Like “The Americans,” “Homeland” belongs to a genre that cannot really depend on evocations of sexual honesty. The chemistry between Carrie Mathison, a psychologically complicated C.I.A. agent, and Nicholas Brody, a former Marine Corps scout sniper and prisoner of war, is certainly palpable, reliant on questions about who Brody really is and what his commitments to terrorist ideologies may or may not be. (Cable drama is so full of concealed selves you rarely know whom you are sleeping with — the desultory Don Draper, or the desultory Dick Whitman; Dexter the vigilante serial killer who likes you, Dexter the vigilante who will send you to prison or worse.) Carrie and Brody seem to have genuine feelings for each other, but the sex between them is still not a pure expression of emotional hunger. When they took to loud and energized lovemaking on a motel room dresser last season, the undercurrent was Carrie’s need to get Brody to return to his covert government work. The titillation the audience may have experienced is quickly erased when the camera shifts to a roomful of government agents listening remotely. Among them, queasily, is Saul, Carrie’s older, paternal mentor.

Sexual voyeurism has itself become a running theme on cable dramas, but even there we are shortchanged. Based on the research of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, in the 1950s, the forthcoming Showtime series “Masters of Sex” offers us sex in all its clinical glory. The initial episode has Michael Sheen, as Masters, peering through a key hole as we get a broad view of the joyless act he is observing between a prostitute and her unappealing client. His accessories are a clipboard and a stopwatch he uses to keep track of how long it takes the various parties to climax. At home in his own life, sex too is work — his wife is having a hard time conceiving even though Masters himself is a fertility specialist. Procreative sex for the age of procreation fetish.

It is this sort of thing that makes one subversively nostalgic for the era when movies like “Fatal Attraction” and “9 1/2 Weeks” made currency of raw sex and untrammeled desire. Several years ago I happened to watch “Bull Durham” and what had escaped memory was the vibrant physical use Susan Sarandon and Kevin Costner made of each other within the context of a comedy about minor league baseball. The scenes are more explicit than anything we might see today. The film seemed so from another time that it almost felt futuristic. Yes, children, sex really was once fun.