Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sex/Life’ On Netflix, Where A Woman Wants Her Wild, Sexy Pre-Marriage Life Back

Why does TV always portray marriage and family as the death of everything people once enjoyed about life? This is something that has been going on for years, and we’re frankly tired of it. Sure, marriage isn’t easy, but there’s still a lot of fun — even sexiness — to be had. Which is one of the things that aggravates us so much about the new Netflix drama Sex/Life.

SEX/LIFE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Dance music plays, and a dreamy scene of a woman dancing appears. “There was a time in my life when I felt free. And the world was full of possibilities.”

The Gist: Billie Connelly (Sarah Shahi) is a mother of two living in a big house in Connecticut. As she breastfeeds her youngest, she fantasizes about those days when she would go clubbing in New York every weekend, having lots of wild sex with guys, especially a particularly intense relationship with a record label owner named Brad Simon (Adam Demos).

Her marriage to Cooper Connelly (Mike Vogel) is everything it could be, especially after the unstable relationships she had during those wild times. He’s handsome and in great shape; he’s kind and giving; he provides all the stability she craved. He was even a very giving lover — before they had kids. Since then, their sex life has fallen off a cliff, with Cooper more interested in work and being too tired to perform when she does initiate.

She calls her bestie, Sasha Snow (Margaret Odette), a law professor who is still uncompromisingly single, about the fact that she’s been craving going back to her old self, concerned that she’s not living the life she wants. She also tells Sasha that she’s thinking about Brad. To her credit, Sasha, who sees Brad in the club as she talks to Billie, tells her that she chose this life, and that Cooper is too good to let go.

But this is getting to Billie so much that she sits late at night, wide awake, and writes about the old days in a journal on her laptop. We flash back to the days when she and Sasha go to a particular club in Soho, and how she met Brad. Their first night together was extraordinarily hot, but when he says “trust me,” for some reason she thinks she can do that, even though they had just met.

The next morning, she comes downstairs to see Cooper reading the journal. “Who the fuck are you?” he demands. He bends her over the kitchen island and she enjoys the intensity, but it freaks her out. She goes into New York to see Sasha, but is in for a surprise.

Sex/Life
Photo: SOPHIE GIRAUD/NETFLIX

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Sex/Life feels like a bad Lifetime movie crossed with old-fashioned Skinemax soft porn. It’s also got the anything-goes vibe of UnREAL, which is the show creator Stacy Rukeyser is best known for.

Our Take: Sex/Life is an example of why the axiom “less is more” exists. The first was just too much of everything. Too much of Billie whining about not getting railed by a guy. Too much voice over that reads like a bad Harlequin novel. And way, way, too much of Shahi naked.

How is that possible, you ask? We’re absolutely not prudes when it comes to nudity on our screens. We’re not obsessing over it like Mr. Skin might, but when it makes sense for the story it’s makes things more realistic. And the fact that Shahi, whom we’ve mostly seen on network and basic cable fare, is so comfortable with her body that she can disrobe on camera so much is always a welcome sight. But she spends at least half the episode topless or completely naked, and after awhile it feels like a narrative crutch.

We get it: Billie had a lot of sex, in a lot of different ways with a lot of different guys. We not only hear about it via her extremely annoying voice over, where she is supposedly writing in this “fuck journal” of hers, but we see it in scene after scene. The point was made repeatedly that Billie wanted wild sex and she wasn’t getting it with Cooper.

We’re not sure what Rukeyser is trying to accomplish with Billie. Are we supposed to feel for her and get on her side that her husband isn’t giving it to her hard and fast on the regular? Are we supposed to root for her and Brad to get back together, despite the fact that Brad seems like a complete asshole (and a not well-acted asshole, at that)? Are we supposed to think that poor Cooper, who seems to be mostly the perfect husband, is the one at fault because he’s too damned tired to be always DTF?

What puzzles us about Sex/Life is that we’re not sure if Billie is supposed to be a sympathetic figure or some sort of sexual antihero, who’s willing to cheat on her husband because she just needs to get nailed. Sure, there’s this whole “losing yourself” angle; to be honest, it’s likely something most married people go through once life intervenes, kids are born and passion dissipates. But the message we’re getting isn’t that Billie is horny; it’s just that she’s horny and looking for her old life back. But, as Sasha told her, she chose this life, especially for its stability. The fact that she’s now regretting it makes us give a big fat shrug.

Sex and Skin: Did we mention that Sarah Shahi is naked through a decent amount of this episode? There’s lots of heads between legs in the first episode, as well.

Parting Shot: For some reason, Billie is really upset over Cooper’s aggressive sex and goes to see Sasha in New York. But after banging on Sasha’s door and coming in, she sees Brad, because he stayed there overnight.

Sleeper Star: We’re going to give this to Mike Vogel, because he’s been stuck with so many “generic handsome guy” roles over his career, we just want him to do something for once that’s different. Can someone give him the role of “disfigured villain” on a show?

Most Pilot-y Line: Lots of them, but the most egregious scene is Billie walking in on Sasha giving a musician a blowjob, and Sasha giving a thumbs up, still with her mouth occupied, when Billie says she’s going to go.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Sex/Life is a show that has no idea what kind of message it wants to send, besides maybe the fact that it would be awfully nice if people could boink like rabbits while having a busy family life.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Sex/Life On Netflix

source: nypost.com