Once again, I want to sing the praises of Sex Education on Netflix. This really, really won’t be for everyone. It’s explicit from the start and covers an exhaustive variety of sexual exploits in plenty of detail. But it’s a wonderful, kind, joyful series about love and relationships, filled with great characters, outstanding acting and meaningful, emotional highs.
I mentioned it briefly before when the second series was out, but I didn’t go into detail. Briefly, the series centres on teenager Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), the son of a sex therapist, Jean, played by Gillian Anderson in for me, her best role to date. It has a vast array of characters beyond these two and starts when Otis realises he has absorbed a lot of his mum’s knowledge, which he starts dispensing at school.
The show takes place in a hyper-real idyll, where it’s perpetual summer and British Sixth Formers attend what seems like an American high school. The period is never clear… everyone has smartphones, but the cars are from the 80s or older and the TVs are all the kind of CRTs we haven’t seen for 10 years now. But every character is multi-dimensional, the stories are engaging and important and in any case the setting makes perfect sense.
When you’re a teenager, everything is hyper-real. Your first kiss, the first time someone tells you they love you, your first sexual fumbling… these are Earth-shattering events and it’s all too easy as a crusty adult to forget that. The glow in the series is the glow of memory before childhood wonder has left and while encroaching adulthood still feels like the greatest adventure.
The show pays attention to adult relationships too, particularly in the second and third series. Love and heartbreak can strike uninvited from anywhere and they have zero respect for age, gender, sexuality or experience.
Yes, it says even the most difficult problems can be solved by talking and yes, it stridently challenges hetero-normative mores, and yes, it is very, very explicit. But it’s also hilarious, filled with outstanding performances, it has a heart the size of a planet and it is unfailingly, unflinchingly truthful. I wish this had been available when I was a teenager. There’s a painfully funny scene in the most recent series that mirrors the kind of sex education we received at school in the 80s, with boys in one room and girls in the other. In our case, the male teachers just sniggered through the whole thing and the girls were told to have babies, just not quite yet.
The music, from Ezra Furman, is great, and they make great use of a Peaches track in this series.
If you want something uplifting, kind and funny – and if you’re not easily offended – then check it out.
