The third season of Showtime’s “Masters of Sex” will kick off in 1966, a decade after the events in Season 1.

If the series’ inaugural year found sexologists Dr. William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) struggling to justify the scientific validity of their work, well, that battle isn’t over. But the times are a-changin’, too. Bill still gets called a smut peddler, but Gini can also confidently declare, when accused of taking advantage of the faddish “sexual revolution,” “We are the sexual revolution.”

As last year’s midseason time jump of three years demonstrated, showrunner Michelle Ashford is impatient to leave the repressed fifties behind and leap into the swinging sixties, when the real-life Masters and Johnson led the culture from their lab. But the heart of the show has always been the romantic and professional entanglements between Bill and Gini — both of whom are currently married to other people — that doesn’t seem to ever get less complicated.

The Showtime series, which has received Emmy and Golden Globe nods for Best Drama, returns Sunday, July 12.

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