Dying to live
Dying for Sex showrunners Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether join executive producer Nikki Boyer to discuss their adaptation of Boyer’s eponymous podcast, which charted her friend’s sexual adventure after learning she had terminal cancer.
When Molly Kochan was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer, she decided to leave her unhappy marriage and embark on a series of sexual adventures to help her feel more alive in the face of her incurable illness.
Together with her best friend Nikki Boyer, she then sat down to discuss her journey in the podcast Dying for Sex, where she revealed she wasn’t just fighting breast cancer but was also dealing with some trauma from her past.
Now, the podcast has been adapted for television as a series also called Dying for Sex, which debuted in the US on Hulu and internationally on Disney+ on April 4.
Michelle Williams (Dawson’s Creek, Brokeback Mountain) plays Molly, who, after being diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer, decides to leave her husband Steve (Industry’s Jay Duplass) and begins to explore the full breadth and complexity of her sexual desires for the first time in her life, with support from her ‘ride or die’ Nikki (It Ends With Us star Jenny Slate). Rob Delaney, Kelvin Yu, David Rasche, Esco Jouléy and Sissy Spacek also star.
Produced by 20th Television, the eight-part series is written and co-created by Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether, who exec produce alongside Williams and Boyer. Katherine Pope, Kathy Ciric, Hernan Lopez, Jen Sargent, Marshall Lewy Aaron Hart, Shannon Murphy and Leslye Headland are also among the EPs.
Here, co-showrunners Rosenstock (Only Murders in the Building) and Meriwether (The Dropout) join Boyer to discuss the adaptation process behind the show, how they blended fact and fiction to tell Molly’s story, and what it was like for Boyer to see herself portrayed on screen.
What was it about Molly’s life story and her experience with her illness that made you want to team up and turn it into a TV series?
Meriwether: The podcast was just so, so gripping and funny and moving and just an incredible mix of tones. I felt like I’d never heard a story like this being told before in this way. It seemed to take on the biggest issues that human beings face and do it in such a heartwarming, loving way, and it’s just so human and honest. I remember listening to the podcast and immediately jumping on it, wanting to do it. I’d known Kim since my early 20s – we’ve been friends since our early 20s and we worked on New Girl together – so I immediately thought of her and I sent it to her in the middle of Covid.
Rosenstock: I was like, ‘I don’t want to listen to a story about a woman dying of cancer. It sounds sad.’ Liz was like, ‘But she’s also having a sexual awakening. It’s crazy.’ I was like, ‘Oh, yes, I’ll listen.’ For both of us, another huge thing is the tension [from the fact that] it’s a story about someone who is dying and healing at the same time. The juxtaposition between those two things felt so fresh. I don’t think I’d seen or heard anything like that before.
The show is a mixture of tones and genres, from comedy to emotional drama. How did you seek to get that balance right while also making it entertaining?
Meriwether: We’re comedy writers, and we had told them [20th Television] we were making a comedy, so we were on the hook for that. It was actually helpful, our background writing sitcoms, because we looked at each episode structurally and asked, ‘How do we find the funny story in the midst of all of this?’ There were definitely episodes later on where we gave up on that, or it was like, ‘OK, that’s not gonna happen for this moment in her life.’ But early on, it was helpful to approach it from a comedic place, just because it helped us move through some of those darker themes and bring the audience in, in a fun way.
The focus for us was not so much about genre in terms of ‘We need a joke every three lines,’ but it was like, how do we dig into the moments and allow them to be as human as possible, which means sometimes tragic, sometimes so silly, awkward, and sometimes all at once? We were just trying to rely on the fact that this was a real woman, these are real people. How would it have actually felt? And less on writing the perfect joke, which I love. We do love that kind of writing, but this felt like it was much more about the humanity of the characters.
As the series is based on Molly’s real experiences, how did you find the line between the truth and the creative licence you bring to the show as TV writers?
Rosenstock: One of the amazing things was that Nikki, who made the podcast, was an executive producer on this show. [She] made herself so available to us throughout the process, but also gave us tremendous freedom from the jump, in terms of allowing us to adapt this and use the podcast as source material and as a jumping-off point, and not needing to feel like we’re making a biopic about Molly’s life and to really let us find what story we thought was the most exciting one to tell for television, for a visual story. That was a huge gift. But then when we were like, ‘We need detail,’ she had this experience and she was willing to really go into some painful memories and tell us how it felt. A really cool part of this process was getting to work with Nikki.
Nikki, how are you reflecting on making the TV adaptation of your podcast and dramatising Molly’s story?
Boyer: I am bursting at the seams, filled with so much gratitude and love. But to be honest, I just went into the bathroom and had a moment to cry for like two minutes. And then I pull my shit together and I get back on. It’s the dance of gratitude and grief, and you can’t have really one without the other. You can’t have that deep love that you have for your friend without the same amount of grief. They measure equally almost.
How did you want to shape the story in your role as an executive producer?
Boyer: Molly and I did the Wondery podcast, and it was such a gift to be able to do that with the team at Wondery. We created this really well-rounded, beautiful thing. So when we went on to meet with showrunners, to potentially work with them, immediately Liz Meriwether walked in the room and it just felt like, ‘Oh, this feels like the safe space.’ She just gets it – she just got Molly and she got the story and the idea.
When she paired up with Kim Rosenstock a little bit later, I didn’t really know honestly where I was gonna fit in. Then they just kind of kicked the doors open and said, ‘We wanna talk to you as much as we can.’ I think they were a little nervous, to honest, that it was gonna be hard for me. And I’m like, ‘Well, I cry all the time, so we just have to get over that.’ But it was really healing for me to be a part of it. Once they understood that, we just dove right in together, so I got to be in the writer’s room, on the phone, creating timelines, just really digging in so deeply and that’s when I really knew I was in great hands because they were really honouring the parts that were true and knew what they were going to embellish and create upon that, and I felt really good about that. I still do watching it back. It feels to me just perfect
What were the things that you wanted to see from the TV show, the parts of Molly or the stories that you shared that you thought have to be included, and where was that creative licence?
Boyer: What I loved is that they really captured the stillness of Molly and also the spontaneity of Molly. She was a really thoughtful person. It just wasn’t about, ‘Let’s have sex, let’s be hot, let’s send a hot picture.’ It was really thoughtful. And her exploration of kinks and fetishes, although I was slightly judgy about some of them, she was just so open. I didn’t want that to get lost, but I knew immediately with Kim and Liz that it wasn’t going to get lost because there wasn’t that type of judgement. Liz said she wants this show to make the men clutch their pearls. That balance they created between being really sexy, but also really vulnerable and tender and also hilariously funny, was just this perfect recipe.
There were some things that they shifted and changed the timeline, like my relationship with my boyfriend and where we were at the time of Molly’s illness. But honestly, I loved the liberties that they took. Their version of this story, I love it.
You’re also in it. What was that like for you, seeing someone play you and following that journey?
Boyer: I loved it. At first I was a little like, ‘Oh, this will be fun. Let’s see what we’ve got.’ Then when I heard that Jenny Slate was playing the role, I remember just kind of breathing a sigh of relief because there’s such a warmth and a humour to her and I’m like, ‘Oh, she’ll be way funnier than I am, so that’s a bonus.’ But she is such a good actress, so present in her body and ready to take risks and have fun and try things on set, so when I saw her, I thought, ‘Yeah, that feels right. That feels like the perfect Nikki to Michelle’s Molly.’ That matched up really well.
What are your hopes for the series and what would you want people to learn about Molly and her attitude of embracing life?
Boyer: I hope that people can look at their own lives and say, ‘What is it that I want to do with the time that I have left,’ because we don’t know how much time we have, and what is it that really makes you feel like your most authentic self? It might be messy at first, it might be unpleasant, it might feel weird, but I think there’s an urgency of ‘Live!’ I think Molly would encourage everybody who’s watching this to light that fire under themselves.
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tagged in: 20th Television, Disney, Dying for Sex, Elizabeth Meriwether, Hulu, Kim Rosenstock, Nikki Boyer