- Network: SHOWTIME
- Series Premiere Date: Sep 29, 2013
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Critic Reviews
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Performance is never a problem for the cast of Masters of Sex. Caplan, Sheen and the supporting players keep everything humming in the best new drama of the fall season. You’ll want to watch.
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This is adult entertainment in the very best possible sense. [7 Oct 2013, p.47]
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A gorgeous period drama that swiftly establishes its risqué themes.... Masters of Sex is the best new show of the fall season.
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Masters of Sex, a biographical drama about sex researchers William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) that makes science sexy.... Sheen and Caplan are beautifully mismatched as the central figures in a story adapted from Thomas Maier's 2009 biography.
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There is no more fascinating, or entertaining, new series this fall season.
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The performances, nurtured by such A-list directors as Michael Apted and John Madden, are extraordinary. There isn't a clinker in the bunch.
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Humor is also key in the capacious pilot hour directed by John Madden ("Shakespeare in Love"). Subsequent episodes echo its deft balance of epic scope and whimsical humanity.
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A few plotlines look rocky, and a few lines of dialogue stumble, but based on the first six episodes, we're being introduced to a show that can enlighten, entertain and contend for Emmys, all in the same breath.
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The characters get better and more complex, the story builds, strange things start to happen and now I can’t wait to see how its interweaving plots unfold.... It’s rare that a show can intuit what the viewer wants and deliver it, but that’s precisely what happened.
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It's a smart show that plays dumb at first, just to get your attention. Masters may not yet be as groundbreaking as the true drama that inspired it. But like Betty, it knows how to fake it until things get real.
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Masters of Sex is the best new show of the fall by a very long stretch. It's also a refreshing anomaly: a prestige cable drama that doesn't feel like a recombination of elements from 15 shows that came before it.
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From episode three on, [Sheen] begins to give one of the most fascinating performances on TV.
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Richer and more challenging than any new series this fall from broadcasters.
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Although technically listed as a drama, make no mistake, it's one of the funniest programs on TV this season.
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It's an absorbing, beautifully acted story about science, emerging feminism and American culture. But it's also a gamble on the idea that great TV drama can involve stakes that are not sharpened to pointy tips.
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The engrossing, beautifully cast and well acted Masters of Sex is at once the tale of an odd couple and the story of a culture coming of age.
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It makes the most of its pay-TV platform by showing plenty of skin, but the sex scenes service a bigger story made all the more compelling by a couple of strong leads in Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan.
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There’s a lot of humor here, but it’s more innocent than leering. And there’s also a great deal of understandable awkwardness that seems as pertinent to 2013 to the ’50s. You may not want to watch this with Aunt Tildy, but it is certainly worth watching.
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The dialogue isn’t always subtle, but it’s often sharp.
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Masters of Sex is an intelligent, assured drama that gets better and better as it goes along.
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Although it’s a medical drama on one level, Masters of Sex is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, with romances, mysteries and coming-of-age stories unfolding throughout its large cast.
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All together Masters of Sex makes an engaging pilot, but it is as yet untested as a premise for a series.
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Without making any extraordinary claims for it, it is easy to watch and to recommend, mostly sweet-natured, with a host of well-shaded performances and almost nothing to insult your intelligence.
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[Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan] are simply tremendous throughout, and they are the main reason to stick with the show, even when some of the supporting characters grate and parts of it feel like exposition-heavy excerpts from Thomas Maier's book of the same name.
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It’s an inviting, beautifully acted, and smartly written period drama set in the 1950s
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Masters of Sex does an elegant job of reframing their [Masters and Johnson's] strange, complicated and at times deeply cynical partnership into a twisted but intriguing love story.
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It was comforting to see that Masters of Sex has depth of vision and plenty of dramatic material to delve into without taking the easy way out with a nipple and a romp every 10 minutes.
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While Masters of Sex might not be a great show as yet, viewed strictly in terms of giving consumers something worth paying for--or at least an experience they couldn’t receive in quite the same way in many other places--it’s the equivalent of a master class in pay-TV development.
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Where Mad Men branches out its individual narratives in a variety of ways, letting its characters deal with problems not related to the workplace, Masters of Sex seems rigidly anchored to its basic premise.
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Although the first few episodes can be slow going and are inert in spots, the series finds a rhythm by episode four, as it develops characters and side themes to remind us just how dark those dark ages were.
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We watch a relationship develop between Johnson and Masters, played particularly well by Caplan. Yet much of Masters still feels clinical, as if it isn’t sure how to remain faithful to the real-life story and still give the TV drama the sex appeal viewers expect.
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Regardless of historical veracity, though, some of the drama here is shopworn.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 237 out of 278
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Mixed: 13 out of 278
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Negative: 28 out of 278
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Sep 29, 2013
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Sep 20, 2014
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Oct 3, 2013