Showtime's New Masters

Homeland's home wagers that sex is as dramatic as violence

In the pilot of Masters of Sex, Dr. William Masters (Michael Sheen) has a hard time getting his university to support the research that will eventually make him and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) famous. To the academy in 1956, studying sex is perverted. To Masters, it's just science. "There are libraries on how babies are born," he says, "and not a single study on how babies are made!"

TV in 2013 has a related problem. We have channels full of dramas about how life ends but scarcely any about the process by which life begins. Even on cable, sex plays backup...

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