SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers for “Dying for Sex,” now streaming on Hulu.
“Dying for Sex” takes its inspiration from the real-life friendship between Molly Kochan, a terminal cancer patient played by Michelle Williams, and Nikki Boyer, Molly’s best friend-turned-caretaker played by Jenny Slate, respectively. But there’s another twosome equally responsible for the lived-in, laugh-out-loud funny, devastating nature of the FX series.
Elizabeth Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock met in their early 20s before working together on Meriwether’s beloved Fox comedy “New Girl,” on which Rosenstock wrote and produced through its final season in 2017. Meriwether had made a hard pivot from sitcoms by 2022, creating the equally lauded but vastly different “The Dropout,” Hulu’s limited series about the rise and fall of fraudulent Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. During that process, though, she got an email about a podcast that made her want to return to writing about female friendship.
“I listened to it all at once,” Meriwether says of the original “Dying for Sex,” a six-episode podcast Kochan and Boyer recorded before Kochan died in 2019. “I set up a meeting with Nikki — in March of 2020, so it was the last meeting I had before COVID — but it was incredible. We were crying and talking about Molly, and I just loved the mix of tones.”
When Kochan realized she was dying, she left her husband (played in the FX series by Jay Duplass) and instead entrusted Boyer with her care as she journeyed to figure out her sexuality with the time she had left. That made for bizarre, hilarious and sometimes concerning stories to share on the podcast, from explorations of kink and BDSM to reckoning with the molestation she experienced as a child.
“It took on the biggest issues that any story can take on, but did it with so much love and joy and comedy. So I went to her,” Meriwether says, addressing Rosenstock now, “and said, ‘Will you help me?’ And she was like, ‘Do I really wanna—’”
Her friend finishes her sentence. “‘Am I really gonna sign up for a show about Stage 4 breast cancer?’ Yeah, no.” Rosenstock says, laughing. “And then Liz was like, ‘She also has a lot of sex!’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely! Give me the link to the podcast.’”
Rosenstock was in. So was Boyer, who became an executive producer on the project — though that was a slight cause for concern at first. It had only been a year since Kochan’s death when they began discussing a “Dying for Sex” adaptation, and Meriwether worried that the material might be too fresh for Boyer. “Like, oh God, what is it gonna be like for her?” she remembers thinking. “I knew the process was going to be long, and there would be ups and downs. What is it going to be like to watch her life put on camera?” There was also the “problem” of the aspects of Boyer and Kochan’s lives that would be changed to better suit the versions of them that Meriwether and Rosenstock were creating.
But Boyer was up for the task. “What really amazed me was that she’s also a creative, and someone who makes things, so she really understood when to come in and when to step back,” Meriwether says. “She was there when we needed her, and not there when we needed some space to figure it out on our own.”
For example, the podcast didn’t reveal that Kochan was assaulted as a child by her mother’s boyfriend until the end, whereas the TV series introduces that information early on. Meriwether and Rosenstock felt that the first structure effectively used Kochan’s trauma to explain the origins of her sexual interests, but they were more interested in actively portraying “the decision to heal or worth through it, and what that actually looks like,” as Rosenstock puts it.
Restructuring the main ideas of Kochan’s story that way was one place the creators needed to diverge from Boyer’s original vision. But removing the big reveal meant they had to find a different way to give Molly closure, which they needed Boyer’s help to pull off. “We felt like if she liked the story, we were in the right space, that we were honoring the spirit of what Molly was trying to do,” Meriwether says.
Sarah Shatz/FX
Enter: Neighbor Guy, an unnamed character played by Rob Delaney who Molly meets when she moves into a new apartment after leaving her husband. A few irritated conversations in the hallway lead to an unexpected sexual connection, which leads to an even more unexpected spark of romance. Molly tries to keep her sex life and her medical treatment separate, but that gets difficult when giving Neighbor Guy a swift, consensual kick in the penis lands her, not him, in the hospital, where she learns that the cancer has spread to her bones. She proceeds to avoid him for months, but when he eventually learns about her cancer by accident, the two begin to fall in love. She allows him to visit her in the hospital only once, where he gives her her first-ever orgasm with a partner — accomplishing the goal with which Molly set out to “die for sex” in the first place. Wanting their love story to end on a happy note, Molly and Neighbor Guy say goodbye for the last time soon before Molly begins hospice care.
Neighbor Guy is one of the most prominent fictionalized aspects of “Dying for Sex”; Meriwether describes him as “a composite of a few of the partners Molly had,” and their final scene together in Episode 7 as “a way to continue the journey we felt Molly had been on in the podcast, that was cut short. That night in the hospital is the intimacy and the connection that, later in her life, Molly decided that she was really open to, but then died before she got to that place.”
“Nikki was really on board with that. It actually was really moving to her that we gave her the end of the journey that she knew her friend wanted in real life,” Rosenstock adds. And when it comes to the literal end, Molly’s death in Episode 8, Boyer’s input was even more essential.
Though Molly is intent throughout the series to “feel as much as possible,” she learns in hospice care that there comes a point where consciousness is no longer worth it. At one point, her palliative care social worker, Sonya (Esco Jouléy), sneaks her into the hospital’s labor and delivery wing to sit in a portable pool used for water births. When it doesn’t relieve her pain the way she expected it to, she realizes she’s ready for a treatment option she’d previously turned down: to be sedated until her death. The pool was never mentioned in the podcast, but when Boyer told Meriwether and Rosenstock the story, they knew they had to put it on screen.
“She has such a sense of humor,” Rosenstock says about Boyer. “That bath scene, when we were filming it, Nikki was sitting next to me crying, but also eating a piece of pizza. I was like, ‘Is this weird for you?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah!’ I think that was part of it for her. There was something really cathartic about it. And she knew Molly would be so happy that her story was being told in this way.”
Like Neighbor Guy, Sonya was another character fictionalized to fulfill the wants and needs Kochan had in real life. “Palliative care is thought of in one way, around dying and hospice. But it’s actually about improving quality of life wherever you’re at,” Rosenstock says. Indeed, palliative care is defined as treatment that focuses on alleviating pain and other symptoms rather than fighting the illness causing the symptoms — in other words, at the same time that an oncologist works to extend a cancer patient’s life, a practitioner of palliative care works to make that life worth living.
“What we were hearing when we were talking to people who had cancer is that it’s not always an option you’re told you have,” Rosenstock says. “You have to ask for it. You might not know that you can get this, or that it applies to you, that you have this option of another way of being treated. And so much of this show is about, ‘How can you feel as good as possible, and what makes you feel good?’ So having a palliative care specialist felt like a really important character, because, literally, their job is, ‘How can I make you feel good through the pain?’”
Sarah Shatz/FX
In the show, it’s Sonya who opens Molly’s eyes to the world of kink as a means of both processing what’s happening to her and simply enjoying sex in a way her body can still handle during treatment. As such, her escapades are nothing like the kind of sex normally seen on TV. For example, like Kochan did in real life, Molly prefers to keep her underwear on and generally avoids penetration. Instead, she becomes well-versed in using various props and toys, and her time with her partners is often marked by her giving them various commands from a considerable physical distance.
Neither Meriwether nor Rosenstock had extensive experience writing sex scenes, but a Valentine’s Day workshop hosted by the Writers Guild of America over Zoom helped them figure out how to approach those moments with confidence. “It actually was really helpful,” Rosenstock says. “It was like: ‘Be clear. Think about the people who actually have to [act the scene]. Don’t just write that they fall into bed, dot-dot-dot. Write what you want to see.’”
“Come As You Are” author Emily Nagoski worked as a sex consultant on “Dying for Sex” and helped the writers find that specificity. “She was like, ‘I love that you’re showing all these different ways of masturbating,” Rosenstock says. “And then she would point out to us, ‘These are the kinds of vibrators she would use. Make sure you’re tracking that. She wouldn’t use a dildo because she doesn’t like penetration.’ We really thought about every detail.”
Meriwether adds that they were inspired by Hulu’s “Normal People” to make sure that “the story doesn’t stop during the sex scene. The story continues,” she says. “If you’re putting the sex scene in, there has to be a beginning, middle and an end, and we have to learn something new about the character by the end of the scene, in the same way that any other scene would have that.”
The unconventional nature of the sex scenes quickly became an asset to the story. “The show taught me so much about what sex could be,” Meriwether says. “Like, how do we make a scene sensual, hot and emotionally interesting when, in some cases, they’re barely even touching? It’s what she’s saying to the other person, or what she’s not letting him do. That’s actually where the eroticism is.”
Plus, the lack of nude scenes for Molly meant there were more angles to shoot Williams with, and more creative ways to shoot the men. “We talked to a lot of different people, and in one conversation with a dom, we were like, ‘What would you like to see that you don’t normally see?’” Rosenstock recalls. “And she was like, ‘I would like to see a submissive man portrayed in a way where he’s not the butt of the joke. Where he’s actually sexy.’ We were like, ‘All right, we’ve got our marching orders.’ There’s that scene in the hotel room where we got that angle of her laying the guy down on the bed. Usually you see the woman laid down. It’s so small, but it really works in the scene. It’ll go by quickly for some people, but we got some pushback on that scene, and we had to insist on it. We were like, ‘No, we’d like to see this. We haven’t seen this.’”
In between each sexual discovery, though, were the moments “Dying for Sex” is really about: Molly and Nikki laughing together, crying together, sometimes bickering and ultimately choosing each other. “I told him I don’t want to die with him,” Molly says to Nikki after leaving her husband. “I want to die with you.”
“Early on in the process, we also were like, ‘Does each episode have to be them having conflict, because they’re the two main characters?” Meriwether says. “And then we realized that there was enough conflict — they didn’t need to be against each other. She says that her friendship with Rosenstock and other women, plus their shared experience writing about friendship on “New Girl,” made Molly and Nikki’s dialogue “the easiest thing to write.” The fact that Molly and Nikki only fight once in “Dying for Sex” is one of Rosenstock’s favorite parts of the show. “It’s something I’m really proud of,” she says. “Yes, they split apart once, but it’s not like they’re out of each other’s lives. They work through it together. They’re always there for each other. It’s very inspiring, and that’s how the real friendship was, too.”
“When I got to the end of the podcast, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s the last time I’ll hear them talk,’” Rosenstock says. “And the show should feel that way. Like, ‘I wish I could just keep watching this friendship forever.”
Sarah Shatz/FX