“I want him. I want him to rub that beard on my face. I want him. Oh God, I want him right now. I can’t wait anymore.” Molly thinks this to herself as she looks at the man (Chris Roberti) she’s just picked up at a bar for a one-night stand as they ride home in an Uber together. She asks him if he wants to kiss her, and he does. The camera films his rough hand on her face and hair in close-up. Both Sheila Callaghan’s script and Chris Teague’s direction are keenly observed, focused squarely on desire and the things that trigger it.
Then the guy cums after a five-second handjob, groaning and spasming for like a full minute, like a character from a Farrelly Brothers movie. He gets thrown out of the Uber for it and everything. Is it funny? Sure — my notes read “lol” and everything. Is it as funny as the moments that preceded it were sharp, sexy, and vulnerable in how they exposed Molly’s hunger for contact with this man? Not by a long shot.
That’s the problem with Dying for Sex: It’s a dramedy, not a drama in which funny things sometimes or even often happen. In general (of course there are exceptions), dramedies are an unhappy hybrid. For every moment of real insight into human behavior, there’s a gag to pop the audience. As soon as things get serious, along comes a joke to lighten the mood.
The Uber-cummer is a textbook case. Molly creates this intensely hot moment for herself, making sexual contact with a man other than her husband for the first time in over a decade — with any man for over three years, that crying blowjob from last episode excepted — only for it to be short-circuited by a recreation of the Lonely Island “Jizz in My Pants” sketch. You were doing so well, Dying for Sex!
It’s a shame, because Molly’s desires are otherwise treated both empathetically — at no point does the writing undermine the idea that sexual fulfillment is a worthy thing for Molly to want pursue — and emphatically — nor does it make light of the length she’s willing to go to to achieve it, i.e. ending her marriage. It really isn’t salvageable based on how Steve behaves in this episode. Sure, he may be a superior caregiver to Nikki, whose disorganization reads as inconsiderate rather than endearing when it begins potentially impacting Molly’s treatment. (She carries around a duffel bag so full of random shit it’s like a Looney Tunes gag.)
But Steve reacts to an image of Molly — his wife, the woman he loves, the woman who’s been begging him to touch her for god knows how long — masturbating by saying “I can’t keep looking at this photo of you! It’s disgusting! I don’t wanna see you like that!” He even can’t play this off as opposition to her masturbating with strangers on the internet, which is where the photo originated, because he keeps telling her he’s fine if that’s what she wants to do. There’s no walking back that visceral a reaction to your wife’s sexuality, buddy. (The way he keeps bringing up her “core trauma” or whatever he calls her childhood sexual abuse suggests that incident makes him more uncomfortable with her having sex than she herself is.)
The episode’s primary focus is on where Molly begins her strange erotic journey: with herself, logically, by masturbating. Like, a lot. All day, in a hotel room, with a Hitachi magic wand she literally overheats, until she cums six times and winds up getting hacked by some dude she was camming with. At one point she just has the vibrator between her legs while she eats a snack, as if being sexually stimulated is just her natural state. Who knows? Maybe it is!
But the hotel room sequence speaks to a continuing problem with Dying for Sex: other than, you know, the whole dying bit, Molly has it almost fairy-tale easy. She leaves her husband, but he still pays the hacker’s ransom, and keeps her on his insurance. (It would be sociopathic not to, of course, but considering the way insurance is tied to jobs and spouses in this country, the show is eliding a massive obstacle to divorce in the first place.) He also foots the bill for the most expensive suite in the hotel, and for the vibrator too. And after spending the day diddling herself, Molly immediately gets hit on by a handsome guy she’s attracted to. The fact that this has a comical womp-womp resolution speaks to the constraints of the dramedy format — it doesn’t undo just how outlandish this string of events would be for most of the population were they in similar circumstances.
The jokes help obscure this stuff, which would stand out even clearer in a straightforward drama, just as surely as they take the air out of both the episode’s steamiest moments and its gravest. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot to like about this show. But if Dying for Sex doesn’t take itself seriously, why should we?
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.
