Dying for Sex is the new FX series that will be available in Streaming on Disney+ from 4 April with all the eight episodes that sees Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate as the main protagonists.

It is written and co-creator by Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether and is based on the Wondery and Nikki Boyer podcast of the same name. And there is a peculiarity behind all this.

And no, we are not talking about his being based on a podcast because this type of transmissions have been very popular for a good piece so much so that there is now even the wikipedia page that collects all the various podcast adaptations made so far between cinema and TV series.

And it has nothing to do even with the fact that the above podcast deals with real topics since, tendentially, it is a common thing to many of them.

If anything, it has to deal with the specific topic told by the podcast first and then by the TV series then (with the debt licenses, as clearly declared by a disclaimer): the last weeks of a woman’s life with breast cancer at the fourth stage that decides, over time that she remains, to want to enjoy. Not in the side of “enjoying life”, but in the most strictly sexual sense of the term.

Dying for sex plot

As we wrote a few lines, Dying for Sex is freely inspired by Molly Kochan’s life, who died on March 8, 2019 at the age of 45 because of breast cancer. Before dying, he had the opportunity to tell his experience in a Wondery podcast, conceived with his best friend Nikki Boyer.

In the series, Michelle Williams playing it. Immediately in the first episode, after learning the terrible news while he is at a couple therapy session together with his husband Steve (Jay Duplass), the woman decides to leave the man with whom she had never managed to have an orgasm and with whom she had no sexual relations for months and months. He wants to finally be free to explore all the nuances of the sexual desires with which he had never had a way to talk truly openly.

There is a lot to do and little time available to do it. To support her in this atypical journey, in which she will also be able to reconcile with her mother (played by Sissy Spacek) there will be her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate)

Of the importance of being at peace with oneself

The first thing that comes to think looking at Dying for Sex is that, perhaps, there is really something unfair in the fact that Michelle Williams, despite the five nominations received between the leading actress and the protagonist, has not yet won an Oscar.

That he was an actress of great skill had already been understood at the time of Dawson’s Creek even if perhaps, who made it immediately, we were the ones who at the time we were teenagers or pre-adolescents and we were struggling with the vicissitudes of the high school students of the capesis.

In Dying for Sex he embraces the difficulty of a performance that must be credible at the same time when he must tell the experience of a terminal patient and so bold as to face scenes that involve masturbation, oral sex and a long series of Kink that we will not be here to list in order not to ruin the surprise. As well as sailed, it may be an actress, it is certainly not a small thing. Michelle Williams is sublime in ensuring that all this is lived by the viewer with similar curiosity because it is a truly frank story from this point of view. Which, respecting the memory of the true Molly Kochan, nothing is held. Perhaps it is an exploration that would have been more incisive with a couple of less episodes because a minimum of repetitiveness, in the central episodes, is felt, but it is still a very negligible defect.

And it is also worth noting that, despite a title that immediately “sells” the main argument, the Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Merizabether series really says so much about being in peace not himself and not only in relation to how Molly decides to use the time that remains. Because Molly is not a monad who lives without having anyone around. And so those people who are close to her and who, as far as possible, accompany her on a journey of sexual awareness and serene acceptance of her being destined to die in a short time, also have the opportunity to deal with their own, of lives. As if Molly was giving them a lesson that has nothing paternalistic but that is an exhortation to not miss – out of laziness or who knows what other reason – the opportunities that life puts in front of you.

And in the final episode, the one whose end is known from the moment in which we push Play on the first episode, Dying for Sex touches the highest point of his speech on a topic with which every person in this world has had, has and will have to deal while pretending that it is not so: death.

He does it with a narrative, a direction and interpretations that can be read, deep and incredibly frank at the same time.

And it’s not that it is a very simple thing to do.

VOTE: 7.5