Sex/Life

The Problem With Wanting More

I keep thinking about how Sex/Life begins as if it’s trying to smuggle a private fantasy into suburban daylight. That’s the show’s real subject, more than desire or marriage or “choosing yourself”: the awkward, almost comic fact that adult life is full of competing selves, and they don’t arrive politely. latestnetflix.com's read is that One version of Billie Connelly is a wife in Connecticut, shuttling kids, organizing a household, living inside the kind of competence that turns invisible.

Another Billie is still wired to the reckless, bodily memory of who she was before the mortgage and the nursery. The series doesn’t ask whether that split is true — of course it is, in some form, for almost everyone. The question is what happens when a show decides to place that split under neon lighting and call it a soap.

What struck me most, watching it, is how seriously the series takes the visual language of yearning even when the writing is often being impish about it. Creator Stacy Rukeyser, who came from UnREAL with a decent instinct for weaponized intimacy and the hypocrisies people call “emotional honesty,” builds Sex/Life like a glossy fever dream of middle-class panic. It’s a Netflix series, yes, and you can feel the platform’s appetite for something that’s easy to click into and difficult to ignore.

But it’s also part of a long television tradition of domestic melodrama — Desperate Housewives with less satire, The Affair with fewer literary pretensions, Mad Men stripped of period varnish and left with the aftershocks. The show knows that the real scandal isn’t the sex. It’s the admission that a good life can still feel like a life lived at half volume.

The conversation around the show, when it arrived in 2021, was predictably centered on its nakedness — particularly that shower scene with Adam Demos, which became a kind of pop-cultural shorthand for “Netflix horniness.” But the more interesting thing, to me, is how quickly the series turns that attention back on the viewer. It’s not merely asking us to stare. It’s asking why we’re staring, and whether our embarrassment is a clue about the culture more than the scene.

There’s a faintly mischievous quality to the whole enterprise, as if the show knows it has to meet a prudish public halfway by being outrageous enough to be discussed, then sly enough to insist it’s about female desire as a site of self-knowledge. Whether it fully earns that claim is another matter. I’m not entirely sure it always does.

Sarah Shahi is the reason the show works as often as it does. She has the face of someone who’s learned to hold two thoughts at once and the posture to match: one shoulder always a little set back, as if Billie is permanently bracing for impact or temptation, maybe both. Shahi’s performance isn’t subtle in the usual prestige-drama sense, and I don’t think it needs to be.