‘Masters of Sex’ season 2 spoilers: Show boss on surprising time jump
When “Masters of Sex” returns on Sunday, you will see a combination of things you are very familiar with, and then things that you are not at all. Take, for example, all of the new guest stars … or that the show is going to make a gigantic leap forward at some point during the season to focus on a very different era in Dr. William Masters’ life.
The show is going to be taking a huge risk at some point in the middle of the season, and that means leaping forward a full two years into the future. We’ll obviously see Masters and Johnson in a different spot than they once were, and the same goes for the rest of the characters (who may or may not actually still be around). Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, show executive producer Michelle Ashford explained the reasoning for this, and how this leap will take place over the course of two episodes:
“I did know a little bit about where I wanted the series to end and that was in the beginning of 1961 so our series starts in the later part of 1958 and goes to the beginning of 1961. This is sort of an experiment, to be honest. Most shows, if they’re going to move through history, will end a season and then come back and it will be later, and we will do that as well but I thought, what if you took one episode and show how it moves through time, and you see how time affects relationships? For example, looking at children, if you just see them every day, they seem more or less the same. If you look at them in jumps from one year to the next, they change radically, as do marriages, as do friendships. Every jump is a little surprise in terms of where the character is now and it shows you how time works on people. So that’s one of the things that we tried in the middle of the season. It’s enormously complicated and I’ll leave it up to others to decide whether or not it worked.”
Personally, we love this idea and mostly because of the fact that the show is going by the beat of its own drum, and that includes recognizing that team means something. Even though two years in two episodes is a huge leap, at least they are not completely discarding that time and acting like it doesn’t matter. While these two years may not be as dramatic as others for Johnson and Masters (at least seemingly, since we’re not seeing a lot of them), they are still a part of their lives that needs to be touched on. The handling of this may also be different just because of the fact that this is a true story, and there is a certain weight of time behind that.
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Photo: Showtime