Masters of Sex Review

I have to admit when I really like a show, I do fall in love with it. As far as I can see, the acting is great, the writing is great, the characters are great, and the time period is very realistically portrayed. This is the 1950's. It is a very conservative America. Not as much in the political sense as in the cultural sense. This was before all hell broke loose in 1964-65. The Civil Rights Movement was taking place and gaining ground in the South, but this is white upper class America we are seeing. A white hospital with white doctors and white secretaries. Because that is the way it was then.

Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan are terrific as Masters and Johnson. There is a dual consideration to their relationship. They do have a professional relationship as Virginia Johnson is Dr. Bill Masters' Research Assistant. She is a woman with talents. Instinct, ambition, innovative with ideas and very good with people. Dr. Masters is the most talented Doctor in this teaching hospital, but he is a reserved, even repressed man. The two are exact opposites, and yet compliment one another professionally. They also compliment one another personally, as they take part themselves in the Sex Studies that Dr. Masters has begun in his study.

Lizzy Caplan is fabulous as she is sexy, intelligent, and complex. She is an ambitious woman, like a supremely interested and involved student, and is persistent in her goal of uncovering truths for the study and keeping the study and the office working and intact. She is unafraid, and knows she wants more out of her life. She has had a somewhat shady, unsteady life up until, apparently, taking this job, which changes her life. Lizzy Caplan has been said to have a "quirky sexiness" and that she has. She is also a terrific and "different" actress.

Michael Sheen as Dr. Bill Masters is also a driven person. Restrained personally, but unafraid to be a revolutionary, and even an outcast, in his prime love affair, the scientific study of human sexuality. BUT he also has a personal side that is calculating in getting what he wants, when he knows what he wants. In Season One, he does discover what he wants, both personally and professionally. I will say that without giving too much away.

A series with a grounding true story that blends heartache and jealousy, live with death, and everything in between.