New York. Billie is a woman in her 30s who seemingly has it all: she is married to a caring husband, manager Cooper; has two lovely kids; and lives in a suburban house. However, secretly she longs for the sexual excitement of her life when she was a student and single. When she crosses paths with her ex-lover, the wild Brad, a record producer, she starts hanging out with him and writes down her fantasies about him. Cooper reads her journal on the laptop and is very upset, and even confronts Brad to stay away from Billie. Feeling remorse, Billie tries to spice up her sex life with Cooper, like having sex in a pool of a random house at night. Cooper even gets hit on by his boss, Francesca, but declines. Things get back to normal between Billie and Cooper—but just as she settles down, she changes her mind and rushes off to see Brad again.
“Sex/Life” unravels like a more direct, female version of Wilder’s film “The Seven Year Itch”, depicting marital problems after the couple’s lives entered a certain routine with time. It owes the most of its intrigue to a great performance by the leading actress Sarah Shahi as the heroine Billie, but also to screenwriter Stacy Rukeyser who has a certain sense for conjuring up a few clever, humorous dialogues, since her specific touch can be sensed in the three best written episodes; 1, 2 and 8. For example, in the first episode, Billie wants to have sex with Cooper in bed, but as they start, he cannot focus, as he is more interested in watching a sports game on TV behind her. After that, Billie gets her vibrator, but its batteries fail her too, and the crying of the baby is heard downstairs. Her frustration is almost palpable. Billie’s narration then comments: “It’s been 18 months since the last time Cooper went down on me. I expelled an entire human being in half that time.” In episode 8, a prude, conservative mother confronts her about going to a sex party, and Billie has a perfect response: “I never judged you for not liking sex. So I expect you to not judge me for liking it, either”. In another episode, while sitting at a station, an old lady gently cautions Billie that her lactating breasts have caused two wet spots on her shirt. You rarely get a TV series so brutally honest these days, which is something that should be complimented.
Unfortunately, the rest of the episodes, not written by Rukeyser, are less inspired, and often feel more like a soap opera, following always the same pattern: Billie going back and forth between her husband Cooper and her ex-lover Brad. It would have been good if she could make up her mind after a dozen of such repetitions. Because this way the story is just going around in circles. The dialogues from episode 3 onwards become too stale, schematic and ordinary. A triple psychological analysis of the situation Billie finds herself in is interesting, though: one interpretation could be that some people are simply never satisfied with whatever they get in life, and always strive towards the illusion of something better. Another could be the old saying that there are two types of guys—the ones that are good lovers; and the other that are good husbands—and that she wants both, even though no man can be both. This is hinted at in the now legendary sequence in episode 3, where Cooper follows Brad to see what he has what he doesn’t—and then Brad turns around in a shower, revealing he has a bigger dick (the only scene in the entire series that this is shown). Billie herself says at one point that she has 85% of all she wants with Cooper, but also needs “that other 15%”. A third one is the bitter realization that Billie’s days of youth are behind her, as she has now settled down and can only be a mother to her kids (the next generation), but refuses to grow old and still runs back to Brad, the symbol of her youth and days of carefree sex. Her escape to Brad is a vain attempt to escape the passage of time and turn back the clock. In that sense, she is a tragic character, torn by her refusal of accept fatalism. “Sex/Life” refuses to enter into moralizing, and has just enough spark and passion to outweigh its more repetitive storyline in the middle episodes.
Grade:++
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