I spent the last week watching all of season 4, finished last night, and just read this post. Since I have nowhere else to share these thoughts (the only other person I know who followed this show is no longer available to me as a discussion partner) I will post them here - beware of spoilers and lots of show-specific stuff most here will probably not be interested in.
I have been a huge fan of MOS, but the last season was a bit of a mess (sometimes glorious, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes head-scratching). It had some great moments, but also more than a few clunky ones, and the show seemed to have lost its sense of what it was trying to do. I don't know when the producers learned (or decided) that Season 4 would only have 10 rather than 12 episodes, but the last couple of episodes definitely had the feel of trying to accomplish more than they could handle in their time limits, and I think they needed one more season to fill out the story and tell it completely. The series has never really been a docu-drama; Masters and Johnson were real people of course, and the show does cover some of the actual events from their careers and lives, but most of the details of the show are so different from the history and biography that it became clear they were not even pretending to be fact-based (which I do not criticize, it allowed them to tell a more interesting story). But I have to believe that they originally were planning on getting to the more bizarre and unflattering period of M&J's work in the 70s and 80s, which included their eventual divorce, and self-created irrelevance in the field of human sexuality just as it became a matter of life and death during the HIV outbreak.That would have provided the framework for the producers to make a full and coherent story. We get hints of that with the thread in Season 4 about "Conversion Therapy" (a term which sounds to my ear like an anachronism, though I am not sure what they actually called these kinds of attempts in the 1960s and early 70s), but it is handled in a clunky and abbreviated way - making me think they had planned on doing more with that in the missing two episodes, and perhaps one more season. It is also surprising and a bit disappointing to me how they wound up portraying Virginia Johnson's character. I think Lizzie Caplan has done some of the best work of any actress on television in this role over the last four years, but for some reason this show, run mostly by women, seemed to go out of their way to transform Virginia into something of the villain of the story, seemingly validating most of the sexist and patriarchal accusations and assumptions the period characters had about her in the first two seasons (that she was an ambitious, self-centered, bad-mother slut). This view of strong, independent woman as the source of evil is mirrored in the story of Dr. Nancy Leveau, and consistent with the introduction of Master's old girlfriend as the kind of supportive, affirming housewife option that got away that the series finale suggests would have been a better alternative future for Bill. And then the show implies that it was Virginia Johnson who was most responsible for the more virulent homophobic turn that M&J's research eventually took, even though my sense is that the antipathy toward homosexuals in their work was mostly pushed by Masters, and that disagreement over this was part of what eventually ended their marriage and partnership (that is all from my memory of the time; I have not read the biography that loosely inspired the series, which probably clarifies all of this). Meanwhile, the uptight, submissive first wife is the main character to grow and mature and reap the benefits of first the Civil Rights and then the Feminist revolutions of the 60s and 70s. Also, one bad sign for any period drama is when a main character accidentally winds up at Woodstock (I think I remember Matthew Weiner saying something like that a few years ago). It is almost as if the producers were worried that they had made Johnson/Caplan too admirable in the first few seasons, and wanted to balance that with some weaknesses. Master's story at first seemed like it was going to be about how love and sexual freedom healed his emotional wounds from the physical battering he took from the Pater in childhood; but by the end they seem to be telling his story as being deceived and entrapped by a series of women who don't really love him. I would love to read something by the show runners about this, and whether, as I suspect, canceling the show at least one season early prevented them from telling their whole story, and left a picture unintentionally distorted against Virginia and in favor of Bill. On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 11:44 AM, Bob Jersey <[email protected]> wrote: > > The critically-acclaimed Showtime series ended its fourth season with > Masters and Johnson's wedding, and producers thought that was as good a > point as any, though at least linear viewing had been slipping... Variety > <http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/masters-of-sex-not-renewed-season-4-finale-1201930270/> > (link) > > B > > -- > -- > TV or Not TV .... 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