(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
What do William Shakespeare, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and a flying puppet penis have in common? All three feature or influenced the excellent Dying For Sex finale. Yes, FX had notes about one of these things—but as viewers can now see, the winged phallus is far from a cheap gimmick. Dare we say, it’s profound.
Throughout the eight-episode limited series based on Nikki Boyer’s podcast of the same name, co-creators and longtime collaborators Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether have straddled (excuse the pun) the line between comedy and tragedy, delivering laughter and tears as Molly Kochan’s (Michelle Williams) story comes to a close.
But Molly’s dance through life doesn’t end without one final curtain call, in which important characters from Molly’s journey partake in a hallucinatory last hurrah. “Everything in that final episode is inspired by something in the real story,” Rosenstock says.
After receiving a diagnosis of Stage IV metastatic breast cancer (Molly’s second bout of cancer is terminal), Molly leaves her husband to embark on a journey of self and sexual discovery. Her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate) is with her every step of the way (outside of the bedroom), offering support, encouragement, compassion, and an emergency delivery of vibrators. By the final episode, Molly has achieved her bucket list goal of achieving an orgasm with a partner. However, the cancer has spread to the lining of her spinal cord and brain, giving her a prognosis of just a few weeks to months to live.
Rosenstock and Meriwether spoke with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed to discuss dreaming up this theatrical revelry, the meaning behind the episode’s soon-to-be-iconic penis puppet, collaborating with Williams and Slate, and writing the moving speech in which a hospice nurse explains the different stages a body goes through as it prepares for death.
“A big part of our take on it was that the sex was always there for story reasons,” says Meriwether. “My reference is musical theater; how a song is supposed to take you to a different place by the end of the song. I feel like that was how we approach the sex in the show.” Having come from the network TV sitcom rules on New Girl and zero sex on The Dropout (“for legal reasons”), Meriwether found the premise of Dying for Sex daunting, but thinking about sex in terms of musical theater helped figure out what served a purpose.
Musicals also play an important part in non-sex scenes like the hospice dream ballet, which Rosenstock describes as “Liz’s imagination gone wild in a hospital.” At this point, Molly has been told to expect hallucinations. The real-life Molly had also talked about how items that normally ground a person were beginning to evaporate for her. “She had this moment where she literally looked up and the clock was coming off the wall, and it felt like time was completely different for her,” says Rosenstock. “We knew we wanted to dramatize that in some way.”
Most of Meriwether’s previous work isn’t this stylized, but it was important to her to show that Molly’s reality is dissolving. “It’s incredible and also scary. It was overwhelming for her [Molly], but it was actually giving her some comfort, because it made her feel like everything was connected, and nothing was really real,” she says.
The question of how to show this on screen led to the theatrical showcase in the finale that brings the company of characters from Molly’s life back to the stage. Rosenstock had spent time with David Rasche (who plays Dr. Pankowitz) on set, and discovered he is a jazz singer, inspiring the scatting portion. Another key figure is social worker Sonya (Esco Jouléy ). Jouléy actually has a classically trained clown skill set—which had to be expanded for the scene’s purposes. (“They don’t always learn how to juggle butt plugs,” Meriwether jokes).
Director Shannon Murphy took inspiration from Björk for this sequence, but it was the Oscar-nominated The Diving Bell and the Butterfly that Rosenstock and Meriwether had discussed in their first conversations about the show. “I think we loved the way it went to these big flights of whimsy and joy that were happening while this man was lying dying in this hospital room,” says Rosenstock. “The juxtaposition between those two things and watching his inner life come out in these wild, expressionistic fantasy moments while he literally couldn’t move.”
After putting off writing the final script (“We didn’t want Molly to die,” says Meriwether), the time crunch helped Meriwether “turn off the filter in your brain where you’re like, ‘I can’t do that.’ It was during this period that Meriwether wrote Molly’s fantasy sequence featuring Molly’s ex-husband Steve (Jay Duplass) and several of her sex quest partners, including the jarringly well-hung finance bro Hooper (Zack Robidas) who appears in Episode 4. “I don’t remember the moment, but I remember just being like, ‘Yeah, of course, the penis sprouts wings and flies off,” says Meriwether. When Rosenstock read the scene, her response was “of course, this is perfect.”
While FX was incredibly supportive during production, they also had some notes about this scene. “We were down to counting seconds of air time of how much penis puppet,” says Meriwether. “I remember the first call from FX, when they got the cut. They were like, ‘Oh, we thought that was supposed to be animated.”
But there is more to this visual than just being a cheeky gag. As with other sex scenes, the flying penis puppet serves a deeper purpose—in this case, about Molly letting go of her feelings about sex and her body.
“This show is a love story about a lot of things, but one of the things is between Molly and her body,” says Rosenstock. “Toward the end, [real-life Molly] had this really beautiful speech on the podcast where she says she’s done with the sex, her body has done a really good job, and she feels like that’s not what she wants anymore. She’s at peace with it, because she feels like she really explored that part of herself.” Hence, the penis, flying away.
Before Molly’s room briefly turns into an imagined cabaret of sorts, hospice worker Amy (Paula Pell) takes Molly, Nikki, and Molly’s mom Gail (Sissy Spacek) through, with meticulous, sometimes upsetting detail, what will be the final stages of her life.
“Death is not a mystery. It is not a medical disaster. It is a bodily process,” Amy says. Pell’s delivery is a mix of high-energy excitement and matter-of-fact statements. “I f—ing love your vibe, Amy,” says Molly. The creators educated themselves about hospice, including watching videos that Rosenstock describes as featuring “people who were talking about death with this enthusiasm that I think struck both of us as very unusual and funny.”
Amy’s description of how the body responds to a person’s final weeks and days is unlike anything I have seen on TV before. The scene is as revelatory as the depiction of desire in previous episodes. “This is actually the map for what’s going to happen. This person who’s been so curious and open to know everything would want this information; we want the audience to have this information as well,” says Rosenstock. “Just trusting that we could lean into it.” Similar to how the duo didn’t want to cut away from sex scenes, they didn’t want to shy away from this reality.
During this conversation, Molly has one request for Nikki: to make sure her mouth isn’t open after she dies—another detail from the podcast. In return, Nikki asks Molly not to bite her. This exchange gets to the core of Slate’s ability to depict Nikki’s overflowing affection toward her best friend and the swirling anger and sadness that accompanies losing her. “You’re feeling the love between them, but she’s mad that Molly’s gonna die. She’s mad that she’s ever going to have to close her mouth,” says Meriwether. “But then it’s this really funny, weird secret anxiety that she has about being bitten. She puts all of that into that one moment.”
Considering how lived in this dynamic is it is surprising to learn that Slate and Williams didn’t know each other before shooting. “They brought so much out of each other. Yes, Michelle is more known for drama. Jenny’s a revered stand-up comedian, but they brought those sides out of each other,” says Rosenstock. “Then there are scenes where Michelle is hilarious and Jenny is the emotional center of it. It was so exciting to watch.”
Small character interactions and fanciful details draw on the podcast source material to ensure that the depiction of Molly succumbing to cancer is grounded in reality. However, death has been depicted in art for millennia, so the duo also took inspiration from one of the most enduring examples of portraying it. “Shakespeare comedies take on so much in the same sort of way that this podcast did,” says Meriwether.
From a thematic point of view, Rosenstock explains that the famous playwright “takes on grief in a way that is very profound and meaningful for people.” Not only that but the fictionalized Nikki is a theater actress (“It was originally set in LA, and we moved it to New York for Michelle,” says Meriwether). Shakespeare is a touchstone for Nikki, ending with the character working on a production of The Tempest and one of my personal favorite lines: “We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
There is a stark reality to Molly’s demise, and yet there is also euphoria in this finale, summed up by this Shakespeare line. Plus, I’m pretty sure the Bard would appreciate Molly’s last flight of fancy—the winged penis too.
