Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in English
Stop the press: Neither of the first two scenes in this episode of Dying for Sex ends with a comical pratfall in which someone breaks their leg while kicking someone else in the dick. Or anything of that nature — no gags, no jokes, no japes. Okay, so the cold open reveals that Molly and Neighbor Guy are talking dirty in front of a neighbor in the elevator (a good bit, admittedly), but beyond that? Just serious sex, followed by a serious conversation, both of which are all the better for being allowed to be serious.
The ep begins with an explicit sex scene, as Molly and Neighbor Guy get as close as they can come to actually having sex without doing so; it’s all about the eroticism of restraint and denial and scopophilia and mutual masturbation, and it is hot stuff. And the show lets it be hot stuff, without attaching training wheels in the form of dick jokes or Molly’s neurotic, wisecracking narration. (I don’t know how this woman wound up with Peter Parker’s interior monologue, but it’s nice when it quiets down for a bit.)
After that, the odd couple sit and eat ice cream and talk about their feeling. Neighbor Guy does, anyway. He gets Molly to say what it is she gets out of their relationship, considering that he’s never given her an orgasm; it’s “the way you look at me when I give you exactly what you want” that turns her on. He compliments her eyes. He admits he’s heard her with other sex partners and doesn’t mind it. He tells her a bit about himself, how his marriage failed because of his wife’s sort of sketchy sexual behavior and his unhappy attempt to play along. He admits that ever since he’s been lonely, and that when he’s with her, he doesn’t feel that way anymore. Finally, he brings up the leg-injury incident and her subsequent disappearance…but she won’t tell him what’s wrong when he asks.
Once again, the scene doesn’t end with a punchline or a bon mot — it just ends, with Molly saying “I don’t wanna talk about it” and shutting the conversation down before the action cuts to Nikki and Noah’s place. We’re asked to simply sit and listen, to be there with Neighbor Guy as he opens up, and with Molly as she debates whether or not to do so in turn. No one’s flailing around for a release valve to ease the pressure. This is Dying for Sex trusting its audience.
That trust is hard to come by on this show. I know it’s a generic convention, a trope endemic to the dramedy form, but scenes on this show have a way of tying themselves up with a neat little bow. Maybe it’s a little joke to ease the tension, or a big one to erase it completely. Maybe it’s a dramatic declaration that’s the logical endpoint of the conversation being depicted, as if that’s how conversations work. However it happens, way too many scenes end with some character or other delivering le mot juste. The effect knocks me right out of the narrative every time.
So when Molly calls her estranged mother, Gail (Sissy Spacek), to come help her at a chemo appointment that Nikki can’t make it to because she needs a tooth pulled, the conversation — the first time Molly has told her she has terminal cancer, after all these months — ends with a bunch of comical barnyard noises because she lives on a goat farm. When Gail walks in on Molly peeing on this guy she’s been seeing who likes to dress up like a dog (Conrad Ricamora, who before things get silly does a fine job of conveying how it feels for your wildest fantasies to come true), Gail basically tells him he’s gotten a poisonous dose of chemotherap, yelling “Don’t drink my daughter’s pee if you can’t handle it, you freak!” When Nikki and Noah break up, she not only cries, she drools, because of the oral surgery. When Gail asks Molly for forgiveness for her horrible parenting in general and her failure to protect her from the boyfriend who molested her specifically, Molly replies “Forgive yourself.” When she tries to break things off with Neighbor Guy because she assumes he wants some tragic love story with her now, he instead tells her “Just keep kickin’ me in the dick.” You can almost hear the curtain closing and the audience clapping after every scene, so heavily do they lean on these perfectly funny or funnily perfect closing lines.
Dying for Sex has every right to be funny if it wants, and it’s often very good at it. The sight gag where Nikki pulls bloody gauze out of her mouth like a magician at a child’s birthday party is delightfully gross. Gail telling Molly that her ex-husband “said you were on some kind of ‘sex quest’” made me snort with laughter. The increasingly large and dreadful gathering around Molly’s chemotherapy, when it became apparent that Steve brought his new girlfriend to meet her under these conditions? Curb Your Enthusiasm–level stuff. I am not trying to sell the show short in that regard.
I just question why 9 scenes out of 10 have to either tickle your funnybone or make you nod in approval when they end. With material about sex, illness, power, friendship, family, kink, love, and death this intense, it’s almost insulting for the show to add a little rimshot to the proceedings every now and then. Let me be blown away by this stuff. I think it’s got that strength.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&appId=823934954307605&version=v2.8”;
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));
