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Previously: Review: 'Masters of Sex' Season 3, Episode 2: If 'Three's a Crowd," Four Spells Trouble The Syllabus "From now on, the best of everything is good enough for me," man-on-the-make Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) boasts in Alexander Mackendrick's acidly beautiful portrait of the Manhattan media elite, "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), and though Bill Masters (Michael Sheen) may lack Falco's flashy manner, he expresses his ambition in much the same terms. "It's not enough," he tells Virginia (Lizzy Caplan) near the end of "The Excitement of Release," balking at Playboy founder Hugh Hefner's offer to fund the pair's future research in return for their "seal of approval." With glowing reviews, strong sales, and several prospective investors—in addition to mountains of hate mail and a member of the Committee for Decency's warning that "Hell is a real place"—"Human Sexual Response"...

On Masters of Sex, the critical reception to Human Sexual Response has become so overwhelmingly positive that Gini wonders, "Why doesn't someone just compare us to Jesus himself?" (She'll have to content herself with Copernicus and Galileo, who Bill and Gini are likened to despite the fact that neither astronomer ever developed or utilized a massive vibrator named Ulysses.) Not everyone is as enthused — Bill is confronted later by a man from the Committee for Decency, who tells him hell is a real place. "No worse," Bill counters, "than St. Louis in August."Still, the afterglow of the critical reviews is so intoxicating that Bill and Gini finally kiss, and while we saw plenty of intimate moments between the two of them in the first two episodes — from Gini's delivery room to their old-married-folk squabbling at the lake house — this is the first real sexual contact between Bill...

Showtime Masters of Sex recap: “Three’s a Crowd” (July 19) As Human Sexual Response approaches its release date, Virginia is faced with a difficult decision regarding her pregnancy. Sensing that Virginia being an unwed mother might bring heightened scrutiny to Masters and Johnson’s work and relationship, Bill and Libby arrange for Virginia and George to legally marry. Bill hires Dr. Wesh (played by Maggie Grace) to fill in for Virginia. Bill takes on a high-profile infertility case in the king and queen of a Middle Eastern country. Not A Euphemism: “I’m making pigs in blankets.” — Libby Ow: “The McCormicks are … Continue reading →

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Masters of Sex made a bold return Sunday. The Showtime drama’s season three opener was less about sex and more about the consequences that accompany it — kids, that is. It’s now 1966, four years from when we last saw Bill Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) at the conclusion of season two, and they’re getting ready to publish their groundbreaking book, Human Sexual Response. Both are still struggling to meet the demands at home, however — a part of their lives the premiere chose to focus heavily on. For starters, Virginia’s children have grown up considerably: she accidentally walks

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We've spent much of the first two seasons of Masters of Sex watching Bill and Gini struggle — for space to work in, for recognition of the study as something scientific and not salacious, for enough funding to scrape by. At the start of season three, those struggles seem far behind them. When Gini emphatically announces, "We are the sexual revolution," she's not shamed or laughed out of the press conference she and Bill are holding upon the release of Human Sexual Response. The assembled journalists hang on and scribble down her every word, compare the work of the study to the work of Galileo, and award Bill and Gini with a legitimate, heartfelt slow clap at the press conference's end. It would seem Masters and Johnson have arrived.It's a little strange, then, that the bulk of the episode is focused on a two-way family vacation between the Masters and...

In the Season 3 premiere of Showtime’s Masters of Sex, “Parliament of Owls” (July 12), there’s a time jump to the mid 1960s. At the forefront of the Sexual Revolution, Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson are about to publish their study, Human Sexual Response, finally removing the shroud from the work that’s consumed them for the past decade. As they face the press for the first time, they flash back to a summer vacation the year prior in which Virginia is faced with parenting struggles, Bill is finishing work on their book and Libby Masters is pulling herself out from … Continue reading →

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The Syllabus On "Masters of Sex," the blink of an eye can herald a whole new era. "Parliament of Owls" opens in 1965, four years after the conclusion of Season 2. But longtime lovers and professional collaborators Bill Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), in Boston to publicize their forthcoming book, "Human Sexual Response," have barely opened the floor to questions when the series fires up the time machine once more. Though not nearly as delicate as last season's gorgeous, regretful triptych "Asterion," the episode transports us to a weekend at the lake four months earlier, amidst the chaos that erupts when Virginia, Bill, his wife, Libby (Caitlin FitzGerald), and a gaggle of fast-growing children navigate the shoals of human sexual response in all its forms. Read More: Watch: 'Masters of Sex' Season 3 Trailer Takes the Revolution on the Road Introduction to Intimacy with Bill Masters From...

So what if the Fourth of July has already come and gone? In its Season 3 premiere Sunday night, Masters of Sex proved the fireworks don’t have to stop when Independence Day is over.

For months now, we’ve been reminding you that the Showtime drama’s third season would pick up in 1965, as Virginia and Bill prepare to present their sex research to the masses. Now that the season’s first hour is over, though, it’s clear that Virginia and Bill’s study is the least shocking thing about the episode.

Before we get your thought on Masters‘ return,...

There are a few key elements of Showtime’s drama series Masters of Sex, about the famed human sexuality studies of Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, that are in dire need of being worked out. And as the series enters its third season Sunday (10 p.m.), a time-jump to 1966 — the year their groundbreaking book Human Sexual Response was published — seemingly fixes one of the main problems. And that was the drag that season two had on the storytelling. The first (and so far best) season was a thrilling introduction to these two real-life characters and the exceptional

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Dramas about real people are not documentaries, and can't be held to the same standards. The demands of one form are different than the other's. By necessity, events and people need to be compressed, or tweaked, if not wholly invented at times, to serve the storyteller's needs. Ideally, you get a story that captures the spirit of the real person, even if the details aren't quite right. But there's still a reason writers choose a real person as their subject rather than simply making up everything out of whole cloth. A fictionalized account has to deviate from the historical record to a degree, but there comes a time where there are so many changes as to make the whole thing seem pointless. Showtime's "Masters of Sex" has never presented itself as a wholly factual account of the lives and careers of pioneering sex researchers William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson...

Masters of Sex's second season found Masters and Johnson exploring sexual dysfunction (including Bill's), Libby Masters getting involved with St. Louis' racial politics, and the show entering the Kennedy era. In the final scene of the season, against the backdrop of the JFK's inauguration, Masters (Michael Sheen) and Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) are resolutely moving forward with their work, but not without having endured a series of personal and professional failures of a sort. The CBS feature about them made sex an implication rather than a focus, presenting it as squeaky clean rather than scientifically rigorous. When Bill concocted a...

The watershed seventh episode of "Masters of Sex" (Showtime), "All Together Now," brought the show into focus for me as a screwball romantic comedy for the post-privacy era. It has a "marriage plot" that happens to be a true story. We know going in that sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson were married shortly after their magnum opus, "Human Sexual Response," was published in 1966. They had become a couple a decade earlier, when they recruited themselves as subjects for their laboratory studies of sexuality at Washington University. The show plausibly imagines, and actors Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan touchingly convey, that the researchers were not motivated entirely by a zeal for science. It is, however, liberating for them to be able to tell themselves that it's all for science, a motif that was introduced in past episodes, with test subjects who happily engaged in extra-marital sex, but only under the aegis of science.

Their names were synonymous with things folks didn’t discuss in polite company in the ’50s, but agonized over in private — until their 1966 tome Human Sexual Response made it downright fashionable to talk about sex. Now Showtime is bringing the life, and life’s work, of famed sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson to fascinating light in its new series Masters of Sex, which premieres Sunday, Sept. 29 at 10/9Ct. Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon) and Lizzie Caplan (New Girl) are engrossing as Masters and Johnson in this beautifully crafted character study culled from the 2009 book by critically acclaimed biographer […]

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