The 50 Best TV Shows of 2025: #2 – Dying for Sex | television

DYing for Sex is about a woman in her 40s who leaves her husband and has a lot of experimental sex after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Except of course it is not. It’s about much more than that. In the end, the sex scenes – although many and varied – are just trivial things.

Partly because there is no false hope here. None of the exciting pieces represent a complete escape from reality. The series is based on a true story and the podcast is made about Molly Kochan’s decision to cram years of sexual experience into the short time she was told she had left before metastatic breast cancer killed her. Whatever Molly does, whatever we see her doing – having fun or not – we know it won’t change the end result. This is the framework in which all the sex party scenes, age-ties, discovering “puppy play” and mastering the tricky latches on cock cages are placed in Molly’s quest to achieve her first orgasm with her partner.

It’s due in part to a smart, sweet — and darkly comedic — screenplay by Elizabeth Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock, and a razor-sharp performance by Michelle Williams as Molly, that the film increasingly becomes a meditation on what it means to live well and die well. It expands the definitions as it goes on. First of the same sex. “You millennials are so tragic,” says Sonya, a member of Molly’s Gen Z care team. “You think sex is just penetration. Why? Because that’s what Samantha said?” Gotta love a show that has the occasional carnage of Sex and the City’s holy cow. Her perspective helps Molly move into the wider world of sex and gradually discover the answer to the question – posed by one of her young friends early on, and which was holding her back at the time – What does she like? Thanks to her neighbor – who never gives her name, played brilliantly by Rob Delaney – she learns that what she really likes is kicking men in the dick.

But the definition that interests everyone involved in the making of Dying for Sex is love. The marital type – which has faded since Molly’s initial diagnosis of breast cancer, with her husband unable to see beyond the patient. When they’re in bed together, he says her breasts remind him of death. The maternal type – Sissy Spacek, wonderfully, plays Molly’s mother. Molly was molested by one of her friends when she was seven years old, and this causes her to dissociate during sex, preventing the intimacy that engenders and engenders orgasm. “I think he knew he was enjoying me,” she says. How much responsibility is her mother and how much love is required to forgive is a powerful question. There is love – or something like it – that grows between Molly and the neighbor. This is why we may need a new word, but it clearly does not need to be categorized in order to be worth having.

Above all, there is love between friends. Nicky (the wonderful Jenny Slate) is Molly’s best friend, her “beautiful slave” who takes care of her (an administrative and emotional burden as much as the American health system is a nightmare of forms) and must fight her natural tendency towards chaos every step of the way, along with her growing fear and grief. “I don’t want to die with him,” Molly says of her husband. “I want to die with you.”

Dying for sex is about the courage of that decision, of letting go of tradition and the joy – which no abuser can take away – of truly knowing yourself and fulfilling not selfish desires but real needs. And if someone wants to get their dick kicked by a man who himself desperately wants to be kicked in the dick – well, that’s a pleasure in itself.