The fundamental tension at the heart of the Showtime series Masters of Sex, a fictionalized retelling of the groundbreaking sex research study by real-life scientists William Masters and Virginia Johnson, is the question of whether love can be explained by measuring human sexual response — and, as a corollary, whether anyone, even scientists, really wants to reduce it to that.
Masters of Sex has the most moving ode to love and sex you’ll ever see
That’s a familiar conflict, like the endless battle between those who insist baseball games are won and lost on “intangibles” and the stat-devising Seamheads immortalized in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball.
As a devotee of baseball and love, I believe there’s room for both science and the wonders of that which can’t be quantified. And as we find out in season three, episode five of Masters, Bill, the data-driven character played by Michael Sheen, believes the same.
His paean to the inexorable nature of love and sex is one of the most moving monologues I’ve ever seen on screen or stage. It’s so poetic, I couldn’t possibly do it justice with my own words. So watch it:
Masters of Sex airs Sundays at 10 pm Eastern on Showtime. You can catch up with previous episodes on Showtime Anytime or Hulu.
