When Elizabeth Meriwether told fellow “New Girl” scribe Kim Rosenstock to listen to the podcast “Dying for Sex,” Rosenstock was hesitant.
“It was June 2020, deep in one of the darkest times of COVID, a really rough moment,” Rosenstock recalled in a conversation with IndieWire. “There was an earthquake that happened, RBG had just died, and Liz was like, ‘Hey, do you want to listen to this podcast about a woman who dies of cancer?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be good for my mental health right now.’ And she was like, ‘No, it’s also all about sex.’ I was like, ‘What? OK, send me the link.’”
Meriwether and Rosenstock, along with millions of others, were completely hooked by Molly Kochan’s story, as told through conversations with Molly’s best friend Nikki Boyer right up until Kochan’s death in 2019. The two serve as co-showrunners on FX’s limited series of the same name, where Molly (Michelle Williams) embarks on a journey of sexual exploration in the final years of her life, with Nikki (Jenny Slate) by her side.
“The podcast just does something,” Rosenstock said. “It grabs you, and it and it pulls you into the story of this beautiful friendship between these two women, but also this look at a person during this part of their life that normally we don’t really have access to. The bravery and vulnerability that Molly showed by allowing herself to be documented in this condition was just so stunning to me. I had never witnessed that. I had never seen someone in that stage of dying, and the fact that she allowed herself to be recorded throughout it, and we can hear her voice, it all felt so special and alive and incredible to me.”
Rosenstock said that as much as the podcast is one woman’s experience (and wild sex stories), what struck her was that it was ultimately “the most profound exploration of the human condition” — “this experience of a woman who is both dying and coming alive at the same time.” She was drawn to Boyer (who serves as executive producer on the show) and to the “love story between two friends,” which makes the series so resonant.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: What was the process like of adapting the podcast — as opposed to maybe a book or play?
Kim Rosenstock: What the podcast does that’s so special and magical is it’s these two real people, and it’s their voices, and it’s the intimacy of that that is so moving. So how do we adapt this into a story for television where obviously we don’t have the two real people, and we don’t have that intimacy of hearing their conversation in your ear? How do we make it feel that intimate, and how do we give audiences the feeling that we had listening to the podcast, while making our own completely new thing?
The number one thing I was asking myself was “Who is Nikki?” We know Molly so well by the end of this podcast. But for the purposes of the adaptation, it felt to me like we had to really build out this character of Nikki and really tell the story of her as a caretaker, and what it means to take care of somebody through this illness, what it means to for her own life, the sacrifices that she has to make, what it actually involves emotionally, beyond just being somebody’s best friend.
Did your playwriting experience help you with adapting this story?
The fact that we [Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether] are both playwrights and we started out in theater… both of us had written stuff that went to some more heightened expressionistic places. We were able to tap into that in adapting this story. One of the things that we applied that to was Molly’s experience of sex. How do we dramatize what it feels like for her to have sex? We’re used to seeing sex scenes, but how can we show this differently? How can we actually take the audience on the journey of what her emotional experience is during these sex scenes? We then called on these tools, these more hyper-realistic modes of storytelling. Especially as the show goes on and we get to the final stages, it gets very theatrical. At one point it feels like a big play happening in her room.
How did you bring the real Nikki Boyer into the storytelling on the series?
Nikki Boyer is amazing and was one of our EPs. [She] was very involved in the process and gave us her blessing to do our own thing. But in the podcast she asked the questions. She’s the listener; she’s the reactor. They’re talking about things that have happened, and the joy is listening to them unpack and delight in the details of what happened, but nobody wants to watch a television show about two people talking about what happened. Our challenge was showing those things and then showing both of their experience going through it.
The other thing for us that we discovered along the way was Molly had, at some point in her journey of having all these sexual encounters, realized that what she really wanted was actually a deep emotional connection with somebody. She says at one point, “I think I actually want to fall in love,” Sadly, her life ended before she really got to have that kind of a relationship with somebody. But for us — and we talked a lot about this with Nikki as well — in our show, we wanted to give her that. So one of the things we did in our adaptation was we took a couple of the guys in the podcast who she has more emotional encounters with, and we sort of created this composite character, this neighbor character out of them [played by Rob Delaney] for her to have sort of messed-up, dark, very different kind of BDSM rom-com in the middle of this story. That was something that we found along the way.
The show goes to some dark places, especially with Molly’s trauma.
Her trauma is this information that we get three-quarters of the way through the podcast. For our show, we wanted to start off knowing that information and focus more on her actually learning to look at that trauma and figure out how to process it and heal from it — and what healing looks like, because healing is not a linear experience. Healing certainly looks different for everybody. We really wanted to show what it looks like to process something that happened to you in childhood as an adult and under these conditions, and that is what the actual Molly was doing.
I think it’s so beautiful, because she makes this discovery that sex was the way to healing for her, because sex was the thing she says made her split off from herself as a child. She is trying to put herself back together, and she realizes along the way why sex was the thing that she needed to use to do that. It wouldn’t necessarily be the thing for everyone, but it was specifically for her. It’s not about, “Oh, I’m healed, I’m better.” We wanted to make sure we weren’t showing it as an exorcism, but more of an integration of this part of herself into the rest of herself.
What was Nikki’s reaction when you came to her about the series adaptation?
I remember being really nervous about giving her the first draft of the pilot that I wrote, because this is her real story, you know, and the main note I got back from her was, “Can you change that name?” [Referring to one of the people in the podcast who is now a character in the show.] That was it. She just trusted us. A lot of people wanted to option this material, and she chose Liz because she just had a gut feeling that that was the right person, this was the right group of people.
Towards the end, it was really important to us to get these things medically right or accurately portray the real experience of being in hospice and in these final stages of this illness. Nikki had been there with Molly through the whole thing, so I would call Nikki at like, 11 o’clock in the middle of writing — she was like, “I’m here at any time for you.” We would just sit on the phone, and she would tell me exactly what she went through and what happened. I was always amazed that she was willing to be so generous, not just with her time, but emotionally — to go back into that time in her life, which is very painful, for the sake of the storytelling.
How has your working relationship with Elizabeth Meriwether evolved?
I’ve worked with Liz for so many years in so many different ways. She was the star of my first play that I ever wrote. She’s an amazing performer, she’s very funny, but I don’t know that she acted too much after. I moved to LA to work on “New Girl.” I had never written for television before, and I learned how to write television working on “New Girl,” and then I worked on “Single Parents,” which Liz also created with J.J. Philbin, and then she called me to work on this. We’ve had these different phases of our friendship and our careers together, and it was just really nice and exciting to be able to fully make something with her — and especially this story that’s about these two women who have been friends for over 20 years, we’ve been friends for over 20 years. It was nice to make a show about friendship with an old friend.
The podcast is just a slice of the full experience that Nikki and Molly are going through. You’ve spoken about pinning down the tone of this show — tell me a little bit more about that process and maybe what did and didn’t work along the way.
Yes, the podcast has a tone of its own. We were very drawn to that, and we wanted the show to have that feeling, that you can be laughing and crying at the same time. Liz and I are both traditionally comedy writers, and especially sitcom, so we have that muscle memory from all those years writing jokes. I think we’ve both pitched thousands of dick joke alts in our lives, and I like to say we brought that to this project. FX was so incredibly supportive of us making this show whatever we felt like it needed to be, and that was huge, having our studio and our network both supporting our our desire to explore the tone and explore genre. When we started, we were like, “OK, this has to be comedy. We said it’s a comedy,” but it’s also so many other things.
This story kind of veers in terms of how it feels from moment to moment, just like life does. Just like this experience of a woman who is both dying and coming alive at the same time, it feels like it’s many things at once… We weren’t trying to write joke-joke-joke, more trying to find moments of humor and levity and joy naturally where they sprung up in Molly’s emotional journey, and to then allow her and the show to sink into moments of despair and darkness where the character would do that.
How do you balance the comedy and drama of the series, making sex something real and important for Molly without letting the humor overtake it?
It was really important to us with the sex to never make what people’s sexual preferences were, or sexual desires were the source of the joke. The comedy was more in just the human interactions between people before and after and during sex, but not about what they liked, never to be making fun of what people liked — and to actually be celebrating that, to be showing this wide spectrum of what sex can be in a way that felt really respectful of all these different ways of feeling pleasure and feeling desired. As this show goes on and she gets sicker, we wanted to make sure we weren’t shying away from that, and that we weren’t romanticizing that.
It was hard. The final episode, she’s literally dying. So how on earth could we make this feel funny like this? It still has to feel like the show. And we found things like the hospice nurse who’s really jazzed about death and talking about it, we found natural ways to continue, to bring the humor through.
“Dying for Sex” is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
