Episode 2 (July 7th)

When Masters of Sex was originally announced, I knew I was onboard from the jump. Not only was the idea of a show dedicated to scientific research right up my alley, but the prospect of a cable drama not dealing with crime, terrorism, murder, the apocalypse, or just misery in general, felt like a bloody revelation. Add to that a period setting based on actual researchers, and Lizzie Caplan and Michael Sheen as the stars, and you pretty much couldn’t have come up with a more appealing show.

I watched the pilot when it premiered last year, liked what I saw, and….only just watched the second episode, due in part to the show’s quickly approaching second season. The pilot didn’t put me off when I first watched it -that I can remember much of it clearly a year later means they were doing something right. But committing to a new TV relationship requires a certain amount of effort I wasn’t ready to put in at this time last year, what with all the other shows that summer 2013 had to offer. 2014 has been a merciful reprieve in that regard (though it’s been offset by a really strong selection of films), so with the help of an informative “previously on,” there was nothing to hold me back from finally getting into Masters of Sex.

The lead paragraph maybe oversells the show’s uniqueness just a bit, as it has the early makings of an Anti-Hero drama, just in the Mad Men vein, instead of something more plot-heavy like Breaking Bad. Sheen’s Bill Masters is every bit the prickly hard-ass striving towards some Greater Good that Don Draper and Walter White always were, but thanks to historical precedent and a less directly self-interested goal, Masters sabotaging his life, and the ones of those around him, in the name of advancing human understanding of sexuality, actually has some weight to it.

The show is still very much in its infancy, such that I was hardly surprised to see episode two double down on the pilot’s double-entendre streak. That the opening credits for the show are nothing but Freudian imagery establishes the difficult approach the show has to maintain when dealing with its chosen subject matter. Sex is silly and spiritual, universal but also deeply personal, and depending on the person, the most important thing in your life, or the least. It would be just as inappropriate for Masters of Sex to treat sex like a snickering twelve year-old as it would to treat it purely clinically. Masters attempting to codify the rules and systems behind a concept of limitless definitions and variations creates an interesting juxtaposition for the show to play with out the gate.

Of course, the show can’t be all about sex all the time (though, one could easily argue that’s the whole point: everything eventually circles back around to sex), so the show does a pretty solid job of setting up a number of engaging characters and relationships over its first two hours. Most belong to the women, in particular Caplan’s Virginia Johnson, along with the salty working girl Betty, who ends the hour with a completely different identity than when she started. A significant improvement from the pilot is Masters’ current wife, Libby, who’s perhaps the most outright sympathetic Anti-Hero wife of any recent examples of the trope. She would most certainly need to be written as a cold-shrew in a two-hour film that looks to follow Masters’ personal history accurately, but using a serial format, the show can explore the complications of their relationship for all they are worth.

Whereas the sexual symbolism can get a pass, the show’s thematic stop signs are more than a wee bit on the nose still, but it’s early hours. There’s a lot of potential for this show to break new ground for TV, and I look forward to seeing what’s in store for the rest of the first season.

Midseason (July 15)

Halfway through its first season, Masters of Sex hasn’t taken the leap forward in quality I hoped to have seen by now, but that’s mainly because I have no idea what a vastly superior version of the show would look like. Thanks to its historical roots, the lengthy period of time Masters and Johnson spent on their research has allowed the show to take a lax and telescoped approach to the sex study, and instead has spent most of its time and energy getting to know the side characters over the course of its first six hours.

This has worked largely to the shows benefit. The writers are trying something risky with Ethan, who was pretty irredeemably awful in the first handful of episodes, but is now starting to come around to being more watchable the more he realizes what a piece of human garbage he can be. More surprising is how invested I am in Libby Masters, who is basically the antithesis to every cable anti-hero wife that isn’t Carmela Soprano. Her frustration with Bill Masters and desperation to connect to him through a child only gets more heartbreaking the deeper the show dives into Bill’s own childhood trauma, and Masters of Sex doesn’t force you to take a side in the issue. These are two people who want fundamentally different things out of life, but try to make it work; her because she loves Bill, and him, because he needs a cover story. Add on top of all that some great work from Beau Bridges, and the always great Alison Janney arriving late to the party, and there’s a already plenty in Masters of Sex that’s ripe with potential.

The one major element to the show that’s not got me hooked yet is the suggestion of a (inevitable) romantic pairing between Masters and Johnson. I like seeing Virginia having to struggle with her (bratty as all hell) kids and commitment to the study, and I like seeing Bill’s prickliness cracking further and further to expose the mushy goo and rage curdling away underneath. Together as professionals, they’re a lot of fun to watch, but whenever the show makes overtures to a non-platonic relationship between the two, I don’t buy it. The show devotes an entire monologue at the end of episode three to how enraptured men are by Virginia, which is an oversell equal to the undersell of what possible interest Virginia might have in Bill that isn’t purely professional. Seeing as their partnership is key to the history the show is following, I have to hope we start seeing some real sexual chemistry between the two before season’s end.

Masters of Sex at its very best probably won’t look all that different from the 80% efficiency it’s running at right now, I imagine. It’ll probably involve fewer of the more obvious, rimshot-worthy sex jokes, and will also indulge less in moments where the viewer is invited to feel superior to the outdated sexual attitudes of the time that Johnson and Masters are one day meant to revolutionize. Both these elements are crucial to the identity of Masters of Sex though, they just involve the much tougher task of writing plot that’s emotionally true, instead of plot that makes a bunch of crazy, exciting stuff happen. All the pieces Masters of Sex needs are present, they just need a little more tweaking to reach optimal output. 

Season 1 Finale (August 11th)

The final stretch of episodes in Masters of Sex’s first season really got me thinking about the last Showtime series that I really got into, which was Homeland. I loved the spy thriller series for the season and a half when it was great, and still thank its creators for ending the third season with an offramp I gladly took to leave behind the middling-to-poor show it had become. Showtime has a bad track record of running one-to-two season wonders into the dirt (Dexter and Weeds, to name a couple), but we can get worried about that particular menace once Masters of Sex starts kicking around longer than it should.

Both Homeland and Masters of Sex close out their first seasons on a downbeat note following pyrrhic victories for their protagonists, who have lost the jobs that consumed their lives (also, there’s some electroshock therapy that shows up in both, but that’s more of a coincidence). Ending on a moment of darkness is what cable dramas are all about these days, so it was just as typical of the form for Bill Masters to end the season at rock bottom, as it would have an 11th hour miracle save the status quo. What concerns me though, is the season’s final moment, which is where the Homeland comparison really solidified in my mind.

It was right around mid-Season 2 of Homeland that viewers finally copped to the show Howard Gordan and Alex Gansa were actually making; this wasn’t a post-9/11 espionage drama, it was a post-9/11 romantic espionage drama. The show, in the creators’ eyes, was ultimately about whether or not the two crazy spies at its center could keep it together, even though one was a CIA analyst, and the other a terrorist. Considering all the good the show had done up unto that point as both a thrilling spy story and a look at the modern security state, this was an unwelcome surprise to most viewers. Sure enough, once the Carrie-Brody relationship started to dominate the show, the wheels came off.

For Masters of Sex to end its first season on Bill professing his love for Virginia (in the pounding rain, no less) shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s literally history textbook that these two end up together. My concern is that Masters of Sex currently has a large engagement vacuum at the centre of its story. Everywhere you look but head-on, there’s great stuff on this show. Thinking back on it, my favorite moments from the finale all involved secondary characters, whether it was Lillian piping up for Virginia at Bill’s presentation, Libby giving birth, or Margaret confronting her husband about his hidden homosexuality. The show has created a rich, well-populated world of characters that can bend the tone and writing show to whatever combination they’re in (sassy Jane alone, and her “you yelled, Sir?” pluck adds a dry sense of humor the show needs more of).

But at the center of Masters of Sex are Bill and Virginia, and with the final two episodes of the season showing how good for the show they are apart, I find it worrying how much the show wants to keep them together. The disconnect between author and audience is a matter of both writing and chemistry. Bill Masters occupies an interesting place in the pantheon of White Male Antiheroes, in that he’s boring and unlikeable by design. The show does very little to make him cool or sympathetic; we root for him because his zealous devotion to advancing science happens to be taking a lot of different causes in the right direction.

The problem is that the show’s commitment to making Bill a prickly crank makes Virginia’s relationship to him hard to buy. Initially, she was exploiting his feelings towards her for a job, and then to become a part of the work he believed in. But the spark of connection that’s required to make us believe a real emotional connection between the two could develop isn’t there. Perhaps the show is choosing a clinical approach to the romance to match the circumstances of its courtship. But that would only explain why the Virginia-Masters relationship is so lifeless -it doesn’t excuse it.

Masters of Sex is that rare program that grows into a fully formed show in only one season. It’s managed to examine sex and gender dynamics better than any show in recent memory because it knows and proves these are topics you can write a whole show about. What’s still up in the air is whether it can make the core relationship of that show as meaningful and entertaining as all the great material swirling around it.