How do you get an audience excited to watch a person dying of cancer? How do you show a woman having a sexual awakening as her body is falling apart? Can a show about terminal illness also be about healing?

The premise of Dying For Sex is, in many ways, a study in contradictions. It’s also a bit of a tough sell. And nowhere do we need to sell harder than in “Good Value Diet Soda.” This pilot has to draw viewers in and assure them … “Hi, welcome, we’re just two geriatric millennials telling a story about bodies and sex and friendship and healing and dying and we’re going to do our best not to depress you and to lean into humor whenever possible and hopefully you’ll leave the series feeling a little more hopeful and less alone and at the very least you’ll know what a cock cage is – if you didn’t already. We don’t want to assume.”

And yet, right from the start we are asking the audience to get on board with a grim reality: Molly, a 40-year-old woman who is in a lackluster marriage and hasn’t done much with her life, receives a devastating diagnosis: she has stage four metastatic breast cancer. Click. “Oh no, where are you going? Come back. Don’t you want to know about the cock cage?”

Liz and I realized early on that in order to prevent the sad, inescapable truth about Molly’s health from eclipsing the rest of the story we would have to do something counterintuitive: lean into the reality of the situation as much as possible. And use humor to shine a light in the darkest of places. Also: we had promised the studio and network it was a comedy.

Tonally we took our cue from the podcast and true story that inspired the show. The way the real Nikki and Molly deployed gallows humor and cracked each other up in moments of despair felt so relatable. Being human is full of contradictions and we wanted this show to honor that. We wanted it to be about life as much as death. And about pleasure as much as pain.

Pleasure is another counterintuitive way of looking at a story about death. Yes, in this pilot, sex and death become inextricably linked for Molly from the moment she gets the diagnosis. She’s reeling from the news and simultaneously can’t shake these memories of a steamy sexual encounter from her 20’s that was the closest she ever came to having an orgasm with a partner. Even before it makes sense to her, she starts following this growing impulse to seek out pleasure wherever possible. And not just sexual pleasure. The very first thing Molly does after getting the diagnosis is find Nikki, her best friend, who brings her the ecstatic satisfaction of feeling truly known and accepted.

This show is a love story. Between a woman and her body. Between a woman and all parts of herself. Between a woman and her weird neighbor who eats like an animal. But most importantly, between a woman and her best friend.

If a traditional love story asks the question: “Who do you want to spend your life with?” Then our love story asks: “Who do you want to end your life with?” For Molly that person is Nikki. Towards the end of the pilot Molly makes the bold decision to leave her husband (and caretaker) of ten years and enlist Nikki, her scattered but undeniably fun and loving best friend, to take over. “I want to die with you,” Molly sheepishly ventures as they sit outside of the hospital. For everyone around them it appears to be a regular day. But for these two characters, with these words, everything changes.

So much of the pilot is about earning this decision. Why Nikki? We had to build the case. With big moments and countless little ones. The way Molly lights up when Nikki first appears. The quiet joy of passing a bottle of bright green diet soda back and forth. The effortless intimacy between them as they lie in bed, spooning. The tenderness with which Nikki challenges Molly when she tries to avoid the topic of her mother. The comfort of Nikki knowing Molly’s favorite soup. The fact that in the midst of this waking nightmare, Nikki continues to make Molly laugh. Like genuinely, uncontrollably, full-body laugh.

Yes, Molly’s husband is attentive and he cares about her a great deal. But he is only capable of seeing her one way: a sick person who requires his care. Molly knows if she stays with him she will spend whatever time she has left being defined by her illness. Whereas with Nikki she will be free to explore and expand. Our hope was that by the end of this episode the audience would understand why there was no one else on earth Molly could possibly choose but Nikki.

I had a file of quotes from the real Molly that I returned to over and over again while writing. Just to be reminded of the real person who went through this experience that I could only imagine. I was particularly struck by this metaphor she used to describe the way it feels to live with a terminal illness: “I can feel the finish line even though I don’t know where I am in the race and have found a new drive to run as best as I can.” I think of the pilot as being about the birth of this new drive for Molly. For the first time in her life she’s listening to her body and following her instincts about what feels good rather than what makes logical sense. There is nothing logical about cancer; it’s chaos. Logic is for people with time.

In the final moments, Molly lurches forward into this brave new world, with nothing but the overalls on her back and her best friend who can barely start her car.

Even though technically she’s dying, she’s never felt more alive.

Kim Rosenstock