Viewers of Sunday night’s episode of “Masters of Sex” may have felt like they blinked and missed a few years in the lives of its characters.
The Showtime drama following the pioneering sex researchers William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) started the night in 1958 — and by the end of the hour was in 1960. Such a time jump is unusual in TV shows, but necessary for a historical drama like “Masters,” which tells the story of a real-life relationship that spanned 30 years.
“All of a sudden I realized with Season 2, if we’re going to see all of this we have to actually move,” executive producer Michelle Ashford, who co-wrote Sunday’s episode, tells The Post. “It became clear that this was going to be one of these shows that was going to have to make big jumps in time.”
It also keeps the plot moving. Masters and Johnson spent 11 years doing research before they published anything, a dormant phase that wouldn’t make for very interesting television. Sunday’s episode also covered the period where Masters cuts off their sexual work after learning Johnson has continued romantic relationships with other men.
“This is a good time then to move it along because there wasn’t a huge amount of events happening,” Ashford says. “I thought, let’s use these time jumps to get to the stuff where things are really in transition and something different and strange is happening.”
That includes Masters having left the hospital to open his own clinic, which he tries to keep solvent in a variety of ways until he’s finally forced to accept money from his mother.
Betty (Annaleigh Ashford), now divorced, is hired as their new secretary and Libby (Caitlin FitzGerald) has a second child. By the end of the hour, Masters and Johnson have made up and resumed their bedroom “research.”
The series will continue to make jumps in time to hit certain milestones in Masters and Johnson’s careers into the 1980s — though it will settle down for the remainder of Season 2.
“It’s all about them refocusing their work . . . and they did make a very interesting shift,” Ashford says. “So the back half is all about this shift and how they came to it.”
Though the passage of time means many guest stars have disappeared from the story line — Sarah Silverman, Betsy Brandt, Courtney B. Vance — Ashford says the show is committed to bringing them back in unexpected ways now that “Masters” was picked up for a third season last week.
“There’s actually not been a character that we are not going to bring back in some form,” she says. “We’ve amassed our little community here, and we’re already making plans for next season having beloved characters come back in a much more full-time basis . . . The only people who can’t come back are the dead.”