I have never properly understood why summer should be a time set aside for just the lowbrow. Dumb movies, dumb books, dumb music — why is it that when the sun comes out, everyone assumes that the only culture people are interested in consuming is the shallowest stuff available? Fortunately, not everyone follows the seasonal prejudice. This Sunday, Masters of Sex starts its second season. Hopefully the fact that it is premiering in the middle of an otherwise empty July, and the five Emmys it was recently nominated for, will finally catapult it into its rightful place among the other cable shows widely considered great, like Mad Men and True Detective.

Right now, Masters of Sex doesn't have the prominence or the ratings of those other shows, despite the fact that it has everything going for it. Bill Masters is played by Michael Sheen, widely accepted in Britain as one of the great actors of his time. And Virginia Johnson is played by Lizzy Caplan, who is completely brilliant in the role, even though she made her name as a hugely underrated comic actress in shows like Party Down, and doesn't get to use those considerable gifts here. The story is based on the true story of the Masters and Johnson study of human sexuality, and the true story has some advantages and disadvantages. The "cliffhanger" of season one was whether Masters and Johnson would end up in bed together. You don't even need a Wikipedia search to know that one. I mean, it was called the Masters and Johnson report in the end. That's what they're famous for.

But the turn in season two is nonetheless significant, and it promises to make the show much more interesting. The first season, much like Mad Men, was about a thrilling look back into the lost world of past values. The charm of a show like Masters of Sex is to see what made people in the past blush. They blushed at everything. They blushed at words like "nipple" or "ankle." They truly belong to an antique past. What makes us blush now? The sex columnist at New York magazine recently admitted that the only article that ever made her blush while talking to an editor was the recent subject of rim jobs:

When a male friend admitted he once sat on his willowy blonde ex-girlfriend's face, I gasped. "But her face was so beautiful!" I protested. He was perhaps double her weight, built like a lumberjack, and hairy from neck to toe. "Were you even clean?" another friend interjected. Imagining her porcelain face wedged up the nastiest part of his body, all I could do was repeat, "But her face was so beautiful!" I said it first in dismay, then as an accusation: "So beautiful! You sat on that beautiful face!" He shrugged, and smiled a smile that can only be described as a shit-eating grin.

We have come a long way from Masters hesitating over the phrase "female orgasm," unsure whether it existed or not.

And yet what is so remarkable about the Masters and Johnson story, at least in the first season of Masters of Sex, is how scrupulously rational they were about sex. The ethical standard of research in the 1950s was such that they felt comfortable hiring strangers to have sex with each other. This was done in the name of science. And in one of the craziest research decisions of all time, apparently true, Masters and Johnson have sex with each other in order to establish their own understanding of the research processes. Science for them means separating the sexual act from its mere humanity. They want to consider it as a biological process. And what their contemporaries object to in the end is not the attempt to treat sex scientifically per se, but the publication of sexual images, the view of the vagina provided by the camera-in-a-vibrator they developed. Talking about sex was much more dangerous than having it.

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What the second season promises is the next level. Because what Masters and Johnson found out, as lovers, while they undertook the study of rational sexuality, was that intimacy is always much more complicated than biology. "We could have an affair," Johnson tells Masters after they've acknowledged their relationship. "Millions of people do, but an affair is a pedestrian thing. The story always ends the same." "Does it?" Masters asks. "We have participated in the study many times, but at your apartment something was different." "There were no wires," she suggests. This, I guess, is how scientists in the fifties told each other that they were in love.

There are two competing historical forces at work in this brilliant show. The first is the rationalization of sex. We, the current audience, are at the end of that learning process. We all know everything now. The mysteries of virtually all sexual practices and of the anatomical questions involved in them have been revealed. They are strictly grade-school stuff. But the other problem, the problem of the second season of Masters of Sex, has not been even remotely resolved. In the question of the relationship between sex and intimacy, the science has not helped us much at all.

And that is what makes the show so relevant, in the end: that we know they're doomed to failure. When it comes to their own lives, they aren't masters of sex at all. They are prey to the mystery that science cannot solve. In other words, they're just like everybody else.

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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