Dying for Sex Review: Michelle Williams Is a Stage 4 Cancer Patient in a Touching — and Very Explicit! — Comedy-Drama About Intimacy

Dying for Sex, about a terminally ill Manhattan woman searching for sexual communion, is probably FX on Hulu’s strongest new show since The Bear. Like that funny-sad hit, this eight-episode series takes place at the intersection of exhilaration and despair.

If the show is also startlingly, unapologetically explicit — imagine XXX and the City — ultimately, it owes less to Carrie Bradshaw than to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. But I’ll get to that.

Based on a popular, true-life podcast, this is the story of Molly (Michelle Williams), who’s just learned that her cancer has returned and metastasized. Now entering terminal stage 4, Molly dutifully, if wearily, embarks on a new round of treatment that will extend her life … for a while. But what she craves, more than anything, is genuine sexual intimacy—something she’s never known with any man, including her husband Steve (Jay Duplass), who’s perhaps too eager to shepherd her to and from doctors’ waiting rooms.

Steve understands her needs as a patient, but not as a woman. “I just want to be touched,” she says, “by someone who wants to touch me.”

In a quest for a true sexual partner (or partners), Molly abruptly up and leaves Steve—it’s like the end of A Doll’s House switched to the front end of the play—and temporarily moves in with her best friend, an actress named Nikki (the invaluable Jenny Slate). Nikki is voluble, weepy and often hilarious. Unlike Molly, who’s politely reticent and reluctant to speak up for herself, Nikki can’t resist expressing her anger and sorrow—or, more precisely, dramatizing them for whatever audience of oncologists happens to be in range.

It’s as if Hamlet had an unusually aggressive publicist to intimidate his adversaries at Elsinore.

But Molly’s unleashed drive for erotic fulfillment—to hell with boy-meets-girl and all that cute crap—reveals no-longer-unconscious drives that are completely alien to Nikki. She quickly moves on from phone-app hookups to more radical erotic experiments, many with a strong strain of S&M (with her in the role of dominatrix). I don’t think I’m allowed to go into much detail about what Molly’s encounters involve, so I’ll just say the show isn’t in the least bit shy about showing you activities that could be covered under the antique, faintly lubricious word pleasuring.

How eye-opening or instructive you find any of this depends on your taste, lifestyle and internet browsing history. Even for a show that tries to find the humor in a dire situation—and often—succeeds, Dying occasionally pushes things: It’s hard to imagine that one of Molly’s partners, a man who likes to dress up as a dog, would actually be allowed to come bounding into one of her chemo sessions in full, floppy-eared canine regalia. Fetishes are an undeniable aspect of human sexuality, but as zany fun, they have their limit. At times Dying can feel like a kooky, kinked-up version of Emma Thompson’s unforgettable HBO film Wit.

But it’s not clear, after a while, whether these erotic adventures are genuinely satisfying to Molly. The stronger possibility is that she needs to feel in control of her vanishing life and to overcome a traumatic memory from her past: At the age of 7, she was molested by her mother’s boyfriend. (The show’s treatment of this nightmarish incident is restrained but deeply unnerving.) She advances slowly, and much more cautiously, into something close to real romance, and even love, with her neighbor (Rob Delaney, typically funny but rueful).

And then she advances onto death: She’s given a bed in hospice care and gradually slips away. The show becomes more solemn (as anything with Dying in the title should) and quite moving.

What is death but the greatest of all mystery dates?

Williams’s performance has a touching fragility and a delicate charm, regardless of whatever bedroom acrobatics Molly happens to be engaged in. As an actress, she’s more than capable of infusing some snap or verve into a role—as she did for Fosse/Verdon and The Fabelmans. But there’s something especially rewarding in the way she plays women whose natural impulse is to make their way through the smaller, more constricted channels of life—as in the movies Manchester by the Sea, for instance, or Showing Up.

Here, tiny, blonde and pale, Williams looks like Tinker Bell in need of a pixie-dust infusion.

All eight episodes of Dying for Sex are now streaming on Hulu.