We talk a lot about the female gaze in pop culture – like, a lot – but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a TV series that gets it quite so right as Dying For Sex.

The title of this one says it all: it’s an eight-parter about Molly (Michelle Williams), a woman with incurable cancer who’s desperate to explore each and every one of her sexual fantasies before… well, you get the picture. Unfortunately for her, though, her sweetly devoted husband, Steve (Jay Duplass), might look hot when he’s disappointed and wearing a blazer, but he can’t endure so much as half a blowjob without crying.

As Molly puts it, her boobs make Steve think about death. “He’s the caretaker and martyr, and I’m his patient. And that means he won’t touch me,” she laments to her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), about 20 minutes after she learns that her cancer has metastatasised into her bones. It’s not until she sits down with Esco Jouley’s Sonya, the psychologist on her palliative care team, that she realises what’s number one on her bucket list: an orgasm with another person.

“You could start exploring,” says Sonya, after a non-judgmental chat about leather and bondage. “There’s a whole world out there.”

Watch the trailer for Dying For Sex below:

Sonya isn’t exaggerating, as Molly discovers when she leaves Steve to become one of those fully-realised women who has sex while wearing jewellery (“I want to be so emotionally stable that I make eye contact every moment a man is inside me… even during doggy style”). She has a lot of work ahead of her, however. Especially as, a) male doctors absolutely freak out whenever she even so much as hints that she’s a sexual being, b) her cancer is causing extreme vaginal dryness, and c) every time she gets close to orgasm, she disassociates from her own body.

Starved of intimacy, Molly is hungry for comfort, touch and that indescribable sensation that comes from being seen as desirable. Her body has become alien to her; something to be monitored, scanned, operated on, pumped full of radiation and chemicals. It’s a series of appointments with masked medical professionals. It’s little wonder that sex – really good sex – has become so integral to her mental wellbeing and stability.

Part of the show’s charm is how matter-of-fact it is about fetish and fantasy. Molly masturbates, invests in a bumper-sized bottle of lube, dabbles with penis humiliation, figures out her kinks, attends sex parties dressed as a “pop princess who’s secretly fucking all the Spice Girls”, faces down her shadow self and wonders aloud how to get what she really needs from the people around her. All of this, and yet there’s nothing gratuitous about any of it: it holds up female desire as something sacred, and it empathises rather than objectifies always.

The show takes much the same approach to cancer, a word that forever strikes fear into people’s hearts, whether it’s their own or that of someone they love. It’s little wonder that Molly compares sharing her diagnosis with Nicky to, say, pushing her best friend off a cliff. That she’s sick and tired of being talked over by therapeutic radiographers, as if she were nothing more than a piece of machinery herself. That she hates the inevitable ‘pity face’ of anyone and everyone who finds out she’s in the ‘stage four’ group. And, while Dying For Sex does, of course, lean into the world’s cancerphobia hard (how can it not, considering its subject matter?), it does so while gently reframing the narrative. A patient doesn’t have to be powerless to their disease, and palliative care isn’t about waiting for death; it’s about figuring out how to live, and live well, because – please hold my hand for this bit – your body knows how to die. The waiting, however long it is, should be a sacred time… in spite of any terminal secretions. 

Perhaps the best part about the series, though, isn’t its musings on sex and death; it’s Williams’s perennially perfect hair. Kidding! It’s how it tackles love and friendship, obviously. Molly and Nicky are just wonderful; they chat easily in the shorthand of all best friends, swearing and laughing their way through life’s toughest moments, whether that’s dealing with breakups, hair transformations, DNR forms or emergency vibrator deliveries in the middle of the night. And Molly’s connections with the others around her – whether that be Steve, Sonya, Dr Pankowitz (David Rasche), her mum (Sissy Spacek) or her new neighbour (Rob Delaney) – are fully realised to the max. There are no two-dimensional characters to be found here, just as there are no unbelievable relationships.

As if that weren’t enough, we also have the sizzling chemistry between Williams and Slate, the pitch-perfect performances across the board and the amazing soundtrack to contend with. Throw in the intoxicating blend of humour and heartaching inevitability, and you have a series that has the power to make you feel happy, horny and sad – sometimes all at the same time. It will make you want to figure out what your life is missing every bit as much as it makes you want to ring your favourite person and tell them you love them. And, yes, it will emotionally wreck you a thousand times over, so make sure you have a box of tissues on standby for each and every episode, basically. 

I promise it’ll be worth the tears by the end of it all. 

Dying For Sex premieres on Friday 4 April exclusively on Disney+ in the UK, with all eight episodes available at premiere.

Images: Sarah Shatz/FX