Death, be not chaste

THE FIRST THING MOLLY, THE PROTAGONIST OF THE new FX dramedy Dying for Sex, does after learning she has incurable cancer is run to the bodega for a green plastic two-liter of generic diet soda.

- JUDY BERMAN

Then she lights up a menthol cigarette. Across the street, her husband Steve, who nursed Molly through her first fight with breast cancer a few years earlier, sits bewildered in the office of their couples therapist. When Molly’s oncologist called with the awful news, they had been arguing about her longing for sex and his refusal to touch her.

Molly, played with impish vivacity and quiet resolve by Michelle Williams, bears little resemblance to the Hollywood archetype of the beautiful young woman dying of cancer. Neither a doomed dream girl like Ali MacGraw in Love Story nor a driven genius struck down in her prime like Florence Pugh in the latest Love Story riff, We Live in Time, she’s no vehicle for some devoted man’s epiphanies about what really matters. Despite her terminal diagnosis, Molly’s story rarely plays like a tragedy. It is, instead, a brutally frank, disarmingly raunchy, often uproariously funny rejoinder to the perfect-patient narrative—an affirmation of life through the insistence that there’s no wrong way to face the certain death that ultimately awaits us all.

The title Dying for Sex evokes trashy reality series like