And to tide us over as we await that indignity, here’s Netflix with an ostensibly steamy, actually terrible drama about a suburban housewife haunted by the carefree, promiscuous life she lived a decade ago as a music-loving party girl in New York.
Inspired by BB Easton’s 44 Chapters About 4 Men, a self-published memoir whose ascent calls to mind the Fifty Shades juggernaut, Sex/Life chronicles one woman’s descent into obsession with her ex-boyfriend.
In one of many violet-hued, lust-inflected flashbacks, we watch him rescue her from the clutches of a would-be rapist on the street outside some implausible hybrid of grungy Lower East Side rock dive and sweaty Midtown meat market.
Particularly now that streaming has expanded the largely uncensored pay-TV universe, there’s room for all kinds of programming aimed at grown-ups—including sexy shows whose target audience is female.
Has any real person ever rhapsodized over “game-changing sex” or, in the throes of lust, referred to a certain body part as a “joystick”? Some utterances consist almost exclusively of cliché: “This neighborhood was ground zero for our crazy nights on the town,” Billie recalls.
While TV’s depictions of women’s sexuality have improved since Sex and the City, it’s still rare to see a series created by a woman , who recruits a mostly female writing team to flesh out a libidinous female lead and hires all female directors as well as a female intimacy coordinator to capture that character’s pleasure.