Dying for Sex: Michelle Williams, Jenny Slate, and the Limited Series as Vessel

Dying for Sex, the FX limited series that debuted on Hulu in April 2025 across eight episodes, was adapted by Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock from the Wondery podcast of the same name. The podcast told the real story of Molly Kochan, a woman who, after a terminal cancer diagnosis, left her marriage and spent her last years pursuing sexual experience, accompanied in practical and emotional ways by her best friend Nikki Boyer.

The premise is the kind of thing that, in the wrong hands, becomes either maudlin or self-consciously transgressive. Meriwether and Rosenstock found a different register. Seven months on, I keep returning to the specific shape of what they did, because the show is the strongest argument I have seen this year for the limited series as a vessel for a kind of dramatic writing that the theatre used to hold and has mostly stopped holding.

The cast

Michelle Williams plays Molly. Jenny Slate plays Nikki. Jay Duplass plays Molly’s husband. Sissy Spacek plays Molly’s mother. The supporting cast, including David Rasche as a neighbour and Rob Delaney as an unusual romantic interest, is chosen with the specific taste of a show that knows it has a shortish runway and is not going to waste a casting slot.

Williams and Slate are the show. Everything else is supporting infrastructure, and the infrastructure is solid, but Williams and Slate carry the argument. The argument is that female friendship can be, under the right pressure, more structurally sustaining than any romantic relationship the women are actually engaged in, and the show stakes the whole thing on the performances selling that claim.

They sell it.

What Williams is doing

Michelle Williams has been giving great performances for long enough that it is easy to take them for granted. Dying for Sex is not that. What Williams does, across eight episodes, is play a woman whose relationship to her own body is continuously renegotiating itself in response to the specific shape of the diagnosis. The performance is physical at a level that very few actors in her generation are willing to risk. It is also, and this is the harder part, funny.

Molly, in Williams’s hands, is not a symbol of female liberation or terminal-illness bravery. She is a specific woman with a specific sense of humour and a specific set of sexual tastes and a specific relationship to her own dying. Williams plays all of these at once. She is continuously modulating between the comic register that Molly uses to survive the diagnosis and the quieter, more interior register that the show allows her in the scenes she spends alone.

The scene that locates Williams’s whole performance is in episode six. Molly is in a hospital bed. A nurse has just finished an examination. Molly is alone. The camera holds on her face for roughly two minutes. She does not speak. She does not cry. What Williams does, across those two minutes, is go through what I can only describe as a specific small domestic argument with her own body. She processes something. She processes it again. She, eventually, laughs, briefly, privately, at something the scene does not explain. Williams is giving us interior life without exposition. It is the kind of work that a lesser actor would have done with a voiceover or a monologue. Williams does it with her face.

What Slate is doing

Jenny Slate’s Nikki is the performance that anchors the show’s emotional logic. Slate has been, across her career, consistently underrated as a dramatic actor because her comic voice is so distinctive. Dying for Sex gave her a role that required both registers to operate simultaneously, and the result is the best supporting performance on American television last year.

Nikki is the caretaker, the practical organiser, the person who is holding the scaffolding of Molly’s last years in place. Nikki is also a woman in her late thirties with her own professional life, her own relationships, her own identity outside the caretaking role. The show, to its credit, does not subordinate Nikki’s interior to Molly’s dying. Slate plays Nikki’s specific struggle, the struggle of a woman who is choosing, in real time, to reorganise her own life around her best friend’s illness, without asking for credit for the reorganising.

The show’s best Slate scene is in episode seven. Nikki is at a grocery store. She is buying specific items for Molly that are non-trivially shameful to buy in public. She runs into a colleague. The colleague asks how she is. Slate plays the entire ninety-second encounter as a woman balancing three separate registers: maintaining social composure, managing the specific items in her basket, and absorbing the fact that her best friend will, probably, not be alive in six weeks. The colleague does not notice. Slate plays the non-noticing as a specific professional achievement of Nikki’s.

Meriwether, structurally

Liz Meriwether, whose previous television work (New Girl, The Dropout) has been, in its different registers, consistently interested in the question of how women perform themselves to survive institutions that are not designed for them, has, with Dying for Sex, produced her most disciplined writing. The episodes are tight. The dialogue has the specific naturalistic tempo that the theatre has historically been better at than American television. The show resists the tendency of prestige limited series to expand into thematic overstatement.

One mechanical thing Meriwether and Rosenstock do consistently is resist the urge to explain. Molly’s sexual exploration is staged without editorial commentary. Her relationship with Rob Delaney’s character, which is central to the back half of the season, is staged without the show either valorising or pathologising the specific dynamic. Meriwether trusts her actors and her audience to process the material without being told how to process it.

The direction

Shannon Murphy, the Australian director whose feature Babyteeth was one of the best terminal-illness films of recent years, directed six of the eight episodes. Chloé Zhao directed the other two, including the finale. Murphy brings to the series a specific light-handed touch that keeps the show from becoming a weepie. Zhao’s finale is more formally ambitious: a long, almost static final scene that lets Williams and Slate carry the emotional load without the camera doing any of the work for them.

The finale’s last shot, which I will not describe in detail, is a long hold on Slate’s face. It is the kind of ending that is becoming rare in American prestige TV because streaming-era finales have drifted toward mechanical-plot resolution. Dying for Sex ends on a performance. The performance is the resolution.

What the show argues

Dying for Sex is, on its surface, a show about a woman’s sexual liberation during terminal illness. That is a true description, and an incomplete one. What the show is actually about, at its structural core, is the specific shape of the friendship that makes the liberation possible. Molly’s project is not sustainable alone. It is sustainable because Nikki is doing a specific amount of invisible, unpaid, unacknowledged work to keep it running.

The show’s refusal to sentimentalise either character is what makes the argument land. Molly is not a saint. Nikki is not a hero. They are two specific women, forty-something, working out, in real time, what they owe each other. The show is about the working-out.

What the season leaves

Dying for Sex is one of the two or three best limited series of the last decade. It is also, I suspect, a show that will age better than its release-week reviews suggested, because what the show does well is the kind of thing that criticism tends to undervalue on first pass: specific actor-driven scene work, structural patience, refusal of genre moves that would have been obvious.

Watch it in paired episodes, two at a time. Pay attention to Williams’s hands. Pay attention to Slate’s pauses. The show is doing something with time that only happens when the writers, the directors, and the actors are in complete agreement about what the show is for.