2024 Was the Year of the Threesome in Film and TV

A FEW WEEKS after Luca Gudagnino’s tennis love triangle drama Challengers took theaters and loins by storm, the film leaned into its own horny energy by offering a buy 2 get 1 free deal on tickets where couples could take a third to go see the film. The popularity of Challengers—and the incredibly sexy triumvirate of Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor—spawned themed parties, Halloween costumes, lookalike contests, and officially kicked 2024 off as the year of the threesome.

Television and film this year explored what alternative forms of relationships could look like. There were reality shows like Couples Therapy, Selling The O.C., and Peacock’s new series Couple To Throuple, where couples seek a third on-camera, to varying degrees of drama. Scripted shows like Bridgerton, Doctor Odyssey, Ghosts, and Laid also looked at the ins and outs of the three-way. And never one to shy away from anything, director Yorgos Lanthimos gave us a grieving Jesse Plemons watching a couple swapping porno he and his missing wife (Emma Stone) made with friends in the anthology film Kinds of Kindness.

It goes without saying that the threesome isn’t a new concept, and its dramatic potential has been mined in a number of pop culture moments that helped shape and cement it in the public imagination. The ’90s erotic thriller Wild Things featured a famous sex scene between Neve Campbell, Matt Dylan, and Denise Richards—the titillating and more common FFM iteration of an on-screen threesome. Elsewhere, Alfonso Cuaron’s 2001 coming-of-age masterpiece Y Tu Mama Tambien, which follows best friends Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) on a road trip with an older woman (Maribel Verdu), might be the blueprint for the lesser-seen MMF configuration, also known as a devil’s threesome, which many of 2024’s triads explored.

Dr. Justin Lehmiller, a Social Psychologist, Author, and Senior Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute acknowledges that threesomes have always been a popular fantasy, but sees pop culture’s growing fascination with them as similar to the discussion around BDSM and kink that emerged when the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey novels and movies manhandled their way into the cultural consciousness.

“There’s a lot of interest in it and it is something that does seem to be becoming more commonly discussed and portrayed in popular media,” Lehmiller tells Men’s Health. “Certainly there’s more articles about it, more depictions of it. I think that’s part of a broader trend toward things that were previously considered to be very taboo. There’s been this shift toward kink, multiple partners, non-monogamy. You can also tie this to broader conversations we’re seeing on social media and the popular media about polyamory. It’s tied to a lot of those broader trends and how we’re thinking about and talking about sexuality.”

A show that has unexpectedly been in the threesome trenches for a long time now is CBS’s Ghosts, a delightful American remake of the British sitcom about a New York couple who inherit an old home upstate when one of them, Samantha (Rose McIver), has a near death experience and gains the ability to communicate with the ghosts who previously died in the house. Flower (Sheila Carrasco), a ghost from the ’60s who lived in cults and communes, has frequently talked about her past in polyamorous relationships, beginning all the way back in the series premiere in 2021.

When Flower begins dating the Viking ghost Thor (Devan Chandler Long), they might appear to be strange bedfellows—but showrunners Joe Port and Joe Wiseman cite their shared sexual adventurous streaks as a reason why they put them together. “Obviously, their archetypes could not be more different. One is such a violent marauder and killer in his day, and the other this peace loving hippie,” Wiseman says. “But they did share a sexual adventurousness that bind them.”

Flower disappears for a stretch in season 3, and when she returns, Thor has embarked on a relationship with Cholera Victim Nancy (Betsy Sodaro). Instead of insisting on a breakup, Flower is ready for a throuple. For Port and Wiseman, this was initially a hilarious plot point that ended up being character building. “I think it helped Flower and Thor to a deeper understanding of each other,” says Port.

A proposed threesome at the center of season 3 of Selling The O.C. caused a lot of strife between agent Sean Palmieri, who identifies as bisexual, and his straight colleague Austin Victoria, whose wife Palmieri alleges propositioned him for a threesome. Victoria tried to paint Palmieri as crazy, while reinforcing his own heterosexuality. That potentially internalized homophobia is something at the core of how pop culture talks about the MMF threesome, Lehmiller explains, but he isn’t surprised to see more of them. “In some ways it’s not surprising because when you look at interest in threesomes, men are more interested overall,” he says. “They have this fantasy at a much greater frequency and are much more likely to want to act on it. It’s actually much more feasible to get two men and women together versus two women and a man just based on that overall difference in interest. That might be part of the story in terms of why that seems to be the more common variation, despite the fact that it does have that historical baggage and homophobia attached.”

Another MMF threesome ended on much more pleasant terms in Season 3 of Bridgerton when Benedict (Luke Thompson) joined his bedmate Lady Tilly Arnold (Hannah New) and her bedmate Paul Suarez (Lucas Aurelio) in a threesome that opened his eyes to the possibilities of other partners, and also finally broadened the horizons of Bridgerton in terms of including and exploring queer identity. The trio ends things on a positive note, with Benedict telling Lady Tilly that she’s helped to open up his world to possibilities he couldn’t imagine. Showrunner Jess Brownell told Entertainment Weekly that this throuple helped the character, whom some fans had already interpreted to be queer, confirm something about himself. “His embrace of his queerness with the throuple is a moment where he’s really figuring out how to be true to himself. And we’ll continue that going forward,” she told the publication.

This idea of exploration is central to many of the threesomes and throuples depicted in 2024—something that Lehmiller would say may be because of a changing in sexual behaviors societally. Premiering on December 19, the sitcom Laid from Nahnatchka Khan and Sally Bradford McKenna (a remake of the Australian show of the same name) stars Stephanie Hsu as Ruby, who has to go back through her entire sexual history when people she’s slept with begin dying. Khan and Bradford McKenna worked closely with Hsu, who identifies as queer, to make sure that Ruby’s timeline felt organic and represented a woman who was open to explore “all variations.”

The series includes a flurry of fun guest stars and a healthy perspective on the dreaded “body count” of a woman who is open about her sexuality. So it’s no surprise that at one point in the season, Ruby’s past sexual experiences include a couple, which for the showrunners made complete sense for the character. “It’s not mainstream by any means, but I do think that it is becoming more popular, at least in movies and TV. And it wouldn’t shock me if a friend of, I mean, it would shock me if Sally said she was doing that,” Khan says with a laugh. “I think that the stigma isn’t necessarily there anymore. And it just made sense for Ruby. Of course, she would want to experience that. That’s who she is.”

And sometimes wanting to try it is the jumping off point. Doctor Odyssey, ABC’s medical procedural from Ryan Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz, and Joe Baken, is set on a cruise ship that apparently hires the hottest medical staff. The show centers on Dr. Max Bankman (Joshua Jackson), Avery Morgan (Philippa Soo), and Nurse Tristan Silva (Sean Teale) as they help patients on the cruise deal with everything from pica to vaginal spasms. From the pilot, the three—including Tristan and Max—have a crackling sexual tension where it’s hard to not root for them all to get together. And in episode 6, “I Always Cry at Weddings,” the trio enjoy a drunken night where they share their respective bucket lists. Having a threesome tops all of them, so why not indulge?

Baken knew that the tension between all of them was going to culminate in something you don’t often see on mainstream TV: “I think from the start, Tristan and Max are in direct competition for Avery’s affection,” he says. “That tension can build and eventually manifest itself in a lot of different ways. They also have a very sweet bromance going on. Putting those two dynamics in contact has created some exciting tension.” While their throuple status ended on a cliffhanger that won’t get resolved until the show returns in March, and Baken says “no spoilers,” they’ve had an easier time than one might have expected for a network show to get a steamy threesome on the air. “ABC has been really game with allowing this show to ‘go there’ in a lot of ways,” he says. “They want it to be fun, but also rooted in truth, and the truth of where we are right now is that people are exploring sexuality and romance, and questioning if the traditional, two person monogamy is right for everyone.”

But is the rise of the pop culture threesome mirrored in a real-life threesome boom? For those of us still in the dating app trenches, couples looking for a third, ethically non-monogamous practicing folks, and those involved in a polyamorous lifestyle might seem a dime a dozen, but data from Feeld and Tinder show otherwise. Dina Mohammad-Laity, VP of Data at Feeld tells Men’s Health that they saw their biggest growth looking for threesomes during the COVID-19 lockdown, and is proud of the community they’ve been able to create centered around people looking for connection outside of heteronormative relationships. But this year didn’t have a huge change, numbers-wise. “Despite consistent yearly growth, ENM, polyamory, threesomes and similar desires haven’t grown significantly this year than in previous years—save for a doubling in growth rate for FFF since last year. Then again, it’s not entirely surprising, as these relationship structures and desires have been accepted and explored by our Members for the past decade,” she says. Similarly, while Challengers and tennis were both trends for Tinder in their Year in Swipe 2024, Tomas Iriarte-Reyes from Tinder’s communications team reveals that in 2023 the app saw a 21% decrease in people looking for Ethical Non-Monogamy, Open Relationships, Open to Exploring, and Polyamory.

In Lehmiller’s research, he has seen more interest in non-traditional relationship structures from people in midlife, as opposed to college students, who are actually leaning more towards monogamy in their preferences. There’s also a contradiction he’s found: a growing interest in non-monogamy, but also a rise in trad wives and purity culture, a tension that will likely continue to develop as the country leans more conservative. Despite that, Lehmiller generally has seen a loosening of sexual mores. “There’s also been a rise in sexual fluidity with more people identifying as something other than heterosexual, or they’re seeing shifts in their sexual identity or attractions over time,” he explains. “Threesomes are a way in which people can explore their sexual fluidity. There’s been a lot of discourse in recent years about how much pressure there is in monogamy to have one partner who meets all of your needs sexually and otherwise. And so threesomes and non-monogamy represent ways in which we can dial down that pressure and have more people that we rely on to meet our needs as well.”

In a study Lehmiller did with the Kinsey Institute and sex toy company We-Vibe in March 2024, they surveyed 1500 U.S. adults from the ages of 18-88 about their sexual attitudes and behaviors. What they found was that 13% of Americans wanted to have a threesome in 2024, whereas Lehmiller’s colleague Debby Herbenick found out in a 2017 study that only 10% of women and 18% of men from a sample of 2,021 adults had previously had a threesome. According to Lehmiller, that’s a sizeable number of people looking for a trio.

Speaking of trios: ironically enough, despite the near-constant sexual tension of Challengers, those characters never actually fully go through with the threesome teased throughout the film, starting with that early steamy hotel room makeout scene. The final shot of the rigorous tennis match between Art and Patrick leaves the ending of how the three end up intentionally ambiguous. But Guadagnino, our preeminent horny director, told the New York Times’s Kyle Buchanan what he thinks happened after the final shot: “They go back to the hotel room.”

And frankly, why shouldn’t they?