Masters of Sex, Ep 1.01: "Pilot" an imperfect but accomplished introduction to a fascinating new series

Masters of Sex, Season 1, Episode 1: “Pilot”
Written by Michelle Ashford
Directed by John Madden
Airs Sundays at 10pm ET on Showtime

The most immediately striking element of Masters of Sex, Showtime’s new hourlong drama based on the lives and work of Dr. William Masters (Michael Sheen) and his assistant Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), is that its approach to historicity is utterly distinct from the series it’s most likely to be compared to, AMC’s Mad Men. Where Matthew Weiner’s series, especially in its first season, wrung laughs and pathos from the social and political disparities between the America of 1960 and the present, Masters of Sex (which opens in 1956) is more interested in how things haven’t changed much at all, in many important respects.

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Masters of Sex is the only current series that comes to mind that – for now, anyway – is closely based on real people and events (as opposed to the more liberty-taking likes of Orange is the New Black and Boardwalk Empire), which gives it a unique set of possibilities and challenges; thankfully, its pilot suggests that Ashford has a very good grasp of precisely what she wants to explore; it’s not without missteps, but it’s a confident, funny, poignant, and bold piece of work. Taking Thomas Maier’s book of the same name as its inspiration (Maier also consults on the series), Masters opens with Dr. Masters, a gynecological surgeon, outlining his most important character trait while accepting an award: “I am a man of science.” He then proceeds to move onto his off-the-books work: observing the sexual act and taking diligent notes. Dr. Masters wants to learn everything he can about what happens, physiologically speaking, to the human body during sex, with a particular focus on the female orgasm. His first female subject, Betty (early standout Annaleigh Ashford), finds Masters well-meaning but more than a little lost: what he’ll need, she says, is a female partner.

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Enter Virginia Johnson. Lizzy Caplan hasn’t had a regular TV role since Rob Thomas’s late, lamented Party Down, and it’s wonderful to have her back. It’s a rich role; Virginia is no mere confidant or acolyte, but a complicated, believably messy character, and Caplan is more than able to convey her intellectual curiosity, romantic skepticism, and maternal care. Her scenes with Sheen are just as loaded and ambiguous as they need to be to suggest that their relationship will be able to remain the series’ central facet without growing stale anytime soon, which is crucial for a series where human chemistry is so central.

While “Pilot” gets a lot right, it’s still a pilot, and some of the usual pitfalls crop up. Beau Bridges gets saddled with the role of Dr. Masters’s boss, whose only function so far is to explain repeatedly why he can’t officially sanction the research so that it can be conducted in-hospital, and the great Margo Martindale is similarly tasked with being the one-note puritanical office naysayer (for now, at least). The most problematic character going forward, though, is easily Masters’s wife Libby (Caitlin Fitzgerald). Her tireless, thankless devotion to her husband is going to cause fatigue if the writing staff don’t find ways to give the character some agency or purpose beyond her (clearly struggling) marriage, and the her teleplay-ordained repeated use of “daddy” (Libby and William are trying desperately to conceive a child, without luck) is more unsettling than poignant.

If you know where these characters are headed based on the real Masters and Johnson’s respective biographies (I do, but I won’t say more here for the time being), it’s fascinating to ponder just how Ashford and her collaborators plan on pacing and structuring the rest of the season – not to mention future seasons, assuming those are forthcoming. For now, though, there’s more than enough for anyone unfamiliar with the subjects to latch onto, especially since their field of interest is still, nearly 60 years later, still, somehow, a hot-button issue for so many. The sex scenes are graphic, but go even further than the likes of certain HBO brethren in terms of using these scenes to explicate character and/or serve the plot. There’s so much – pardon the pun – fertile ground to cover on the topic and from this particular angle, and the fact that this pilot nails so many comic and especially dramatic moments (the scene where Nicholas D’Agosto crosses a very serious line comes to mind) is incredibly encouraging. It just remains to be seen if a series that takes sex seriously without descending into straight-up soap territory can actually thrive.