If Dying for Sex doesn’t take itself seriously, why should we?
“I want him. I want him to rub that beard on my face. I want him. Oh God, I want him right now. I can’t wait anymore.” Molly thinks this to herself as she looks at the man (Chris Roberti) she’s just picked up at a bar for a one-night stand as they ride home in an Uber together. She asks him if he wants to kiss her, and he does. The camera films his rough hand on her face and hair in close-up. Both Sheila Callaghan’s script and Chris Teague’s direction are keenly observed, focused squarely on desire and the things that trigger it.
Then the guy cums after a five-second handjob, groaning and spasming for like a full minute, like a character from a Farrelly Brothers movie. He gets thrown out of the Uber for it and everything. Is it funny? Sure — my notes read “lol” and everything. Is it as funny as the moments that preceded it were sharp, sexy, and vulnerable in how they exposed Molly’s hunger for contact with this man? Not by a long shot.
That’s the problem with Dying for Sex: It’s a dramedy, not a drama in which funny things sometimes or even often happen. In general (of course there are exceptions), dramedies are an unhappy hybrid. For every moment of real insight into human behavior, there’s a gag to pop the audience. As soon as things get serious, along comes a joke to lighten the mood.
The Uber-cummer is a textbook case. Molly creates this intensely hot moment for herself, making sexual contact with a man other than her husband for the first time in over a decade — with any man for over three years, that crying blowjob from last episode excepted — only for it to be short-circuited by a recreation of the Lonely Island “Jizz in My Pants” sketch. You were doing so well, Dying for Sex!
It’s a shame, because Molly’s desires are otherwise treated both empathetically — at no point does the writing undermine the idea that sexual fulfillment is a worthy thing for Molly to want pursue — and emphatically — nor does it make light of the length she’s willing to go to to achieve it, i.
