The National Magazine Awards judges described Emily Nussbaum as “discerning and authoritative” and likened her to New Yorker critics of the past, including Edmund Wilson and Pauline Kael. “She can zing with the best of them,” the judges said (in “Shark Week,” House of Cards is “handsome but sleazy, like a CEO in a hotel bar”; in “Private Practice,” Master of Sex’s Lizzy Caplan is “the swizzle stick in the show’s erotic cocktail”). But what really sets Nussbaum apart is her understanding of how and why we watch television (we being Nielsen families, Twitter users, fan-fiction chroniclers, and even other critics). As she suggests in “Difficult Women,” she’s still the woman “argu[ing], often drunkenly, at cocktail parties” to get you to take Sex and the City seriously.
Shark Week
House of Cards is an original release from Netflix, a DVD-distribution and streaming company that has decided, after several years of selling tickets to the circus, to jump into the ring. Adapted from a British political thriller and produced by David Fincher, the series stars Kevin Spacey as a mercenary Democratic House majority whip and Robin Wright as his wife. This prestigious résumé has turned House of Cards into big news—not least because Netflix has cleverly released all thirteen episodes at once. As a model of TV production, it’s an exciting experiment, with the potential to liberate showrunners from the agony of weekly ratings. It suggests fresh possibilities for the medium, feeding an audience that has already been trained to binge on quality TV in DVD form.
As a television show, however, House of Cards is not so revolutionary. This isn’t to say it’s bad or not worth watching or unmemorable. (Certain lines, such as “Twitter twat, WTF?,” might become catchphrases—for all its elegant contours, the show is marbled with camp.) Over a recent weekend, House of Cards acted something like a scotch bender, with definite highs and lows. I found the first two episodes handsome but sleazy, like a CEO in a hotel bar. Yet by episode 5 I was hypnotized by the show’s ensemble of two-faced sociopaths. Episode 8 was a thoughtful side trip into sympathy for Spacey’s devilish main character, but by then I was exhausted, and only my compulsive streak kept me going until the finale—at which point I was critically destabilized and looking forward to season 2.
Sensually, visually, House of Cards is a pleasure. Its acrid view of political ambition is nothing new (that perspective is all over TV these days, on shows like HBO’s Veep and Starz’s Boss), but the series has some sharp twists, with an emphasis on corporate graft and media grandstanding. There’s also one truly poignant plot about a working-class congressman hooked on drugs. Yet in the days after I watched the show, its bewitching spell grew fainter—and if House of Cards had been delivered weekly I might have given up earlier. Much of the problem is Spacey himself, as Francis (Frank) Underwood, a wheeler-dealer who is denied the job of secretary of state and then conspires, with his steely wife, to go even higher. Spacey’s basilisk gaze seems ideal for the role, but he’s miscast by being too well cast—there’s no tension in seeing a shark play a shark. It’s a lot easier to buy his opposite number, the investigative blogger Zoe Barnes (the awesomely hoydenish Kate Mara), who strikes up an affair with Underwood in return for access. Her hair slicked down like a seal, her eyes dead, and her T-shirt sexily V-necked, Barnes is like some millennial demon from the digital unconscious, catnip for condescending older men. You could criticize the show’s portrayal of female reporters as venal sluts in black eyeliner, but it’s hard to object too much since Mara’s performance, which has a freaky, repressive verve, is the liveliest thing in the show. Robin Wright is regal as Claire, Underwood’s charity-running wife, and Sakina Jaffrey makes a quiet impact as the president’s chief of staff, a restrained professional who in this lurid context feels downright exotic.
Fincher’s Washington is full of eerie imagery, such as a homeless man folding a twenty-dollar bill into an origami swan, and it’s magnificently lit (although I don’t understand why a sought-after journalist like Zoe lives in a flophouse full of spiders). But eventually the show’s theatrical panache, along with Spacey’s Shakespearean asides to the camera, starts to feel as gimmicky as a fashion-magazine shoot, with melancholic shots of Claire jogging in a graveyard. The show may be made of elegant material, but it’s not built to last—it’s a meditation on amorality that tells us mostly what we already know.
And, honestly, the more I watched, the more my mind kept wandering to Shonda Rhimes’s Scandal—an ABC series that’s soapy rather than noirish but much more fun and that, in its lunatic way, may have more to say about Washington ambition. Scandal, which is inspired by a real-life political “fixer,” started slowly, as a legal procedural blended with a Rielle Hunter–flavored presidential affair. It took a season to shed its early conception of Kerry Washington’s PR bigwig Olivia Pope as a “white hat.” But, once it did—whoa, Nelly. Popping with colorful villains, vote-rigging conspiracies, waterboarding, assassinations, montages set to R&B songs, and the best gay couple on television (the president’s chief of staff, Cyrus, and his husband, James, an investigative reporter), the series has become a giddy, paranoid fever dream, like 24 crossed with The West Wing, lit up in neon pink. Last week’s episode was such a #GameChanger—that’s the hashtag that the show’s creator used to advertise the episode—that Twitter exploded with exclamation points.
Because Scandal is so playful and is unafraid to be ridiculous, it has access to emotional colors that rarely show up in Fincher’s universe, whose aesthetics insist that we take it seriously. Like Underwood, Jeff Perry’s Cyrus is a Machiavelli who cozies up to the president, but he’s got rage, wit, and a capacity for passion, not just oleaginous asides. During last week’s episode, he and his husband faced off, naked, in a fight about Cyrus’s crimes. (They’d stripped to demonstrate that they weren’t wearing wires.) The scene was absurd but also genuinely intimate, with all the daring that House of Cards lacks. Rhimes’s show is made under the opposite circumstances from Fincher’s: nearly twice as many episodes, ratings pressure, constant threat of cancellation, a ravenous tweeting audience. These forces wreck other network dramas, and Rhimes’s previous shows have flown off the rails, but Scandal has only got stronger. It’s become more opera than soap opera, as the critic Ryan McGee observed online. Like much genre fiction, Scandal uses its freedom to indulge in crazy what-ifs: What if everyone but the president knew that the election was fixed? What if the president tried to divorce his pregnant wife? What if—well, I don’t want to spoil everything, but you might consider jumping in at the beginning of season 2. It’s a different kind of binge watch.
• • •
After nine seasons, NBC’s once great mockumentary sitcom The Office is ending its run. Instead of going out like 30 Rock—at the top of its game—The Office has had a more typical trajectory, staggering to the finish line in a weakened state. First, it was hobbled by the departure of Steve Carell as Michael Scott, the bad boss whose Pinocchio-like transformation concluded when he found real love. In the aftermath, the writers introduced new characters, but they never jelled; potential plots were set up, fiddled with, then abandoned.
Still, the biggest problem has been the relationship that used to be the show’s heart: the one between Jim and Pam, work friends whose unspoken longing fueled the early seasons. Jim was a handsome prankster trapped in a soul-killing job; as an escape, he poured all his emotions into sweet, plain Pam, who was engaged to a neglectful man named Roy. That primal triangle went fractal, very effectively: the initial model flipped several times, as Pam rejected Jim, then Jim, Pam, and it was mimicked in crueler forms (Angela, Dwight, and Andy), sillier forms (Kelly, Ryan, and Darryl), and more grownup forms (Michael, Jan, and Holly), until nearly every character had dealt with some form of unspoken longing or romantic betrayal.
Eventually, Pam and Jim married and had two children. They were soul mates, and the show had the sense not to throw any doubt into that mix—until this season. Now the showrunners have made the bold choice to threaten a perfect marriage, with Jim in Philadelphia, pursuing his dream job at a sports-marketing company. He’s distracted, seduced by the free, fun-guy single life he never had, and, as a result, he’s left Pam isolated, with two small kids, furious at the financial risk, her supportive smile cracking. The primal triangle has resurfaced, with a bizarre revelation—Brian, the soundman on the crew that has been filming the show’s implicit documentary for years, has broken the fourth wall and fallen for Pam. And she has clearly, in her Pam-like way, nurtured this emotional affair.
Much of the show’s audience has bridled at this development, but it works for me. I’m impressed by the daring of the writing staff, which has done the unthinkable: set up a realistic challenge to a marriage of soul mates. Pam may be a sweetie, but she has a history of passive-aggressive insecurity, fear of change, and, well, sneakiness. Under pressure, she triangulates. She flirted with Jim while engaged to Roy; when she briefly moved to New York to attend Pratt, she attracted a male friend whom Jim found so threatening that he proposed. (In contrast, Jim wasn’t even tempted by a colleague who threw herself at him.) Jim’s sexy new job is much like the one he dreamed of when he played the online game Second Life, in season 4. These compulsive flirtations are Pam’s Second Life.
I have no idea if the show will be able to pull this off; on a beloved network sitcom, there’s no way that Pam and Jim will divorce. Who would want them to? But I appreciate this return to the show’s roots, which were always about complicating easy notions of human happiness. As Michael Scott once put it, “Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”
Difficult Women
When people talk about the rise of great TV, they inevitably credit one show, The Sopranos. Even before James Gandolfini’s death, the HBO drama’s mystique was secure: novelistic and cinematic, David Chase’s auteurist masterpiece cracked open the gangster genre like a rib cage, releasing the latent ambition of television, and launching us all into a golden age.
The Sopranos deserves the hype. Yet there’s something screwy about the way that the show and its cable-drama blood brothers have come to dominate the conversation, elbowing other forms of greatness out of the frame. It’s a bias that bubbles up early in Brett Martin’s otherwise excellent new book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, a deeply reported and dishy account of just how your prestige-cable sausage is made. I tore through the book, yet when I reached Martin’s chronicle of the rise of HBO I felt a jolt. “It might as well have been a tourism campaign for a post-Rudolph Giuliani, de-ethnicized Gotham awash in money,” Martin writes of one of my favorite shows. “Its characters were types as familiar as those in The Golden Girls: the Slut, the Prude, the Career Woman, the Heroine. But they talked more explicitly, certainly about their bodies, but also about their desires and discontents outside the bedroom, than women on TV ever had before.”
Martin gives Sex and the City credit for jump-starting HBO, but the condescension is palpable, and the grudging praise is reserved for only one aspect of the series—the rawness of its subject matter. Martin hardly invented this attitude: he is simply reiterating what has become the reflexive consensus on the show, right down to the hackneyed Golden Girls gag. Even as The Sopranos has ascended to TV’s Mt. Olympus, the reputation of Sex and the City has shrunk and faded, like some tragic dry-clean-only dress tossed into a decade-long hot cycle. By the show’s fifteenth anniversary, this year, we fans had trained ourselves to downgrade the show to a “guilty pleasure,” to mock its puns, to get into self-flagellating conversations about those blinkered and blinged-out movies. Whenever a new chick-centric series debuts, there are invidious comparisons: don’t worry, it’s no Sex and the City, they say. As if that were a good thing.
But Sex and the City, too, was once one of HBO’s flagship shows. It was the peer of The Sopranos, albeit in a different tone and in a different milieu, deconstructing a different genre. Mob shows, cop shows, cowboy shows—those are formulas with gravitas. Sex and the City, in contrast, was pigeonholed as a sitcom. In fact, it was a bold riff on the romantic comedy: the show wrestled with the limits of that pink-tinted genre for almost its entire run. In the end, it gave in. Yet until that last-minute stumble it was sharp, iconoclastic television. High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, Sex and the City was a brilliant and, in certain ways, radical show. It also originated the unacknowledged first female antihero on television: ladies and gentlemen, Carrie Bradshaw.
• • •
Please, people, I can hear your objections from here. But first think back. Before Sex and the City, the vast majority of iconic “single girl” characters on television, from That Girl to Mary Tyler Moore and Molly Dodd, had been you-go-girl types—which is to say, actual role models. (Ally McBeal was a notable and problematic exception.) They were pioneers who offered many single women the representation they craved, and they were also, crucially, adorable to men: vulnerable and plucky and warm. However varied the layers they displayed over time, they flattered a specific pathology: the cultural requirement that women greet other women with the refrain “Oh, me, too! Me, too!”
In contrast, Carrie and her friends—Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte—were odder birds by far, jagged, aggressive, and sometimes frightening figures, like a makeup mirror lit up in neon. They were simultaneously real and abstract, emotionally complex and philosophically stylized. Women identified with them—“I’m a Carrie!”—but then became furious when they showed flaws. And, with the exception of Charlotte (Kristin Davis), men didn’t find them likable: there were endless cruel jokes about Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Carrie as sluts, man haters, or gold diggers. To me, as a single woman, it felt like a definite sign of progress: since the elemental representation of single life at the time was the comic strip “Cathy” (ack! chocolate!), better that one’s life should be viewed as glamorously threatening than as sad and lonely.
Carrie Bradshaw herself began as a mirror for another woman: she was the avatar of the New York Observer columnist Candace Bushnell, a steely “sexual anthropologist” on the prowl for blind items. When the initial showrunner, Darren Star, and his mostly female writing staff adapted Bushnell’s columns, they transformed that icy Carrie, pouring her into the warm body of Sarah Jessica Parker. Out popped a chatterbox with a schnoz, whose advanced fashion sense was not intended to lure men into matrimony. For a half dozen episodes, Carrie was a happy, curious explorer, out companionably smoking with modelizers. If she’d stayed that way, the show might have been another Mary Tyler Moore: a playful, empowering comedy about one woman’s adventures in the big city.
Instead, Carrie fell under the thrall of Mr. Big, the sexy, emotionally withholding forty-three-year-old financier played by Chris Noth. From then on, pleasurable as Sex and the City remained, it also felt designed to push back at its audience’s wish for identification, triggering as much anxiety as relief. It switched the romantic comedy’s primal scene, from “Me, too!” to “Am I like her?” A man practically woven out of red flags, Big wasn’t there to rescue Carrie; instead, his “great love” was a slow poisoning. She spun out, becoming anxious, obsessive, and, despite her charm, wildly self-centered—in her own words, “the frightening woman whose fear ate her sanity.” Their relationship was viewed with concern by her friends, who were not, as Martin suggests, mere “types” but portrayals of a narrow slice of wealthy white thirty-something Manhattanites: the Waspy gallerina, the liberal-feminist lawyer, the decadent power publicist.
Although the show’s first season is its slightest, it swiftly establishes a bold mixture of moods—fizzy and sour, blunt and arch—and shifts between satirical and sincere modes of storytelling. (It’s not even especially dated: though the show has gained a reputation for over-the-top absurdity, I can tell you that these night clubs and fashion shows do exist—maybe even more so now that Manhattan has become a gated island for the wealthy.) There is already a melancholic undertow, full of foreshadowing. “What if he never calls and three weeks from now I pick up the New York Times and I read that he’s married some perfect little woman who never passes gas under his five-hundred-dollar sheets?” Carrie frets in episode 11. In a moment of clarity, she tells Miranda that, when she’s around Big, “I’m not like me. I’m, like, Together Carrie. I wear little outfits: Sexy Carrie and Casual Carrie. Sometimes I catch myself actually posing. It’s just—it’s exhausting.”
That was the conundrum Carrie faced for the entire series: true love turned her into a fake. The season 1 neurotic Carrie didn’t stick, though. She and Big fixed things; then they broke up again, harder. He moved to Paris. She met Aidan (John Corbett), the marrying type. In season 3, the writers upped the ante, having Carrie do something overtly antiheroic: she cheated on a decent man with a bad one (Big, of course), now married to that “perfect little woman,” Natasha. They didn’t paper over the repercussions: Natasha’s humiliation and the way Carrie’s betrayal hardened Aidan, even once he took her back. During six seasons, Carrie changed, as anyone might from thirty-two to thirty-eight, and not always in positive ways. She got more honest and more responsible; she became a saner girlfriend. But she also became scarred, prissier, strikingly gun-shy—and, finally, she panicked at the question of what it would mean to be an older single woman.
Her friends went through changes, too, often upon being confronted with their worst flaws—Charlotte’s superficiality, Miranda’s caustic tongue, Samantha’s refusal to be vulnerable. In a departure from nearly all earlier half-hour comedies, the writers fully embraced the richness of serial storytelling. In a movie we go from glare to kiss in two hours. Sex and the City was liberated from closure, turning “once upon a time” into a wry mantra, treating its characters’ struggles with a rare mixture of bluntness and compassion. It was one of the first television comedies to let its characters change in serious ways, several years before other half-hour comedies, like The Office, went and stole all the credit.
• • •
So why is the show so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind? It’s a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic or pleasurable or funny or feminine or explicit about sex rather than about violence or made collaboratively) must be inferior. Certainly, the show’s formula was strict: usually four plots—two deep, two shallow—linked by Carrie’s voice-over. The B plots generally involved one of the non-Carrie women getting laid; these slapstick sequences were crucial to the show’s rude rhythms, interjecting energy and rupturing anything sentimental. (It’s one reason those bowdlerized reruns on E! are such a crime: with the literal and figurative fucks edited out, the show is a rom-com.)
Most unusually, the characters themselves were symbolic. As I’ve written elsewhere—and argued, often drunkenly, at cocktail parties—the four friends operated as near-allegorical figures, pegged to contemporary debates about women’s lives, mapped along three overlapping continuums. The first was emotional: Carrie and Charlotte were romantics; Miranda and Samantha were cynics. The second was ideological: Miranda and Carrie were second-wave feminists, who believed in egalitarianism; Charlotte and Samantha were third-wave feminists, focused on exploiting the power of femininity from opposing angles. The third concerned sex itself. At first, Miranda and Charlotte were prudes while Samantha and Carrie were libertines. Unsettlingly, as the show progressed, Carrie began to glide toward caution, away from freedom, out of fear.
Every conversation the friends had, at brunch or out shopping, amounted to a Crossfire-like debate. When Carrie sleeps with a dreamy French architect and he leaves a thousand dollars by her bed, she consults her friends. “Money is power. Sex is power,” Samantha argues. “Therefore, getting money for sex is simply an exchange of power.” “Don’t listen to the dime-store Camille Paglia,” Miranda shoots back. The most famous such conversation took place four episodes in, after Charlotte’s boyfriend asked her to have anal sex. The friends pile into a cab for a raucous debate about whether her choice is about power-exchange (Miranda) or about finding a fun new hole (Samantha). “I’m not a hole!” Charlotte protests, and they hit a pothole. “What was that?” Charlotte asks. “A preview,” Miranda and Samantha say in unison and burst out laughing.
The show’s basic value system aligns with Carrie: romantic, second-wave, libertine. But Sex and the City’s real strength was its willingness not to stack the deck: it let every side make a case so that complexity carried the day. When Carrie and Aidan break up, they are both right. When Miranda and Carrie argue about her move to Paris, they are both right. The show’s style could be brittle, but its substance was flexible, in a way that made the series feel peculiarly broad-ranging, covering so much ground, so fleetly, that it became easy to take it for granted.
• • •
Endings count in television, maybe too much. The Sopranos concluded with a black screen: it rejected easy satisfaction and pissed off its most devoted fans. (David Chase fled to the South of France.)
Three years earlier, in 2004, Sex and the City had other pressures to contend with: while a mob film ends in murder, we all know where a romantic comedy ends. I’ll defend until my dying day the sixth-season plot in which Carrie seeks respite with a celebrity like her, the Russian artist Aleksandr (Mikhail Baryshnikov), a chilly genius she doesn’t love but who offers her a dreamlike fairy tale, the one she has always longed for: Paris, safety, money, pleasure. It felt ugly and sad in a realistic way. In one of the season’s, and the show’s, best episodes, she saw other older women settling (Candice Bergen) or falling out of windows (the hilarious Kristen Johnston, who delivered one of Sex and the City’s best monologues: “When did everybody stop smoking? When did everybody pair off? … I’m so bored I could die”). The show always had a realpolitik directness about such social pressures; as another HBO series put it recently, winter was coming.
And then, in the final round, Sex and the City pulled its punches and let Big rescue Carrie. It honored the wishes of its heroine, and at least half of the audience, and it gave us a very memorable dress, too. But it also showed a failure of nerve, an inability of the writers to imagine or to trust themselves to portray any other kind of ending—happy or not. And I can’t help but wonder: What would the show look like without that finale? What if it were the story of a woman who lost herself in her thirties, who was changed by a poisonous, powerful love affair, and who emerged, finally, surrounded by her friends? Who would Carrie be then? It’s an interesting question, one that shouldn’t erase the show’s powerful legacy. We’ll just have to wait for another show to answer it.
Private Practice
Masters of Sex, a new hour-long drama on Showtime, is a fizzy, ebullient quasi-historical romp about the team of scientific pioneers who transformed American attitudes toward sex. But let’s not bury the lead: it’s also a serious turn-on.
For many viewers, this will be reason enough to watch, and there’s no shame in that game; this is adult cable television’s bread and butter, after all. Luckily, the show has an appeal beyond solid date-night viewing. Masters of Sex is based on Thomas Maier’s lively 2009 book of the same title, which tells the story of the rise of William Masters, a renegade who aimed to study sex in the lab, using human subjects. In 1950s St. Louis, where Masters was a prominent OB-GYN, this was an idea outrageous enough that he had to keep the project secret. Then, almost by chance, Masters found his soul mate. Virginia Johnson was a low-level secretary with no college degree, but she had social skills that the doctor lacked, in addition to a spitfire sexual iconoclasm. The two became intellectual partners and, later, lovers—though few knew about that part until many years afterward. Their best-selling 1966 study blasted through medical prudery and Freudian hornswoggle, explaining the physiology of orgasms, spreading the good word about healthy sexuality, and turning them into national celebrities.
This sounds like a romantic, upbeat story, and at times Masters of Sex does have a caper-plot element, as Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) flirts with doctors and nurses in the hospital, convincing them to “do it” for science. The sex scenes are graphic and often very funny, with classic Showtime panache, and they star people you definitely want to see having sex (or, in many cases, masturbating with sensors pasted to their skin, as the doctors murmur things like “turgidity of nipples”). In its stylish pilot, Masters of Sex initially comes off a bit like Mad Men with Benefits : fetishistic fun with a historical pedigree. But over the first six episodes, the show deepens by degrees, becoming more poignant and more surprising, too. It begins to acknowledge some of the unsettling implications of the doctor’s work and lets characters who start as entertaining cartoons gain complexity, taking the plot in new directions.
When we first meet him, Masters (Michael Sheen) has begun his sex study without official permission: he’s been paying a skeptical prostitute to let him watch through a keyhole while he takes notes on positions and duration. His interest seems fueled by equal parts radical scientific curiosity and radical innocence. “Is that a common practice amongst prostitutes?” he asks, astonished by the revelation that his subject has faked an orgasm to speed up a customer. “It’s a common practice amongst anyone with a twat,” she replies.
Masters is married to a lovely woman named Libby (the charming Caitlin FitzGerald), and they are struggling with infertility—he’s made her believe it’s her fault, when, in fact, he knows that he has a low sperm count. At the university hospital where he works, the doctor’s kindness to his patients coexists with a peevish, shut-down air of arrogance, the native entitlement of a big-shot doctor of his era. Then Johnson arrives, a former night-club singer, twice divorced, a single mother of two kids—a worldly woman seeking a sense of purpose. As Masters’s assistant, she handles all the administration and much of the design of the study, but her effect on him is stronger than those roles would suggest. Heterodox and bold in her manner, she’s a destabilizing force whose charisma acts like a magnet, spinning every moral compass into a panic. And yet, despite her bravado, she’s under society’s thumb, too: she needs to keep this job.
• • •
The show departs in several key ways from the true story, blurring chronology and conflating characters and adding in one or two questionable twists for the sake of drama. In a few cases, it makes events less strange than they were in reality: in the actual experiments, anonymous couples mated with paper bags over their heads. (Later on, Masters’s mother helpfully sewed silk masks.) These early episodes briskly sketch out a fraught fifties milieu, including the sub rosa doctor-nurse hookup scene; the lonely Masters marriage and its origins in Masters’s unhappy childhood; and Johnson’s struggles with her irresponsible ex (the hilarious Mather Zickel) and her son, who begins to hate her for neglecting him.
Along the way, we get a sense of the ebb and flow of Masters and Johnson’s research, which began to bump up against charged social questions, like homosexuality and the then-accepted Freudian notion that vaginal climax was more “mature.” There are satisfyingly silly comic set pieces, including a flirtation between a blond nurse and a doctor who are paired for study, as well as a few on-the-nose bits reminiscent of a conventional medical drama. The dialogue isn’t always subtle, but it’s often sharp. (When a chagrined cad deflowers a virgin, he moans, “It’s like those signs you see in thrift shops. You break it, you buy it.”) A few episodes in, Allison Janney shows up to give an affecting performance as the university provost’s wife.
For all the show’s appeal, none of this would work without Lizzy Caplan, the swizzle stick in the show’s erotic cocktail. In previous roles, Caplan has stood out as a modern girl, all defensive postures and tomboy sarcasm. On the cult TV classic Party Down, she was a jittery cater-waiter; in the underestimated dark movie comedy Bachelorette, a self-destructive hipster; in Mean Girls, a furious goth. But in Masters of Sex she’s chilled out and self-possessed, the type of woman who turns everything she says into an intelligent come-on, even when that’s not her intent. With her elegant nose and amused eyes, black-slash eyebrows and warm mouth, she’s like a pen-and-ink illo of herself. At times, the script can be a bit worshipful of the character—“that woman is magic,” one voice-over coos—but Caplan is watchable enough to override that flaw. And it’s a fascinating conception of a female superhero: her libido is a superpower, one she tries to use for good rather than evil, with mixed results.
Since the era when the Bada Bing girls writhed reliably, each Sunday night, in the background of Tony Soprano’s business meetings, cable television has adopted, if not an actual Madonna/whore complex, something approaching a Gallant/Goofus one. The most artistically prestigious series, such as The Wire, Breaking Bad, and even Mad Men, might include sex or nudity, but they generally do so for some plot-based reason, not as keep-’em-watching titillation. The shows that deliver more graphic scenes, often at oddly predictable twenty-minute intervals—Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, True Blood—share a slightly seamy quality, as if the boobs were contractually required product placement.
Masters of Sex threads this needle well. Sex is its subject, after all—and the show makes the case, beneath its cinematic lacquer, that it is not something merely exciting or trivial but a deep human necessity. Deprived of intimacy and true release, people shrivel up. “Once you’ve seen Oz, who wants to go back to Kansas?” one heartbroken character asks. In this way, Masters of Sex reminded me not of a few other Showtime series, with their mood of anomie and disdain, but of Orange Is the New Black, the Netflix series that, for all its comic bounce, takes sex seriously as pleasure, power, and escape. These stories are humanistic, not cynical, and although they go in for a level of prurience, the nudity isn’t simply there to jump the needle on the viewer’s electrocardiogram. Masters of Sex may not be revolutionary TV, but it’s got something just as useful: good chemistry.