Michael Desmond Photography
Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson and Michael Sheen as Dr. William Masters in Showtime's "Masters of Sex"
Let's beET’S BE honest here: 90% of the viewers for this show are tuning in expecting to see some sex.
And they will. There are dirty words and discussion of reproductive organs and lots of topless women simulating sexual arousal.
Yet for all that, title and subject matter notwithstanding, “Masters of Sex” often feels prosaic.
In that sense, it’s true to its source, the pioneering sex research of Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson.
Masters and Johnson got a reputation as sensational iconoclasts, because almost no one before them had studied sex as a physical function.
But as “Masters of Sex” makes clear, Masters and Johnson’s work itself was far more academic than lurid.
It was revolutionary because it helped hurl the subject of sex, which had been tucked in our closet since the Puritans, into the public conversation.
As portrayed by Michael Sheen, Masters himself starts out as a repressed man of his era. He has a stilted, almost formal relationship with his wife, who watches Elvis Presley on “The Ed Sullivan Show” while Masters pours himself martinis.
Subtle? Not so much.
He’s surprised when, early in his research, a hooker tells him most women sometimes “fake it.”
He asks his new, young research assistant, Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), if that’s true. She says sure, so they can move on to whatever they’d prefer to be doing.
Once Johnson brings those intangibles to the research, it takes off.
We also watch a relationship develop between Johnson and Masters, played particularly well by Caplan.
Yet much of “Masters” still feels clinical, as if it isn’t sure how to remain faithful to the real-life story and still give the TV drama the sex appeal viewers expect.
Spoiler alert: A show about sex isn’t necessarily the same thing as a sexy show.
dhinckley@nydailynews.com
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