Niki Cruz
FX’s Dying For Sex is one of the best shows of the television season.
The show focuses on Molly (Michelle Williams), a 40-something who finds out that her cancer is back and now it’s terminal. Instead of spending the last of her days with her husband (Jay Duplass), she chooses her last moments to be with her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate). As Molly comes to terms with her terminal diagnosis, she also vows to reclaim her sexuality, solely focusing on her pleasure and partners who see her as a sexual being and not her disease.
Based on the podcast by the late Molly Kotchan and Nikki Boyer, the series is a beautiful exploration of dying, living in the present, female friendship, and confronting repressed trauma head on. That description alone might be a hard pill to swallow, but once you hit play, you’ll soon discover it’s a funny, often raunchy, and hearbreakingly human tale of a woman wanting to reclaim something for herself. At its best, the show details what it means to be a soulmate through the winding friendship of Molly and Nikki, a friendship that’s so tender and honest that it never gives way to the usual pitfalls and tropes.
For music supervisor Maggie Phillips, the FX series Dying For Sex was personal, having dealt with two cancer diagnoses in her immediate family. Philips, whose work as a music supervisor spans years in film and TV (The Dropout, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fargo, Ingrid Goes West), explains, “It’s such a human thing to go through, there’s laughter, and there’s despair. There are so many big emotions you go through. I think I got to go through my own process with all these feelings that I had trapped inside of me during the year and a half that we were battling cancer as a family. In some ways, I felt so close to Molly and Nikki’s journey.”
Awards Radar sat down with Phillips to discuss picking songs for Dying For Sex, the intimate production, and balancing a show with multiple tones.
Niki Cruz: Dying For Sex is one of my favorite shows this season. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen before. It’s such a beautiful exploration of female friendship, caregiving, and it breaks conventions of how we define people by this disease. What made you say yes to this project?
Maggie Phillips: Well, I had worked with Liz Meriwether on The Dropout, and I loved it, and I loved working with Liz. I read the scripts for Dying For Sex, and fell in love with the project. It’s really one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on. I was so inspired by the story. Cancer is something that’s close to home. I was enamored with the story and the characters, especially the friendship between middle-aged women. I also loved the way Liz and Kim (Rosenstock) injected humor. The podcast is funny too, but the way they capture the humor along with the dying? I agree with you; I haven’t seen anything like it.
It was one of those shows where I got excited, dropped everything, and couldn’t wait to listen whenever they asked me to listen for a spot. There was endless inspiration. There were so many tears while listening for the show, but it was just so satisfying as a project, and Liz and Kim are really collaborative. Sometimes, it’s a lot of people listening, but for this one, it was my music, my taste, and what I wanted to hear there, and that’s a nice place to be in as a music supervisor.
NC: By the way you described it, this whole production seems really intimate. What was your process in finding those moments or specific scenes that would be elevated with music?
MP: They were telling me which spots to listen to, so I wasn’t picking the spots, but I was picking the songs, and the process was just a lot of back and forth. It was Liz, me, and Kim, and there weren’t a lot of producers, as far as I knew. I felt like we were given some independence with the tone, like they trusted us to capture it, and I worked really closely with the editors, too. There were definitely moments when we tried songs, but it was fewer songs than we imagined. It’s interesting that you said the word intimate because I never thought about that while I was doing it, but it really was. Kim and Liz are so cool, collaborative, and open, and there’s no ego. There was room for a lot of trial and error. It’s a difficult tone in that it’s super emotional, and you want to, in some ways, capture what’s going on in either Molly or Nikki’s head, but you don’t want to manipulate the audience in any way so that was creatively, the trickiest part.
NC: I’m glad you brought up tone because obviously it’s important, but especially in this show, which, while it is about dying and there are cry-your-eyes-out moments, there’s comedy in there, too. How do you tackle tone with songs?
MP: Sometimes it’s really just moment to moment. Sometimes, it’s more “I have to put more thought into this.” But with this, I went with my gut and what felt right. It was throwing stuff up against picture and seeing what felt right.
NC: Cancer touches everyone, and obviously, dying is universal. I think the show really does a great job of making that digestible for people. I thought about Paula Pell’s Nurse Amy and when she’s bringing Molly, Nikki, and Moly’s mother through the very natural steps your body goes through when you’re actively dying. I’ve never seen that on television and there was something so beautiful about it because otherwise it’s all so taboo.
MP: That was one thing that when I was watching my mom and brother go through their cancer, I wasn’t prepared for it. I blame our society. Sickness is a taboo subject, admitting weakness in your body or fallibility. No one talks about their illnesses. Then, with death, people put the sick and the elderly in houses and just forget about them and just pretend they’re not going to die. The show felt very honest. I thought the laughter and the humor that they approached it with felt very true to what I went through.
NC: And if that isn’t enough, there’s also a level of empowerment, too. Molly’s owning and examining her sexuality and she’s dealing with her body’s response to trauma, and all of it is for the first time.
MP: That’s another thing! I think most women, if they’re lucky, learn how to do that in their lifetime, and that’s something that I can relate to as well. I feel like they tackled all of that in a way that I haven’t seen before, absolutely.
NC: Episode 6 has some amazing music moments. My favorite track was of course, Chappell Roan’s My Kink is my Karma, for such a sex positive show, that song is perfect. That scene, in particular, feels like such a moment. What was it like to get that song for this show? That must have been amazing. That song is everywhere.
MP: It was one of our most obvious choices, and we discussed, “Do we replace this?” While we were making the show, she blew up. And then I was like, “Is she too out of the moment? And then I thought, well, for that moment when Nikki puts it on for a New Year’s Eve party, Nikki is still in the present and would be listening to it. I felt it was authentic to her and she’s listening to it with her best friend, but yeah, I loved it. We had to beg them to give us a price break because the budget was really tight.
NC: What is the most rewarding part of your job?
MP: I mean, look, there’s a lot of BS. There are budgets and clearances and so much stuff. That’s not fun. But I do it all for the moment when I find a song that, when I put it in a picture, I feel something. I feel like I’ve added to this picture. I’ve transformed a moment. I’ve transformed a scene. I’ve added to the story, and it makes me so happy, it does blend my love of music and visual art. It feels like magic.
You can currently stream Dying For Sex on Hulu.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
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