Review: Sex Education Season 1 Offers an Empathetic Look at Teenage Sexuality
At the risk of voicing a controversial opinion, being sixteen sucks. Everything is painfully awkward, you’re jockeying with your peers for social standing (or pretending you’re above the fray), obtaining alcohol is a herculean task, people are making you learn the arcane lore of trigonometry, and you can’t have sex anywhere. If you do manage to wind up sprawled on a friend’s couch or scrunched into the backseat of a purely hypothetical 2003 Chrysler Sebring, chances are you don’t have the first clue what you’re doing. Fortunately, Laurie Nunn’s painfully honest, funny look at teen travails is here to shine a light on this brutal stage of life.
As in real life, sex is a main driver of teen anxieties in the new Netflix show Sex Education. The series follows Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), a mild-mannered British high school student whose mother Jean is a sex therapist played by a deliciously blithe Gillian Anderson. Otis stumbles across an unexpected talent for offering relationship advice thanks to the techniques he’s picked up from his mom. Although he’s content with his social invisibility, bookish bad girl Maeve (Emma Mackey) convinces him to start a sex advice business with her, and it’s off to the hormonal races. Soon, Otis finds himself salvaging relationships and bringing sexual liberation throughout the school, despite the fact that his own repression runs so deep he can’t even masturbate.
Sex Education sports a late ’80s-early ‘90s aesthetic that gives it an endearing sense of timelessness; viewers of a certain age will feel right at home among the shoulder pads, jumpsuits, and screamingly loud windbreakers. A diverse and talented cast brings the addled teens of Moordale Secondary School to life, breathing real pathos into dating struggles that expand the usual cis-het model of teenage sex comedy fare. The result is a series that feels refreshingly modern while evoking an ache of Lycra-clad nostalgia.
The show gets a lot of things right about teens’ first experiences of sex, from the unrealistic expectations fostered by porn to the general worry that everyone else is more experienced. Otis angsts endlessly about his virginity being a liability to his “clinic,” and his best friend Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) laments that he’s only ever given “two and a half handjobs.” As Otis listens to his classmates’ problems with openness and compassion, teenage cliquishness falls away to reveal a bunch of insecure kids terrified of being exposed—sometimes literally. While Sex Education doesn’t shy away from heavy topics like abortion, homophobia, and revenge porn, it never preaches or loses sight of the specific, warmly drawn characters affected by these capital-I issues. It certainly never talks down to its young protagonists or judges them.
In most sex comedies, horny teens are the butt of the joke, but this show is more subtle than that. Sure, it might wring a few chuckles out of Jean’s explicit wall décor, but the desire for sex is never played for mean laughs. Sexuality is portrayed as a normal and healthy part of adolescence—albeit one that gets people into comical scrapes now and then. Like Otis, we are encouraged to approach the erotic foibles of our fellow humans with radical empathy rather than shame. Along with his classmate Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood), viewers come to a freeing realization: “yeah, she’s a slag. But so am I.”
Season one of Sex Education is available for streaming on Netflix.