Director: Shannon Murphy
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Episodes: 8
Year: 2025
Available from April 4 on Hulu (Disney+), based on the same-name podcast, Dying for Sex is one of those shows you only realize existed when it’s almost too late, the kind of series that is unfairly rediscovered over time.
Made up of eight episodes, each about thirty minutes long – a format that’s increasingly popular and clearly a winner – the series follows the final months in the life of Molly (an extraordinary Michelle Williams) who, after years of battling cancer, finds out the disease has returned and is now incurable.
After the initial shock and fear, Molly’s desire to enjoy every remaining moment of her life takes shape … and to “enjoy” in the most vivid, literal sense of the word. Trapped in a marriage where her husband can no longer satisfy her sexually and sees her only as a patient, a “cancer victim” to obsessively take care of, Molly decides to leave him and spend her last few months exploring all the sexual experiences she had denied herself because of childhood trauma, and fear of judgment.
But with the cancer in its final stage and metastases spreading throughout her body, Molly knows she doesn’t have the luxury of grand, crazy adventures before she dies, so her journey becomes an unapologetically sexual one, seeking pleasure long denied and withheld.
By her side in this chaotic, darkly humorous journey – her way of coping with the looming shadow of death – there are her therapist Sonya (Esco Jouley), Dr. Pankowitz (David Rasche), and her wonderfully scatterbrained best friend Nikki (a brilliant Jenny Slate), along with a parade of more or less awkward, quirky lovers.
But beneath the comic surface of Molly’s sexual escapades, Dying for Sex tackles much deeper, more sensitive topics, and it does so with great care and nuance. Yes, death frightens most of us. Yes, watching someone you love die is devastating. But so often, in confronting shadows of illness and death, we forget the person behind them. Molly’s journey is not just a last attempt to feel alive, it is also – if not above all – a powerful act of resistance against the stereotypical image of the “patient”. She refuses to be seen and – above all – treated as a victim («Don’t look at me like that», she says. «Not with pity»). She wants to be seen as a woman with all her sexual desires intact.
Molly seems to say that yes, sex is still valid, even in a body “ruined” by disease. She’s not afraid to say the words cancer and death, she doesn’t sugarcoat them, and through her final journey she helps those around her confront the harshness of reality and the absurdity of life.
But there’s more. Because Molly is not the only one walking the painful path toward death. Dying for Sex offers a raw, heartbreaking look at the blindness and selfishness that can sometimes consume the ill, and a deeply human perspective on the pain of those who stay behind. It explores the silent suffering of caregivers, of those who choose – out of love – to put their lives on hold for someone else. It reminds us that, no matter how much humor or defiance one brings to a terminal illness, it leaves no one untouched, it shatters lives all around. And all of this, in just thirty-minute per episode.
What’s truly astonishing about this series, infact, is its ability to balance comedy and drama with absolute sensitivity. Each comic scene is, at its core, deeply tragic, and every tragic moment ultimately leads to a smile, if not a full-blown laugh.
And by the end of the journey, we do not wish for a single minute more or less. We just wish – like the characters in this story, like Nikki, like anyone who’s lost someone they loved – that we’d had more time with Molly.
