Wanderlust
ワンダーラスト: 幸せになるためのセラピー
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
A therapist and her husband try opening their marriage; the first full-frontal female orgasm on BBC One.
Joy Richards is a therapist, long married to Alan, an English teacher, with three children: Laura, twenty-five, Naomi, eighteen, and Tom, sixteen. She is recovering from a cycling accident, caused partly because she was distracted by the sight of a former client, Emily, whose husband, Josh, took his own life while the couple were in therapy with her. Joy and Alan's sex life has stalled, and each of them, almost by accident, sleeps with someone else: Alan with Claire, a colleague at his school, Joy with Marvin, a man she meets at physiotherapy. When they confess, they find that they still love each other and would both like to go on seeing the other person. Joy proposes an experiment: stay married, and open the marriage.
At first it works. The affairs revive their own sex life, the new partners adjust, and a double date with Claire and Marc, a younger man Joy sees, goes well. Then the arrangement spreads. They explain it to their children, and Tom is upset; Alan has to explain it to his head teacher. Feelings grow where only sex was meant, and Joy's old flame Lawrence, with whom she once cheated on Alan, reappears. Around them the family has its own awakenings: Naomi explores her sexuality with Rita, a neighbour whose marriage has collapsed, and Tom begins his first relationship.
The fifth episode is almost entirely a single session between Joy and her own therapist, Angela, in which Joy comes to see that her restless search for sex has been a way of not facing her grief for her mother and her guilt over Josh's death. In the last episode Alan, in love with Claire, moves into her flat and out again: Claire loves him too, but finds she cannot go on at another woman's expense. Joy is rebuffed by Lawrence. Their children's love lives, by contrast, are going well: Naomi grows closer to Rita, Tom finds an uncomplicated love with his best friend, Michelle, and Laura runs off with one of Joy's former clients. Alan comes home, and he and Joy find their way back to each other, as a couple.
Starring
Toni Colletteas Joy Richards
A therapist and mother of three who, after an accident and years of marriage, proposes that she and her husband open it.
Joy Richards’s story
Joy is recovering from a cycling accident, caused partly by the sight of Emily, whose husband took his own life while the couple were in therapy with her. With her sex life with Alan stalled, she sleeps with Marvin, whom she meets at physiotherapy, and when Alan confesses to Claire she proposes they stay married and see other people. She sees a younger man, Marc, and takes up again with Lawrence, the old flame she once cheated on Alan with. In a long session with her therapist, Angela, she sees that the search for sex has kept her from grief for her mother and guilt over Josh. Alan moves in with Claire, and Lawrence rebuffs her. She meets Emily, then rides her bicycle along the route of her accident. Alan comes home, and they hold each other again.
Steven Mackintoshas Alan Richards
Joy's husband, an English teacher, who agrees to the experiment and falls in love with a colleague.
Alan Richards’s story
Alan is a tidy English teacher whose sex life with Joy has stalled since her accident. He sleeps with Claire, a younger colleague, confesses, and agrees to Joy's proposal that they both keep seeing other people. It works at first; then he has to explain the arrangement to his head teacher and his children, and he detests Lawrence, the man Joy once cheated on him with, when she takes up with him again. He falls in love with Claire and moves into her untidy flat, where he tidies, needs an iron and cannot settle; Claire, who loves him too, finds she cannot go on at another woman's expense. He sleeps in a friend's spare room, then goes home, where he and Joy find their way back to each other.
Zawe Ashtonas Claire Pascal
A fellow English teacher at Alan's school whose affair with him becomes more than either intended.
Sophie Okonedoas Angela Bowden
Joy's own therapist, with whom she spends the fifth episode uncovering what she has been avoiding.
Emma D'Arcyas Naomi Richards
Joy and Alan's eighteen-year-old daughter, who begins exploring her sexuality with a neighbour.
Why it matters
Wanderlust takes up a subject most marriage dramas treat as a crisis and treats it as a question: what a long, loving marriage should do when sex has quietly stopped. It is frank about a woman in midlife who wants sex and says so, and it lets the open marriage be tried in good faith rather than set up to fail. IndieWire's reviewer wrote that it does not treat an open marriage as a cure for a flagging sex life. Its most unusual choice is its fifth episode, a single long therapy session in which the series stops to ask what the wanting was covering: grief for a mother, and guilt over a client's suicide. The Evening Standard called it a meandering polyamory drama. It leaves an unresolved question about whether desire for others can be separated from what is missing at home.