But there’s a bigger problem here, the biggest one Masters of Sex Season Three faced and failed to surmount: None of this matters, because none of it happened. It is indeed possible to make historical fiction that dances between the raindrops of reality while still traveling in the direction of the storm: Boardwalk Empire deftly incorporated real gangland figures into the story of its imaginary or heavily fictionalized ones, and wound up become a story about why the latter never amounted to anything while the former became famous. The Americans mostly avoids actual people except in TV soundbites, but still maintains the basic battlefield arrangement of the Cold War in the Reagan Era, using its foregone conclusions for dramatic effect.
By this point, however, Masters has proven it can’t handle historicity. No matter the liberties taken with the particulars of their lives, Bill Masters, Libby Masters, and Virginia Johnson were real people. The broad strokes of their personal lives, when they met and how they lived and when they got married and when they got divorced, are all known to us. The specific and tangible nature and impact of Masters & Johnson’s work on human sexuality is known to us in great detail. So unless the show is suddenly going to become alternate-history science fiction, we know Bill and Virginia get together. We know he was never arrested, much less publicly humiliated or legally convicted, for pandering or molestation. We know their publisher didn’t destroy their reputations out of pique. To suggest that any of that might come out differently is either to imply you’re willing to alter the timeline of society in a way that distorts rather than reveals, or to admit you’re openly wasting our time. I want a temporal refund.
I reviewed the bad finale for the bad third season of Masters of Sex for the New York Observer. Failure can be fascinating.
Tags: masters of sex, new york observer, reviews, TV, TV reviews