Guy

Zack Robidas as Hooper

Tracee Chimo as Nikki's sister

Annabelle Toomey as Young Molly

Production and release

The series is loosely based on the real-life experiences of Molly Kochan. After being diagnosed for breast cancer, Kochan underwent chemotherapy, a bilateral mastectomy, radiation therapy, and breast reconstruction treatment. She also started on a hormone therapy that increased her libido. In 2015, she was re-diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer, which meant her illness was terminal. She went on to co-create along with her real-life friend Nikki Boyer a podcast called Dying for Sex, in which Kochan related how, after the diagnosis, she left her marriage and began a journey of sexual exploration. Kochan died on March 8, 2019, at the age of 45; the podcast and Kochan's memoir Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole was released the following year.

The series was created by Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock, a pair who had started off as playwrights before working together on Meriwether's New Girl. Meriwether, then working on The Dropout, had received the podcast in March 2020 from a producer who thought she might be interested in it; the series was commissioned later that month. The pair started writing the show several months into the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and consulted Emily Nagoski for Molly's orgasm scene. The pair had nothing to directly compare their scripts with on a narrative or tonal level, but were inspired by I May Destroy You and the sex in Normal People. In 2022, Michelle Williams spoke with Meriwether and Rosenstock via Zoom having been reduced to tears by the podcast, though declined to sign to the project as it was set in Los Angeles. Meriwether and Rosenstock continued to develop the show with five women, one non-binary person, and one man, during which time Williams became pregnant and narrated the audiobook for Britney Spears's The Woman in Me.

Williams eventually signed to the project after her daughter became obsessed with New Girl and after a chance meeting at the 2023 Critics Choice Awards with Meriwether, who told her that she was moving to New York. Her participation was announced in November 2023; it was her first TV role since 2019's Fosse/Verdon, for which she had won an Emmy Award, and contained her first masturbation scene. In January 2024, it was announced that Jenny Slate had joined the cast; at the time of her chemistry read in late 2023, she was looking for something with depth and breadth and had paused looking for other jobs to wait for it. Rob Delaney, David Rasche, Esco Jouléy, Jay Duplass, Kelvin Yu and Sissy Spacek were hired for recurring roles in April. Delaney had been public about his experiences with grief, having lost his toddler-aged son to a brain tumor. Filming on the series began in March 2024 in New York City; one scene, where Williams kicks Delaney's penis, was filmed repeatedly for more than half a day.

Reception

Viewership

JustWatch, a guide to streaming content with access to data from more than 45 million users around the world, reported that Dying for Sex was in the top ten most-streamed series in the U.S. from March 31 to April 6. TVision, using its Power Score to evaluate CTV programming through viewership and engagement across over 1,000 apps, estimated that the series was one of the fifteen most-streamed shows between April 7 and 13.

The streaming aggregator Reelgood, which tracks real-time data from 20 million U.S. users for original and acquired content across SVOD and AVOD services, calculated Dying for Sex was in the top ten most-streamed series between April 9–16. Nielsen Media Research, which records streaming viewership on U.S. television screens, reported that the show has been streamed for 5.9 million hours as of May 31.

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Dying for Sex has an approval rating of 98% based on 60 critics' reviews, with an average rating of 8.4/10. The website's consensus reads: "Jaunty and sweet but never flippant, Dying for Sex leverages wonderful performances from Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate to present a bittersweet ode to living life to its fullest." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 82 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Ben Travers of IndieWire wrote the film "act[ed] as exuberant encouragement for the rest of us to follow", while Nicole Vassell of Elle wrote that it was "thrilling to see a story of a woman's sexual liberation told so frankly" and "revolutionary to see it in the context of life with cancer".

Barbara Ellen of The Guardian loved the series, but felt that the series ran two episodes too long and that "for some the juxtaposition of sexual high jinks and mortality may jar". The same publication's Lucy Mangan complimented the series for "upend[ing] just about every expectation" and for being "a feminist endeavour to its core." Mangan appreciated the show's highlighting of Molly's emotional and physical exploration of her desires, through a "variety of sexcapades," as well as the strong female friendship between Molly and Nikki, wishing, "uniquely in the annals of modern television history," for "longer episodes or a longer season, so that more justice could be done to all parts of Molly's life." Kat Rosenfield of The Free Press wrote that the series's men were all "losers, jerks, weirdos, or predators".

Anita Singh of The Daily Telegraph wrote that the sex became "an annoying distraction" to the tender scenes between Molly and Nikki and felt the series was unrelatable, while Ann Marie Hourihane of the Irish Independent raised eyebrows at Molly not losing her hair or being bloated by treatment and wrote that the show could do with less sex and more death. Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times also wrote that the series was somewhat unrealistic, but felt that this could be "easily overlooked by the power of the performances, the hilarious courage of the writing and the glorious reconstruction of a familiar genre" and also compared the series to the 1970 film Love Story. Lili Loofbourow wrote that her 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", while Dana Dickey of PureWow was frustrated by the image of viewers interpreting Kochan's orgasm as a dying woman's treat, on the grounds that orgasms were "a life essential for everyone".