“Sex/Life,” Netflix’s new series about marital dissatisfaction and monogamy, sets out to ask several big questions.
Inspired by the book “44 Chapters About 4 Men” by BB Easton and created by Stacy Rukeyser, “Sex/Life” is at least at first organized around the diary kept by Billie Connelly , a fixture from her past who intrudes upon her present; she writes all about him in her diary.
All the raw materials are here either for great art or great fun, or both; questions of what it means to be committed to life to one person have only gained currency in the everything-on-demand internet age.
It’s as though provocation is equivalent to having something to say: Endless shots of nude characters in intimate settings, from one-on-one sessions to a somewhat startlingly raw group sex party, are this series’ key means of communicating information, but there’s not enough on this show’s mind to justify pushing them quite so far.
But “Sex/Life” resorts to the broadest sorts of Stepford clichés in depicting Billie’s neighbors and communicating her discontentment, suggesting that the writers don’t have a handle on its material.
Most galling of all is that this is territory in which Netflix has recently succeeded.
For a show about the basic instincts, it’s unusually removed from anything recognizably human; for a look at what it means to heedlessly seek fulfillment, it’s surprisingly sour and mean.