'Sex/Life' Showrunner on the Meaning Behind the Famous Shower Scene
Sex/Life is the latest Netflix drama to attract a lot of attention thanks to raunchy sex scenes and full-frontal nudity. The show tells the story of Billie Connelly (played by Sarah Shahi), a suburban wife and mother who begins to fantasize about her wild-child past and, more particularly, her ex-boyfriend Brad (Adam Demos).
These fantasies unexpectedly become reality when Brad reappears in her life, ready to make their relationship work eight years after it ended.
Meanwhile, Billie's husband Cooper (Mike Vogel) has come across the journal where she keeps her deepest—and sexiest—secrets, and is willing to do anything to be the man of Billie's dreams.
What follows is a "nostalgia-fuelled wild ride," showrunner Stacy Rukeyser told Newsweek, as Billie explores her past and present in an attempt to find herself again.
Unsurprisingly, this leads to an intense rivalry between Cooper and Brad, which comes to a head 20 minutes into Episode 3, "Empire State of Mind."
Cooper follows his wife's ex into the gym—and then into the showers, where the camera lingers on the naked Brad in a jaw-dropping moment.
The scene quickly went viral on TikTok and became one of the most-searched topics related to the show. Fans made reaction videos or shared their response to the shower scene on Twitter.
One fan tweeted: "Cooper was never the same after that shower scene with Brad."
Another viewer posted, "I literally screamed," and a third wrote, "Watched Sex/Life on Netflix and that shower scene has got to be a prosthetic..."
Rukeyser told Newsweek that the nude scene was "never about" Brad and his penis, it was about Cooper and his "obsession" with Brad and Billie.
She explained: "It was really important to understand what Billie was missing and to make them the sort of most beautiful, sparkly, nostalgia-fuelled version of the best sex you ever had and the impossibly sexy men you had it with, and otherwise I think it's harder to be along for the ride.
"A lot of people are saying, 'Oh, I get it now.' And the joke from the TikTok and memes is like, 'Oh, I get it now' from the shower scene, and it was never about that.
"The shower scene is about Cooper. It's about his obsession and how far down the rabbit hole he has gone and what the effect of reading his wife's journal has been."
Rukeyser adds that the show's frequent sex scenes were vital to tell Billie's story.
"The intimate scenes were really about showing what's keeping Billie up at night. It was really exciting to take an empowered-female look at intimate scenes, and so many times when it's a show that's even allegedly about female sexuality, it's really about the kind of sex that the man wants and whether or not the woman is going to come to like that kind of sex too," she said.
"This is really just about the kind of sex that we think women are remembering or fantasizing about or wanting and the kind of experience that we want and then everything goes into that.
"There's a lot of romanticization of the sex. There's slow-motion, there's this gorgeous music, there's the jewel-tone lighting and it's really about Billie's experience and what she's going through. The camera does sort of hang on the male bodies this time, even a bit more than on the female body, because that's what she is looking at. That is what her gaze is."
Sex/Life is streaming on Netflix now.
