Sometimes the hunt for a good television show seems no different from the hunt for what is popularly called the G-spot. I’m thinking of all the couples who ask me to help them find a new show to enjoy together. It’s the same basic concept with roughly the same success rate, adhering to a certain mating ritual between network and viewer: The first episode manages to seduce, but the real pleasure — the plateau, the climax, the afterglow! — is so elusive that it enters the realm of the mythic. Some shows get it done but never really achieve it. A lot of times, as viewers, we just fake it.
Sunday nights are when we attempt to make love to the dramas: One show will get our blood pumping every time (“Breaking Bad”), while another show may seem irresistible, but all the moaning is manufactured (“The Newsroom”). Most shows fall into a pattern, a predictability, and start to take their prowess for granted (“Homeland,” “The Walking Dead,” even “The Good Wife”). Some shows, you’re still trying to decide whether you regret hopping into bed with them at all (“Ray Donovan,” “Boardwalk Empire”). Some you’ll get into bed with, still, after everything they’ve done wrong! I mean you, “Mad Men.” (You, too, “Downton Abbey.”)
So I guess when we ask whether “Masters of Sex” is worth adding to our DVR queues, what we’re really asking is whether it’s good in the sack.
The new Showtime drama (premiering Sunday night, after “Homeland”) is certainly an excellent candidate for close study; it’s easily the only show in the fall crop of series that makes me want to watch more, more, more, and not just because it’s got sex in it. Hoo-boy, does it have sex in it. It’s technically soft-core sex and entirely narrative-appropriate, but there’s sex from the front, from the back, from the side, from the top, from the bottom — mattresses a-squeakin’ and EKG needles a-zippin’ back and forth. (When you send me e-mails denouncing the collapse of quality television and expressing your measured outrage, be prepared to get one back from me asking why on Earth you were watching in the first place.)
When I wrote a short review of “Masters of Sex” two weeks ago in my fall television preview, I had seen the first two episodes and gave it a grade of B+, because it seemed like a sturdy launch — a show with a good sense of what it’s trying to accomplish. Now that I’ve seen four more episodes, I could easily nudge that grade up to an A. The characters get better and more complex, the story builds, strange things start to happen and now I can’t wait to see how it’s interweaving plots unfold — yes, I think that’s generally what Masters and Johnson would have called the plateau stage.
Based (somewhat) on journalist Thomas Maier’s absorbing 2009 biography of renowned sex researchers Virginia Johnson and William Masters, “Masters of Sex,” created by Michelle Ashford, checks many items off the clipboard: The lead actors are excellent. The writing has a confident pace and expert touch when it comes to balancing its more emotional moments with a refined wit. The setting and period details — the 1950s American Midwest — reflect just how high viewers now set the bar when it comes to not only the right furniture and fashion but also the right feel.
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