Watched: Masters of Sex, Season One
I don’t think I was expecting this to be as nuanced and clever as it turned out to be - the only Showtime series I’d previously seen was Total Recall 2070, and the less said about that the better. This was wonderful, though - Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan shine in the lead roles of Masters and Johnson, and it very rarely goes from being an honest period piece to a caricatured stereotype of the 1950s.
It’s alarming quite how much comes down to the demands of the period, too - given that the show is about sexual research and the politics and personal drama surrounding it, it brings a lot of 50s-era repression and shines a light on it without being condescending or preachy. One of the most compelling threads throughout the series was of the unversity provost, Barton Scully, a fictional amalgam of a few men that William Masters knew at the time. Despite the lack of truth behind his character, his storyline exposes the very real practice of ECT (and worse) in “treating” gay people in the fifties, and the human tragedy that comes out of it.
It’s thrilling in a way that Mad Men isn’t, because while the props are equally sedate and quaint in this series, every beat in this show is filled with something powerful - a discovery here, a revelation there. Every episode skips along, expertly weaving multiple strands and sometimes drawing them together, creating sparks. There’s very little room to sit back and relax.
The entire series is twelve episodes long, and it was just commissioned for a second series to air in 2014. I can’t wait.