How 'Dying for Sex' Gets Death and Sex So Right

Going behind the scenes of the astonishing new dramedy with a writer who brought her own cancer experiences to the series.

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Dying for Sex is like nothing that’s ever been on TV before. It follows Molly (Michelle Williams), a woman in her early 40s who, while struggling to process sexual abuse from her past, gets a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, meaning likely death. She decides that her main bucket-list item is having a proper orgasm, so she leaves her husband to dedicate her remaining time to a sex quest while her scatter-brained best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), agrees to be her caregiver. While this setup, based on the podcast of the same name, could have gotten a Sex and the City-meets-Autumn in New York treatment, instead it balances a mature and unashamed look at the wide varieties of sex available, and an unflinching stare-down of death. TV has long floundered when dealing with these topics, judging, romanticizing, and pulling punches to keep audiences comfortable, but Dying for Sex bravely avoids these pitfalls.

One way it does so is with writers who have experienced cancer, caregiving, or the varied sort of sex life that Molly seeks in her final months. Among the writers is Sasha Stewart, who contributed throughout the series’ 8-episode run and is credited as a co-writer on the sixth episode, “Happy Holidays.” (Full disclosure: She and I also work together on the Peabody Awards’ podcast, We Disrupt This Broadcast.) Her own medical journey with a kidney transplant and lymphoma in her 20s and 30s informed her work, providing inspiration for the particularly moving arc of Dr. Pankowicz (David Rasche), who goes from a detached doctor who uses unhelpful golf metaphors to a caring professional who listens to Molly.

And in case this all sounds a bit too heavy, don’t worry—there are plenty of lighter moments, too, including a flying penis. I talked to Sasha about the ways her real life made it into the series, as well as the creative process behind her episode, which includes Molly’s self-destructive decision to ditch Nikki for a handjob with a stranger on New Year’s and her beautiful dance-therapy breakthrough.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong: I'm going to start with a big thematic question, which is: What do you think the show says about sex and death and maybe even their relationship to each other?

Sasha Stewart: It's something that we talked about a lot and I think is really embodied in episode eight when Paula Pell’s [nurse] character says that death is just another bodily process the same way that an orgasm is another bodily process, and it all eventually connects to the body. And one of the big themes of the series is reconnecting with your body and accepting your body for whatever it is and everything that it's done for you, even if there are times when you're mad at it or you hate it or you're so upset with it, but that ultimately one of your deepest relationships is with your body. And I think that Molly has this really beautiful arc where she goes from somebody who's really disconnected from her body emotionally and physically, and then through her sexual journey is determined to reconnect with her body. That's one of the most visceral ways we can reconnect with our bodies is through sex. But that it's not just about the sex, it's about accepting what has happened to her in the past, accepting who she is now, and accepting that she's going to have to let the body go at the end and say goodbye to this corporeal plane. So I think that that is one of the biggest ways sex and death are related in the show and what we're trying to say is that they are inherently linked and that they can be linked in ways that are not negative as well.

JKA: It didn't fully compute until you were just talking now, but these are two things that we really don't like to talk about, especially on American television. It's so striking to see. I knew we were going to do the dying process, but seeing it in such an unflinching way, where she's like, I'm ready. Even that alone is such a sort of taboo thing still for us to say—at some point it hurts more to be alive.

SS: Right, exactly. At some point you can say, thank you, my body did a good job. And then you can say, now I'm ready to let it go. The body had its time, and now we're off on a new adventure and she's ready. She's ready to let the pain go. Molly said something really beautiful that always tears me up. She said, I've been really wanting to go on a trip and because I've been so sick, I haven't been able to go on a trip. And finally now I'm going to take a trip and it's going to be just for me and it's going to be beautiful.

JKA: And there are the flying penises in that hallucination when she’s dying.

SS: Flying penises!

JKA: There are a lot of taboos that are explored here. Was there a particular taboo that kind of tripped you up the most?

SS: I was intrigued by the way that Molly in the podcast described urinating on a guy and how it really opened up something for him in a way that nobody had else had been able to do. And to me it was like, this is not for me, but I love how nonjudgmental Molly is. I was like, if she's not being judgmental, then I need to not be judgmental, if that makes sense. It actually was one of the first things that we in the writer's room were like, we have to put this in the show.

It's not like we're making fun of guys who like to be peed on. What we're saying is that when you're so nonjudgmental and you're so open and you're so willing to try something new, then you may end up peeing on a guy, and that might be the most sexually liberating experience he's ever felt. And you would get to do that. That was one of the things that was so special to real Molly and to our show Molly is that she could be that person for people, which is so giving and loving and caring. That was a taboo that I never even thought about outside of cultural references. And then it was like, oh, wow, this is actually meaningful. That is the essence of the show.

JKA: I know some of the stuff in the cancer storyline was taken from your own life. What is a scene that's closest to your heart?

SS: I had a kidney transplant when I was 21, and that was extremely traumatic versus the cancer, which I had when I was 32, which sucked, but because of all the things I had learned the first time around having medical trauma, it was less viscerally traumatic. And I had learned how to work with my doctors and stuff, but when I was 21, I didn’t know what I was doing. So in episode 2, where Dr. Pankowicz is trying to explain her lines of treatment, like with golf drivers and stuff … like golf clubs. Golf clubs, that's the word.

JKA: Right, he uses golf metaphors to try to explain things. And you still don’t know anything about golf!

SS: That happened to me. I was a 21-year-old girl. I had just had a kidney transplant and my surgeon was explaining how something happened in the first surgery that went wrong and they had to go back in and fix it. And I am hopped up on prednisone. I was supposed to be out of the hospital. Instead I'm finding out I have to have a second surgery, and he's trying to explain this whole procedure using golf metaphors.

I was like, I don't know golf. I am a 21-year-old college student. What are you talking about? And he is like, oh, let me explain. And then he's starting to explain the golf. I was like, not the golf. I remember telling that story in my meeting with [showrunners] Liz [Meriwether] and Kim [Rosenstock] to get on the show. Then for it to actually make it into the show just made my heart sing because it was to me a formative moment of being a woman, dealing with doctors, specifically male doctors. This is what we are up against.

Middle aged men, they mean well. And that's why I love the Pankowicz arc is that he means so well, but he is stumbling through it, and that stumbling hurts people. So you have to be a Molly who's able to eventually advocate for themselves in order to get what you need from these people who deeply care about you, but also just don't understand how to communicate.

The first time I'm meeting the guy who is going to be my nephrologist for my entire life, he said, I need to take you into the back room and give you a kidney biopsy so we can see what's going on. I was like, I don't know what that is. And then he proceeds to do a kidney biopsy where, and a lot of times now they actually put you under, because it's kind of a really intense experience. You're face down. And then they shoot you with this big gun that you can't see. You can't see it happen. They show you the gun, but then you can't see it happening. I didn't realize that I don't react well to local anesthetic. I need more in order to actually not feel anything. So he just does a quick local anesthetic and then just shoots me. And it was so painful, so traumatic. Flash forward to 12 years later, I had just come out of chemo and my doctor's like, we need to do a kidney biopsy of the transplant, to make sure that it's doing well after we've just sandblasted your body with all of this poison.

And I was talking to my therapist and I was like, how am I going to get through this? Because it was so traumatic the first time, and I really don't want to relive the trauma. And she was like, Sasha, it has been 12 years. You know how to talk to Dr. Jay now. She's like, you already know how to make this biopsy go well. I went to Jay and I said, okay, we're going to have this kidney biopsy. Here's what you're going to do. I was like, I'm going to be facing forward. You can't make me turn around as it's going on. You are going to give me multiple doses of anesthetic so that I really don't feel anything. We are going to wait for the anesthetic to actually work before you jab me with a gun. I just sat him down and I was like, let's talk this out and let's do this in a way that let I feel safe and comfortable. And it was no big deal. Jay was totally confused and surprised that I was asking these things, but he was like, sure, fine. Yeah, okay, we'll do it. And then we did it and it was like this really lovely experience. It was like, okay, let's give Molly that same thing.

JKA: You have the great Rob Delaney from Catastrophe as the character who’s only known as Neighbor Guy. The character is not a conventional love interest, but he ends up playing a key part in her sexual and her emotional journey. I imagine that that was a really specific casting process. He has to be just right.

SS: The creation of Neighbor Guy in the room was really beautiful. Originally we were all just saying she has to have sex with her neighbor because he's so convenient. We wrote this giant list of all the people who she could have sex with that's pages and pages. I would say the hardest part was narrowing it down.

I love the fact that they meet with the taco in his mouth and he's, like, gross, and he won't throw it away. And we were working on this whole question of: How are we going to unleash Molly's anger in that episode? We knew Molly was the top, but how does she learn that she's the top? She's been somebody who's so kind and gentle and doesn't say what she's thinking. That is also based off of my experience being on prednisone. She's not on prednisone, she's on something else. But I was telling them that when I am on prednisone, which I was on for my transplant, then also for chemo, I realized that I was a total monster. All feelings are amplified.

She has to let it out, but what a great excuse for her to kick Neighbor Guy in the dick. But then we realized as we were developing him, also because he's around, he's going to be the one where it's going to be meaningful, that he finds out that she has cancer. And then ultimately we realize, oh, he's the one. He's the one who's going to be there to orgasm with her.

But then, in the room, we were like, Who are you going to get to play him? When they told us it was Rob Delaney, I was like, oh my God, that's brilliant. I was like, that's it. That's Neighbor Guy. He's sexy, he's likable, he's vulnerable. When we were thinking about, how do we make this guy who it seems so irredeemable at first be redeemable? You cast Rob Delaney,

JKA: Your episode includes the beautiful scene where Molly has a therapeutic breakthrough. She has struggled with a group therapy exercise where they’re supposed to write about a traumatic experience, then do a sort-of interpretive dance to express their feelings about it, to work the feelings out in their bodies. Then she finally does this poetic dance about her childhood sexual abuse that’s so moving.

SS: There was so much research on support groups, on the way that they function and all the different ways to get people to heal. Some people heal better through art than they do through talk therapy, for example. It was so exciting to work with Sam Pinkerton, who is the director of Oh, Mary! Liz and Kim brought him to be our choreographer for those dance sequences.

Sam graciously also invited me into all these conversations just to be like, what are all the different emotions that Molly is feeling in this moment and how do we express them? She needs to feel anger, she needs to feel released, she needs to feel joy. She's not going to be able to connect with Neighbor Guy if she can't connect to herself. The dance way to physicalize that and externalize that. She's literally getting out of her head and into her body.

Also full credit to Michelle. She is up there doing that with no music. She came up with stuff that was just so incredible.

JKA: What kind of reaction have you gotten from people now that it’s out in the world?

SS: One of the things that is so special is the way that the show connects to people in different ways. Some people have reached out and been like, I've never seen female friendship portrayed this way before. Some people who have been caregivers say, you really got the caregiver arc. Though one of the biggest things for me when I was going to the show was that—and fortunately Liz and Kim also felt the same way—I was like, it's Molly’s show. Because as somebody who's had cancer, I have seen these movies and TV shows all just be about the other person. It's always about the friend or the family member or some love interest learning something.

But at the same time, as somebody who loves somebody who took care of her during this horrible experience, I did also want to be a hundred percent honest and the whole room wanted to be really honest about that experience as well and really make sure that we gave Nikki her own arc and her own journey. She becomes somebody who can give care and who can give love. But in order to get there, it's really fucking hard.

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