I’m finally up-to-date on Season 2 of Masters of Sex. And I am pretty disappointed. I sometimes felt like I was the only one really, really in love with the first season. I told everybody to watch Season 1. Did you watch it? Probably not. And now I’m not even sure I should still recommend it because the second season has been a mess. The writing has been all over the place and they’re making a concerted effort to make the two female leads, played by Lizzy Caplan and Caitlin FitzGerald, into very unlikeable creatures (when both characters were really beautifully established in Season 1). “Fleshing out a character’s flaws” does not equal “changing their personalities to make them raging a—holes or fancy prostitutes.”

Anyway, Lizzy Caplan covers the new issue of LA Confidential. She’s promoting Season 2, plus she’s shilling a little bit for her Emmy nomination. The interview – which you can read in its entirety here – is a decent piece with lots of quotes from the MoS people who love her. But the photoshoot it terrible, right? Lizzy is a really a beautiful woman but they’ve made her look sort of unkempt. The styling is atrocious. Anyway, some highlights from the piece:

Getting the job on MoS: “I honestly cannot believe that I got the job I’ve been waiting for. It just makes no sense to me that I get to go to work on that show every day and play that woman.”

She always thought she would be a comedy actress: “Doing a dramatic role was something that I could see myself doing on a very small scale—independent films—but on a large scale, on a show that people actually seem to watch? It’s completely shocking to me.”

People don’t recognize her: “I can walk down the street and live my life and nobody knows who I am. Something about the network sitcom thing has always scared the s–t out of me.”

The role of Virginia Johnson: “As I got older and slightly more jaded, I knew better than to see myself fully in the role because it would hurt too much when I didn’t get it. And I truly believed that I would not get this part… Virginia and I share quite a few similarities. My approach to sex and relationships at certain times in my life fell completely in line with how she viewed those topics in certain points in her life. There were eerie things that we had in common that I don’t really tell anybody, very specific details. It started to feel like she and I shared this cosmic connection.”

The early years, struggling to get work: “I’ve always felt like the underdog—partly because I’ve been told that I’m the underdog, pretty explicitly, on many occasions,” she reveals, recalling the days when she and her friend Lindsay Sloane would audition for pilots on the now-defunct WB network. “We’d want to get T-shirts made that said, I AM WB PRETTY! because we’d just been told, ‘Oh, she’s great, but she doesn’t have that WB look.’ In retrospect, I’m so grateful it took as long as it did, because I’ve been able to slowly acclimate to these changes instead of an overnight success story.”

[From LA Confidential]

I laughed at the “I AM WB PRETTY!” thing. She is really beautiful, but I sometimes feel like Masters of Sex has the same styling issue as Mad Men, in that the ladies always look more remarkable on the show than they ever do on a red carpet or editorial. That’s always been the conundrum with January Jones and Christina Hendricks – both women look SO GOOD on Mad Men and then on the red carpet, it’s just… deflating. I worry that the same thing is going to happen with Lizzy. That she’ll go too far and I will be disappointed by her, like, goth-modern look at the Emmys.

Photos courtesy of LA Confidential.