WE ALL NEED A HELPING HAND
Pondering Sex Education when touching is off-limits
At a time when the world has become defined by unsettling news and social distancing, how is a writer supposed to focus on telling a funny story about physical intimacy?
That’s the conundrum facing Laurie Nunn, the creator of the acclaimed Netflix comedy Sex Education.
“We’re suddenly living in a world where human touch has become something to be feared,” she said recently from London, where she is sheltering in place and working on the show’s next season.
A surprise hit when it debuted in 2019 — Netflix said more than 40 million viewers watched at least some of the first season — Sex Education won over audiences young and old with its breezy charm and unvarnished depictions of teen sexuality. (“Just wish this was around when I was a kid,” one presumably older fan noted in a representative post on Nunn’s Instagram.)
The show, which revolves around an inexperienced high school student named Otis (Asa Butterfield) whose mother is a sex therapist (Gillian Anderson), received more plaudits for its second season, which arrived in January. It was renewed for a third in February, with filming originally scheduled to start in May.
Then the coronavirus pandemic brought most TV production to a halt, along with the rest of society. So as Sex
Education is probably racking up more fans as much of the world sits inside watching Netflix (the series has shown up on many “best shows to binge in quarantine” lists in recent weeks), Nunn has moved her writers’ room online to work on the next chapter with an eye toward filming this year at the earliest.
“I keep trying to remind myself that, despite this horrible pandemic, teenagers will still have a lot of sex and relationship questions that hopefully our show can help answer,” she said.
It was a similar sense of purpose that led Nunn, 32, to aggressively pitch herself a few years ago to Eleven Film, the company that developed Sex Education for Netflix. At the time she was a 20-something writer with no TV experience or particular expertise in adolescent issues, but she believed strongly that she was the right person for the project.
“I sent all these photographs of myself as a teenager and basically just begged, ‘I have to write this show,’ ” she said. “I felt instantly it was something I could bring a lot to.”
Jamie Campbell, a founder of Eleven Film and an executive producer on the series, said Nunn was convincing. “She immediately knew exactly what she wanted to do with the world of the show, and how to tell it.” While Nunn had never written anything specifically about teenagers, she said that everyone has an inner adolescent and she was instinctively drawn to that sensibility.
“They feel so much — everything feels like life or death — the angst is so potent,” she said.
“As a writer, that gives you a lot to play with because everything is on the surface. They haven’t grown that armour yet.”
In some ways, Nunn is giving voice to her own personal history with Sex
Education. Raised in England and Australia, she was an introvert who took refuge in young adult novels as well as John Hughes films (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club) and other teen movies,
like Mean Girls, Never Been Kissed and 10 Things I Hate About You.
“I know every line,” Nunn said. “I was kind of an awkward teenager — a bit like Otis.”
She came into her own when her mother gave her a small video camera — Nunn started making her own short movies and eventually immersed herself in boxed sets of TV series like The
Sopranos, Sex And The City and Six Feet Under.
She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in film and television from the
Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne in 2007 and a master’s in screenwriting from the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England, in 2012. She had just a few projects under her belt
— namely some short films and her first stage play, King Brown, which won a 2017 judge’s award from the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting — when she convinced Eleven Film to hire her to write Sex Education.
In creating the series, Nunn has mined her own experiences. In Season 2, for example, the character Aimee is molested on a bus, a story line based on Nunn’s personal encounter with sexual misconduct. She revealed the connection on Instagram in January, linking to a video conversation with cast members about assault.
“I tried to brush it off as an unfortunate random event, but it stayed embedded in my mind and left me feeling shaken and unsafe in my environment,” she wrote. “Sadly, this horrible experience isn’t the only time I’ve been made to feel anxious in a public space by an unknown man.
“Even sadder is the fact that almost all of my female friends and family members have been through something similar in their own lives. In fact, unwanted sexual attention in public spaces is so common to the female experience that it almost feels like a right of passage, and that is a devastating reality.”
Nunn has approached Sex Education with a sure hand, becoming an executive producer on the series in Season 2, making her a rarity in an entertainment industry still dominated by men. And in her writing for the show, she has fearlessly tackled once-taboo TV topics like female pleasure, anal douching, abortion and lesbian love.
“Young people don’t want to be patronised,” she said. “They want to be challenged and told difficult stories.”
The series’ straightforward approach to sex is also particularly timely, given increasing cultural awareness about the unrealistic male fantasies perpetuated by online porn.
“It’s tackling different sexual topics with an honesty I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere, embracing the awkwardness of teenagers’ first exploring themselves as sexual beings,” said Ita O’Brien, the show’s intimacy co-ordinator.
(In his review of Sex Education for The New York Times, TV critic James Poniewozik wrote that “sex, in this show, isn’t an ‘issue’ or a problem or a titillating lure: It’s an aspect of health”.)
Nunn acknowledged that working on the new season during a pandemic has not been easy. But she has found comfort in the show’s comedy, which helps her stave off the “constant sense of low-level anxiety and dread in the air that is difficult to ignore”, she said.
As a writer, Nunn added, she is accustomed to working mostly in isolation. And that work continues to feel necessary.
“The main message of the show is the importance of honest communication,” she said. “Hopefully that will always be something worth writing about.”
Teenagers feel so much — everything feels like life or death