Emily Nussbaum calls Showtime’s new series Masters of Sex, based on the lives of sex researchers William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson, a “serious turn-on”:
[T]he show makes the case, beneath its cinematic lacquer, that [sex] 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.
Ashley Fetters appreciates that the show “limits its sex to where sex is an important component of the story.” Laura Bennett calls it “the best new fall drama on TV”:
“Masters of Sex” captures the atmosphere of its era better than all of “Mad Men”’s exquisite costumes and scrupulous sets: the sense of being on the brink of a seismic shift in the zeitgeist, as well as the particular courage required to be a sexually liberated woman in the baffling, buttoned-up years after Alfred Kinsey’s ground-breaking studies but before the sexual revolution. And the show does so without condescension, but rather with a winking understanding that times have changed less than we think. “The truth is nobody understands sex,” Masters says wearily. Given that a show set in the ’50s feels like the freshest take on sexual relations in awhile, it’s easy to agree.
But Neil Drumming isn’t feeling the chemistry, and neither is John Powers:
Nowhere is Masters of Sex worse than in its unmasterful vision of sex. Rather than treating it maturely, the show exemplifies much of what remains retrograde about premium cable and American pop culture in general — the gratuitous nudity, the squirmingly unsexy lovemaking scenes, the reflexive jokiness that reminds us that sex still makes people very, very nervous. At one point, the show actually cuts from a couple having sex in a car to a shot of a neon sign with a hot dog in a bun.
Maybe such a gag will crack up the 12-year-old boys watching at home, but it’s faintly depressing that half a century after Masters and Johnson helped liberate human sexuality, a TV show about their lives should so often reduce the conversation about it to the ignorant sniggering from which they were trying to set us free.
The Dish 