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Surprisingly smart and witty series Sex Education returns for second season
When Sex Education first aired on Netflix last January, critics were unsure how to react. Created by the then-unknown writer Laurie Nunn, the show stars Gillian Anderson as free-spirited sex therapist Jean Milburn, alongside some first-time, 20-something actors as 15-year-olds navigating the perils of adolescence.
Jean lives with her emotionally precocious son, Otis (Asa Butterfield), who doles out sex education he pilfers from his mother to school peers for money.
While clearly set in the present day, the show’s soundtrack and cultural references are decidedly ’80s. And then there is the sex: While both relentless and explicit, any crudeness is dispelled by hilariously goofy mishaps, incongruous shots of the countryside and imaginative camerawork. The first season’s most memorable scene saw Otis’s first successful sexual experience presented as a comically religious encounter, with
Otis’s body hovering up through the air and bathed in bright white light while a choir trilled.against all odds, this peculiar show swiftly became one of Netflix’s biggest hits, which the streaming service revealed was watched by 40 million people worldwide within the first four weeks.
Younger viewers can relate instantly to its angst-ridden issues, while adults are drawn to the tender, often very witty writing. Subjects such as same-sex parenting and homosexuality are dealt with so gracefully that the older generation was instantly won over.
While the sex is often played for laughs, Nunn and her team take it very seriously. In an industry first, Netflix even hired an “intimacy co-ordinator ” (Ita O’brien, joined by David Thackeray for season 2) to guide its young stars through the more uncomfortable moments on set, and Nunn brought in a “sex educator” for her (mostly female) writers’ room.
“The sex educator was very helpful in putting forward the issues young people today have questions about, and what they need to know about,” Nunn says. “The sex educator also told me about vaginismus (when the vagina involuntarily contracts during intercourse), and how common it was. So that’s something Lily (a wacky friend of Otis’s who loves to write alien erotica, played by Tanya Reynolds) suffers from in the new season.”
While the first season was particularly male and priapic — centring on Otis overcoming his fear of masturbation and the turbulent coming out story of school bully Adam (Connor Swindells) — the second shifts the focus on to its female characters.
We see Maeve (Emma Mackey), a sharp-tongued feminist with pink hair, battle with her single mother’s crack cocaine addiction, while her best friend Aimee Gibbs (Aimee Lou Wood) is left traumatized by sexual assault.
Meanwhile, another character begins to feel attracted to her best female friend despite having a boyfriend, and Anderson’s character Jean teaches a middle-aged mother in a sexless marriage how to masturbate for the first time.
This may sound like provocation for provocation’s sake, but such storylines are incredibly powerful. How often do we see a middle-aged woman’s sex life taken seriously on screen? “What was very important for me in the second season was thinking about female desire,” says Nunn. “When I was at school, there was no mention of sex beyond ‘You’re going to get pregnant and die.’ And boys never learnt about the female anatomy because the classes were gender split.
“I really hope we’re going to see a big change in schools soon.”
Patricia Allison, who plays Otis’s new girlfriend, Ola, says the show has given her “a real sense of ownership of my body..”
Wood, who happens to be dating Swindells (who plays her onscreen boyfriend, Adam) felt the same. “We used to lie at school and pretend we didn’t even know what it was,” she says. “Sex education shouldn’t just be about having children. I honestly think we should have sex therapists at school.”
Allison first met Wood and her fellow cast members at a “sex workshop” with O’brien. “We watched videos of different animals having sex and then we would mimic them and see which ones fit with our characters.
“It’s pretty weird, being like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Patricia, and now I’m going to imitate a Bonobo monkey having sex!’” laughs Allison. “I loved watching the way the slugs intertwined, but in the end I went with how the cats do it.”