Michelle Williams is Dying For Sex (I Know, I know)

One of The Great Actresses of this Century Helps Make What Should Be An Unwatchable Story One of the Most Joyful Experiences of 2025 So Far

A convincing argument could be made that the era of Peak TV owes as much to the WB as it does to HBO. That small network barely managed to last a decade but we are still rejoicing in the world of great television it created.

I don’t just mean with series from Buffy to Felicity, Smallville to Gilmore Girls, that are deservedly part of the pop culture landscape but how it has been a wellspring for all the talent that has been part of television ever since. For such geniuses as J.J. Abrams, Ryan Murphy, Greg Berlanti and Alexis Sherman-Palladino the CW was their finishing school from which they have been blessing us with great works of television to this day. And just as important were the young actors and actresses who came out of it who even now continue to make impacts on television nearly twenty years after they left their original shows. From Alexis Bleidel to Sarah Michelle Gellar, from Chris Pratt and Joshua Jackson they have never left the world of that gave birth to them, though it has taken more than a few enough time to get the awards they should have gotten from their work on the WB.

But even among these towering talents Michelle Williams has been in a class by herself. Unlike so many of the actors and actresses who spent much of their time in television Williams has by far had the most success in the film industry. Less than two years after Dawson’s Creek came to an end she received her first Academy Award nomination for her stunning work in Brokeback Mountain. Since then she has received a total of five Oscar nominations, though she has yet to win the grand prize once. (It will happen.) She has spent the majority of her career as the grand dame of the independent film industry best known (though little rewarded) for her collaborations with Lucy Reichardt for whom she is as much Reichardt’s muse as Jennifer Lawrence has been David O. Russell’s during the early 2010s. Four of her five nominations for Oscars have come from playing wives who suffer from the fallout of a disastrous relationship, from the failing marriage of Blue Valentine to the disastrous one of Manchester by the Sea to the mother of young Sammy in The Fabelmans. There is a more direct connection to her most famous return to television when she played half of the title roles in Fosse/Verdon where she played a genius Broadway actress who is quickly overshadowed by her more successful husband before he flames out. She deservedly won an Emmy for that incredible performance.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that if you had described the plot of Dying For Sex to me, I would have to think about watching the fictionalized versi0n of a true story of a forty-ish women who has recurrence of cancer that is terminal and decides that she would like to spend what time she has left having as much sex as possible. However, if you then told me that Michelle Williams was playing the role of Molly, my response would be: when and where?

Dying For Sex debuted just a few weeks ago on FX on Hulu and I have just this past weekend watching the first two episodes. One of the reasons I chose to make this my next Emmy watch series to catch up rather than, say, Disclaimer or Adolescence (I will get to both trust me) is the fact that not only are there are only eight episodes but they have the added benefit of all being relatively short, all within the half-hour range. Most limited series episodes are always an hour or so long, if not longer but Baby Reindeer set the tone by saying, yes, you can tell great stories in limited series in episodes that can be shorter than certain episodes of The Bear. That comparison in particular is worth noting because I probably laughed more in two episodes of Dying for Sex then half the episodes of Season 2 of that show and considering that Dying For Sex makes it clear from the start that its material will be even darker then what we see hanging out with Carmy’s family that may be the best argument as to why that show might be more content to be in the drama category. (Not me, I still think it’s a comedy but one dark series at a time.)

And to be clear Dying for Sex is hysterical in almost every minute of it. I think a large part of this is due to Williams talent as a performer and her work with Reichardt in particular. So much of Reichardt’s work deals with women trying to work through the aggravations of every day life, such as her most recent collaboration Showing Up where she plays an avant-garde sculptor who at one point ends up digging a hole in her backyard. So many of Williams’s role are women who are deeply restrained in public with a yearning beneath the surface. It’s not much of a reach to see Molly Koohan as much different from those women, trying to remember a sexual encounter while going to couples counseling with her husband. Molly is dealing with the issue that she and her husband haven’t had sex since she went to remission and Steve (Jay Duplass at his most nebbish-like) tries to explain how much of this is not his fault. Then she learns that her cancer’s back from her doctor and immediately walks out of therapy and to the bodega. Her first reaction is to by a liter of terrible diet soda.

After that she immediately meets her best friend Nikki. Nikki is played by that whirling dervish of a talent Jenny Slate who has spent twenty years almost always playing someone who has the emotionally maturity of a child. This is something that Slate, who is a hyphenate has really leaned into and it’s always been wonderful to watch her playing a woman who never grew up. (Slate and Williams first met when they were starring the complete opposite of everything they work in: Venom.

Nikki isn’t much different from the character Slate always plays which is basically a hot mess. This is a good thing to have in a friend and support, it’s not necessarily the best thing for a caregiver. We see just how badly this will go when Nikki comes with Molly and her doctor (David Rasche) and is gently told she’ll have to take notes. She then goes into her bag, which Molly will later describe as a black hole, before finding her laptop. Then she asks the doctor to keep slowing down as she types.

I’m not yet clear on the origin of Molly and Nikki’s friendship yet but you do get why the two have been friends all this time: for all her messy attributes Nikki is extremely, ridiculous devoted to Molly. She will shout at bodega owners from her car, yell at people in wheelchairs and support her best friend in these final days whether it is by yelling at hospital staff or gazing approvingly at dick pics from a dating site.

Because Molly is determined not to go gentle into that good night but her desire is far less selfish and destructive then most television characters diagnosed with cancer. She accepts that she’s dying and what she tells her palliative care giver is that she wants to have an orgasm with another person. It’s clear from the start that Steve represents the worst aspects of a spouse in every way; he has basically seen Molly only through her disease and seems to be seizing on it as a chance to be supportive. When Molly decides that what she wants is to perform oral sex on him, he collapses into tears before she finishes which is not the ideal reaction.

So Molly decides to go on her journey and she is hysterically bad at ai in the first episodes. She sets up an online encounter which she backs away from, tries to pick up a stranger in an elevator and failing at that, makes a $200 charge at a sex toy workshop. She then spends the next six hours pleasuring herself in some of the weirdest ways possible, to Keanu Reeves talking to Sandra Bullock in Speed, pictures of tropical wildlife, online with an online personality who she then discusses cancer treatment. This ends up leading to ransomware when he gets pictures of her pleasuring herself which ends hysterically.

What mere descriptions can’t tell you is how funny and light-hearted these two episodes are. To be clear Dying for Sex is upfront about what is going to happen to Molly and everyone around her is perfectly aware about it. Yet I can’t help be reminded of that exceptional dramedy The Big C in which Laura Linney spent all of Season 1 dealing with a cancer diagnosis determined to enjoy every moment of her life and how funny it was right up to the end even when it dealt with the real life horrors. Linney is just as capable an actress as Williams and I do see the wonderful parallels in their work.

And it helps immensely that the showrunner is Elizabeth Merriweather, who first brought us the adorable New Girl and then in her FX limited series threw us in the deep end with The Dropout. Her follow up project is closer in formula to her comedy series but it has the same level of darkness at its center (though it has yet reach that). Williams has always worked best with women creative forces and there’s a confidence to both her and Slate’s work that they know they will never be led wrong. All three women are likely to be making rounds of awards circles in the months to come.

Because Dying for Sex is based on a real life person we know how the story will end before we tune in. And I realize that having so much discussion of the two great taboos — death and sex — in such a light-hearted fashion may seem in bad taste for some viewers even now. I’d argue that’s all the more reason to watch it. Considering how dark the world seems to be in all the big ways, we might as well not take seriously the two things we all have to deal with in our personal lives. As the series finale itself is titled: “It’s Not That Serious” And if Molly can say that given everything she’s facing, who are we not to do the same?

My score: 4.75 stars.