Showrunner Michelle Ashford talks Masters Of Sex

AVC: We see quite a bit of female nudity, but very little in the way of male nudity. Is that a thing that’s forced on you by the network or studio, or is that a conscious choice?

MA: No, not at all. The great thing about where we are in terms of on the dial, we never get notes like that. We can do pretty much anything we want. It’s interesting. I think it has a lot to do with just gut reaction on my part to things that make me uncomfortable, or don’t make me uncomfortable, like that’s the only barometer I can go on. I think I have to say it’s just a gut thing when I see something, and I go, “I don’t want to look at that.” I mean, I know it does seem like we have a lot of female nudity, and we do, but so much of it got left on the floor, if you can believe that.
In terms of male nudity, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a victim of the same kind of conditioning of “Why do we never really see male nudity in movies or television?” I can’t explain it. But you know what? Here’s what I don’t want to do: I don’t want someone to say to me, “Well, when are you going to full-frontal male nudity?” It’s really not a box I’m inclined to check off just to be able to check off a box. [Laughs.] But I actually appreciate being reminded of it, because it makes me think, “Well, when we do come around to those kinds of things, let’s look at it, and see why are we portraying it that way.” Although, to be honest with you, I’m not sure if Showtime would be okay with full male frontal nudity. I’ve never really asked that.

AVC: You’ve talked about the Scullys quite a bit, but is there a chance that they’ll be back in season two, even though those actors have moved on to other things?

MA: It’s funny, we had Betty the hooker for three episodes last year, and then she had to go do Kinky Boots, and we were bemoaning the loss of Betty because we found her to have a really fun energy. She was a character that we had no intention of bringing back after the pilot, and then once we cast it we thought, “Oh, she’s so much fun.” Then she had to leave. But she’s back now for the entire second season. She’ll be in every episode, and with Allison and Beau. Here’s another thing I discovered only after the end of the first season, which is anybody that’s leaving, I’m really compelled to bring them back in some way. We’ll answer the questions like, “What happened to the Scullys?” but I think there’s a little bit of a pause in that story. Both of them will come back, but they’ll come back in a way that I think will be surprising. Because the thing is, we have to move through time. So even in this second season, we’re going to move through more time than we did in the first. That actually, in an odd way, allows for characters to come back having reinvented themselves in ways that will be, I hope, really interesting.
AVC: What are you looking at for season two?

MA: Well, the hospital, which was true to life—Masters did make his presentation at Washington University, and it did go very, very badly. It took longer than it did in our show, but he did eventually have to leave, and he went and had to open his own practice. The weird thing about our show is every year is going to change pretty radically. Their lives and their careers really went through major transitions, and so the show is going to have this weird quality of feeling different every season. It won’t be like with Mad Men where you’re always coming back to the ad agency. This takes these very odd turns, so the hospital is done, and what you need to see is that they went out on their own. So that is what season two is about. How they get there and what form it takes, hopefully, will be interesting. They’re just embarking now on the second phase of their career. And, of course, their lives together. But there will be a very different cast of characters. A few characters will stay the same and come along, but there’s going to be a whole different world that opens up as a result of their moving. The world has a little bit more to do with the outside world coming in. Very slowly, the outside world is more and more going to seep in because, in fact, they ended up on the cover of Time magazine. They became very public figures and very much a part of what was going on culturally, and so one of our huge challenges is, “How do we tell that story and not feel like it’s some kind of commentary on the bigger world? How do we make it intimate and personal to them?” But it is true that the real world started to intrude in a big way.

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