Review

Culture

Film & TV

Purpose

Romance

18 June 2025

5 min read

The Four Seasons and Dying for Sex hunt all of life for meaning

The TV shows joining academics exploring what it means to flourish

Giles Gough

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

Tina Fey and Michelle Williams.

A recent Harvard study revealed an intriguing relationship between religion and how well people feel their lives are going. The study suggests that there is a direct correlation between attendance at religious services and happiness.

The researchers defined ‘human flourishing’ as encompassing all aspects of a person’s life, including happiness, health, purpose, character, and relationships. Perhaps a snappier way to think of this would be “what does it mean to live a full life?.”

There must have been something in the air that leads to asking this big question, because two TV shows have come out close to the release of this study, both of which tackle what it means to have a fulfilling life. While science has only turned its attention to this topic recently, artists, philosophers and storytellers have been grappling with this one for centuries, and as science has neither Tina Fey, nor Michelle Williams, let’s see what the story tellers have to say

The Four Seasons

The Four Seasons is Netflix’s latest comedy drama series based on a 1981 Alan Alda film of the same name. In it, a group of long-time friends in their fifties, who regularly go on holiday with each other have their whole dynamic rocked when Nick (Steve Carell) tells them he plans to divorce Anne, (Kerri Kenney-Silver) his wife of 25 years. Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani) are the group’s only same sex couple, but their warm and hedonistic lifestyle is marred by Danny needing surgery for his heart condition, which he keeps putting off. Our point of view characters are Kate and Jack, played by Tina Fey and Will Forte. Initially positioned as the most normal and stable couple of the group, seeing the unhappiness in their friend’s marriages opens a fissure in their own relationship. Kate gets frustrated that Jack appears to turn into a hypochondriac when they’re in private, and Jack resents his embarrassing secrets being shared by Kate as the butt of a joke. As season one draws to a close, we are unsure if these two will repair their marriage.

The Four Seasons is a show about wanting your remaining days on this earth to be filled with meaning and passion. Dying for Sex has arguably the same motivation but on a tragically compressed timescale.

Dying for Sex

Inspired by the story of Molly Kochan and originally shared on the podcast of the same name, Dying for Sex follows Molly (Michelle Williams) as she receives a diagnosis of Stage IV metastatic breast cancer. In a moment of desperate clarity, she decides to leave her husband, Steve (Jay Duplass) and begins to explore her sexual desires for the first time in her life. Aided by her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate), Molly dives into the world of online dating, finding partners that range from the kinky to incompetent, and finally compassionate. Molly’s one goal is to experience an orgasm with another person for once in her life. An aim that is hindered by a childhood trauma of sexual abuse. Despite the edginess of the title, Dying for Sex is a heartfelt meditation on what it means to find love just as your body is shutting down on you. It includes perhaps the best depiction of the final stages of life for a person with a terminal illness, the show is worth it for that alone.

Yet one constant remains for believers and non-believers, and it is as trite as it is true; love is the key to a fulfilled life.

It is important to note that there is a class element to both of these shows. The Four Seasons places good-looking affluent people in beautiful locations and then invites you to feel invested in their relationship drama, like an episode of 90210 for people in their fifties. Similarly, Dying for Sex sees Molly receive some of the best medical care possible, by virtue of still being on her husband’s health insurance. In a country where free health care is not seen as a basic right, the luxury of the facilities she has to hand starts to seem conspicuous. But this is not oppression Olympics and we’re not here to compare people’s pain. The less money you have will certainly decrease the amount of time you have to ponder the meaning of life, but it’s not a question that should be avoided indefinitely.

The connection between ‘human flourishing’ may be the type of thing that might get jumped on by pastors around the world. But a note of caution is advised here as to how it’s used. Firstly, the Harvard study does not appear to make any kind of distinction between religions. So, if one were to use this study to endorse being a devout Christian, then the same could be said for being a Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu etc.

Secondly, if the church tells people that becoming a Christian will statistically increase their chances of happiness, it’s doing them a disservice because Jesus never promised that. He distinctly told his followers: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” That’s a difficult line to swallow in the world of retail religion, but it borders on false advertising to ignore it.

Lastly, as critics have pointed out, even if faith improves happiness, it doesn't make the beliefs automatically true! If used as a guiding principle, the pursuit of happiness could have you swapping churches, denominations, even religions until you find what makes you happiest.

These two shows stimulate an interesting thought experiment; whether a relationship with God would have made a difference in their lives? For Kate and Jack in The Four Seasons, the answer may well have been yes. For Molly in Dying for Sex the answer is a little trickier. Jesus doesn’t condone a promiscuous lifestyle, but the drive towards that was borne out of a fundamental lack of connection with her husband. The main thing that Jesus does promise his followers is connection, either directly with him, or with those walking the same path.

You can have a fulfilling life outside of God, it would be disingenuous to say otherwise. Yet one constant remains for believers and non-believers, and it is as trite as it is true; love is the key to a fulfilled life. Molly finally attains it when she finds true love, Jack and Kate begin to lose it when they fear their love might be slipping beyond their grasp.

But the one area where faith might just differ from the secular is that Jesus lived out his time on this earth as a walking talking example of perfect love. Patient, kind, quick to forgive. The kind of example that’s impossible to completely emulate, but still worth trying.

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Article

Belief

Books

Culture

Morality

21 July 2025

5 min read

Jane Austen’s satire helped her survive a dark culture

Amid folly and frailty, she allowed her characters the possibility of forgiveness

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Juliet Stevenson stars in Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius.

BBC.

Do Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines really get the happy endings they deserve? Not exactly, argues writer and journalist Julia Yost in her recent essay, Jane Austen’s Darkness (Wiseblood Books, 2024).

Far from an escapist Regency fantasy, Yost paints Austen’s world as one ruled by mediocrity and hatred. While believing that ‘Marriage is the heroine’s only defense against darkness’, an institution where goodness can put up a fight against moral bankruptcy, Yost also ultimately argues that none of Austen’s heroines, with the exception of Elizabeth Bennet’s in Pride and Prejudice, manage to triumph over society’s corruption.

Most Austen readers will be able to recite a list of her villains: Mr. Wickham, Mr. Willoughby, Henry Crawford… but Yost goes beyond this, pointing out that certain universal social malaises – greed, unregulated anger, lack of charity – infect even the supposedly nobler characters in Austen’s novels. For example, Yost interprets Emma Woodhouse’s mocking of Miss Bates, Highbury’s verbally incontinent spinster, not as a sign of immaturity, but as an expression of ‘contempt’ for a social inferior. Another character in Emma, Frank Churchill, is not simply a foolish young man trying to hide an engagement to one woman by flirting with another; he actively ‘enjoys toying with Emma’, and even ‘enjoys torturing Jane [Fairfax]’, his secret fiancée, by spending time with Emma in public. Eleanor Dashwood, Sense and Sensibility’s calm and collected heroine, is guilty of moral compromise by marrying the undeserving Edward Ferrars. Mr. Bennet, Elizabeth’s father in Pride and Prejudice, is an unreformed misanthrope. Vice runs rampant in Yost’s reading of Austen’s novels.

Not even the truly admirable men and women of Austen’s stories are spared from suffering entirely. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth marry under the threat of the soon-to-be-resumed Napoleonic Wars. In Pride and Prejudice, the Darcys’ marital happiness, we are told in the final chapter, is not quite enough to spread moral betterment among their family and friends: Elizabeth’s sister Kitty improves greatly, but Lady Catherine de Bourgh remains arrogant, Mr. Wickham retains his rakishness, and Lydia stays just as thoughtless.

For Yost, showing this universal moral malady does not weaken but rather strengthens the novels’ moral gravity. ‘Austen’s satire is salubrious’, she writes, and agreeing with the Austen scholar D.W. Harding, who, in his 1940 essay ‘Regulated Hatred’, argued that laughing at vice is a ‘means for unobtrusive spiritual survival’ amidst social and natural evils. Austen’s biting condemnation, in other words, is the only way to dispel the power of human vices.

As I was reading Jane Austen’s Darkness, I found myself agreeing with many of Yost’s observations. I’ve spent the better part of the last decade writing about why Jane Austen’s satirical tone serves to make us, the readers, more aware of our failings, so Yost finds a natural ally in me.

Despite this, I was left feeling that something was missing. There’s a dimension of forgiveness to Austen’s narrative pattern that remains largely unspoken. To be fair to Yost, that’s not the focus of the essay. And yet, I’d be remiss not to mention that, in Austen’s novels, we can’t speak of condemnation without also speaking of repentance.

Austen’s characters are undeniably fallible. But human frailty also allows for the possibility for repentance and, ultimately, forgiveness.

For every example of moral failure in an Austen novel, a corresponding example of true remorse can be found. Austen tells us that, after the incident where Emma mocks Miss Bates publicly, she experiences a mixture of ‘anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern’. ‘Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life’, we’re further told, ‘She was most forcibly struck. The truth of this representation there was no denying’. Emma’s shame pushes her to admit her mistakes to herself. Something similar happens to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, when she realises how blind she has been to Mr. Darcy’s goodness and Mr. Wickham’s deception. Similarly, Yost is right that Mr. Bennet’s misanthropy ‘disables him as a moral actor’, but after his daughter Lydia’s elopement with Mr. Wickham, he begins to feel the force of guilt, knowing that this might have been prevented, had he been more involved in his own children’s upbringing. And if Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, is passive at the risk of ceasing to be a moral agent altogether, she more than makes up for it when she sternly refuses to marry the rakish Henry Crawford, a man she neither respects nor loves.

Austen’s characters are undeniably fallible. But human frailty also allows for the possibility for repentance and, ultimately, forgiveness. As the late philosopher and Austen devotee Alasdair Macintyre argued in After Virtue (1981), all of Austen’s heroines experience a moment when they recognise their own failings, and this newly acquired virtue of ‘self-knowledge’ allows them to repent and more consciously act as moral agents in the world.

In turn, these true acts of repentance open up the way to mutual forgiveness. After marrying Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy, who’d claimed that he couldn’t easily ‘forget the follies and vices of others’ agrees to reconcile with his aunt Lady Catherine, welcomes Lydia into his house, and even continues to financially support Mr. Wickham for Lydia’s sake. In Persuasion, Captain Wentworth eventually forgives Lady Russell for the role she played in ending his first engagement to Anne Elliot. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor Dashwood forgives Mr. Willoughby for abandoning her sister Marianne after he confesses how much he regrets his actions.

Even when granted to someone we may consider undeserving, this central act of forgiveness heals broken social bonds. Perhaps, it’s even more healing than the ‘salubrious’ effect of Austen’s biting satire. There is darkness in Austen, but there is also much light. And if her novels prove that moral corruption is ubiquitous, they also make the case that, despite our corrupted nature, we’re not unsalvageable: forgiveness and redemption are always within reach of humankind.

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