- Network: HULU
- Series Premiere Date: Apr 4, 2025
Critic Reviews
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To call the FX/Hulu limited series a sitcom would be to diminish the healing positivity it lavishes on both title subjects. Yet laugh-out-loud comedic it consistently is. Poignant and adorable too. Empowering if that’s what you want from it, but not insistent in that regard. Any tears the show will bring are eminently earned. And there’s a good chance it’ll get you hot. .... It’s difficult to recall any actor giving as much in-the-moment believability as Williams delivers in these eight half hours.
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It's not going to leave you galvanized to pursue your most outrageous, impractical dreams under a "life is short" banner. Instead, it will rip out your heart, rearrange it a bit, give it a good stomping, and then put it back in, and I'm not sure that I will ever be the same.
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While the sexual elements are fodder for outstanding sparkle and wittiness, the deep, touching connection between Nikki and Molly truly becomes the heart of the show. Wistful, tragic, funny and engaging, “Dying For Sex” is a super captivating story of self-determination, healing and reckoning with death.
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As Molly strains to shrug off the shackles of her trauma, both deep-rooted and more recent, “Dying for Sex” refuses to settle for the neutered, morose mood most expect from a cancer story. It’s quite something to behold.
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Dying for Sex manages to upend just about every expectation. .... Contributing to the success of this endeavour is the fact that at least as much time and loving attention is given to illustrating the friendship between Molly and Nikki. From the start, you can sense their long history in every exchange, but as the series and the disease progresses we watch the balance between them shift. .... By the end it is not just the definition of sex that has been expanded but that of soulmate too.
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Williams roots Molly’s years-long saga in vivid, life-affirming, human characteristics that naturally emphasize the story’s central thesis: that getting off together isn’t just what makes life worth living; it is life. Her supporting cast is an embarrassment of riches, starting with Slate, whose screentime and depth nearly make Nikki a co-lead.
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The duo at the show’s core is charming and boundaryless and so singular that their relationship becomes smeary, irreducible.
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While it’s revelatory, liberating, emotionally devastating and a very sex-centric story about love and desire, it also needs to be explained.
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It could also be this century’s “Love Story.” .... Funny, heartbreaking, deeply humane and more than occasionally insightful as hell.
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A near perfect amalgamation of absurdity and tragedy, and yet another superb showcase for its incredible leading lady.
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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.
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All of these encounters are funny, raw and real, in line with the series itself. But what makes “Dying for Sex” more than just a collections of scenes involving sex is the foundational friendship between Molly and Nikki. It’s compassionate and believable.
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Williams understands the freedom that comes with knowing the finish line is near. It’s a perfectly calibrated performance that is the main reason the tonal balance works because she finds the truth even in the most ridiculous scenes. Everyone matches her.
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I wanted the episodes to be a little bit longer, to allow the series' many thoughtful themes more room to breathe. Even in a smaller package, though, Dying for Sex has the tools to leave you satisfied, and completely (emotionally) spent.
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“Dying for Sex” is, in fact, conscientious to the point of being a boner-kill. It’s also something of a Trojan horse. The first half of the eight-episode series focusses primarily on Molly’s sexcapade. .... In its second half, the series deepens wonderfully.
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Despite the fact that the first two episodes of Dying For Sex try too hard to lean on the funny side of Molly’s story, the elements are there for a moving story of life, death. love and desire.
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Even with short, half-hour(ish) episodes, Dying for Sex is still two instalments too long, and for some the juxtaposition of sexual high jinks and mortality may jar. Personally, I loved it: as well as sexual emancipation, it’s also about love, friendship and living life on your own terms until the last fierce, bittersweet moment.
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FX’s latest half-hour comedy won’t be for everyone because of the graphic depiction of a woman. .... But “Dying for Sex” — all eight episodes stream April 4 on Hulu — inspires a lot of laughs, too, thanks to Molly’s voiceover observations and her interactions with scattered best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate).
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It is credit, then, to Williams’s performance, and the lightness of touch that Meriwether brings, that Dying for Sex manages to bottle the intimacy of the podcast form. In spite of its subject matter, it feels soothing, a parasocial balm to the ills of the human condition. It might not be family viewing, but it has a universality.
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The comedy feels like a welcome release from the sadness, but the heaviness of the material in turn keeps the jokes from feeling too over-the-top.
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As Molly, Williams is a crucial force in keeping the series tethered to reality; even when Dying for Sex pushes hardest for dark, titillating comedy, she mixes something palpably rich and human into it.
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Shine up an Emmy for Michelle Williams—hilarious and heartbreaking in this true story of a 40-ish podcaster who only works up the courage to push the limits of sexual identity after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Jenny Slate shines as her partner in letting go.
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“Dying for Sex” improves so much in its final few episodes that it is tempting to use the cliche of it being two different shows. But Williams and Slate give their characters’ friendship the same soulful authenticity throughout.
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One of the most impressive things about Dying for Sex is the balanced way in which it presents sex as something to both laugh about and take very seriously.
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What’s surprising is how well Dying For Sex is able to walk that tightrope, keeping up the comedy even in the most devastating situations and reminding you of the inevitable sadness of this story after so many giggly moments of joy.
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It lives and dies by Williams’s performance. Williams nails the paradox at the center of the show: As Molly’s body grows weaker, her self-possession grows stronger. She’s so frail — but also not. .... For all the ways “Dying for Sex” is transgressive and audacious in its frankness about pain and pleasure, it can also feel awfully generic.
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Sure, the show could have benefited from a few more episodes in order to really dive into some of its most sensitive plot points, but there is still a lot to hold onto while watching.
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The episodes are only 30 minutes each, which adds flippancy to a bleak subject. Molly and Nikki (Jenny Slate) have mastered gallows humour. Eventually, the sex becomes an annoying distraction – the scenes that feel tender and true and most amusing are the ones between the two best friends.
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For all of the show’s eagerness to map the contours of Molly’s desires, it proves less invested in the rest of her — thus undermining the very story it means to tell.
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