Messy is normal in ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls’
Mindy Kaling wants young women watching her new show to be more relaxed about sex than she was.
“I am repressed. I grew up repressed,” the 42-year-old actress and producer told the Daily News. “But I don’t want to watch repressed people. It doesn’t feel modern for girls to have that same attitude toward sex.”
So Kaling created “The Sex Lives of College Girls” along with co-producer Justin Noble. The comedy, which premiered Nov. 18 on HBO Max, follows four freshmen randomly assigned to live together at the fictional Essex College, a quintessential New England liberal arts school.
Together, aloof New Yorker Leighton (Renee Rapp), jock Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott), aspiring comedian Bela (Amrit Kaur) and sweet but naive Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) try to figure out the next stage of their lives.
“College is really being dropped into a city full of people with totally different backgrounds, who come from totally different spaces with their own sets of beliefs that make you challenge and question your own,” Scott told The News. “You don’t know who you are at 18. No one does.”
“The Sex Lives of College Girls,” like its title not-so-subtly implies, is more concerned about extracurriculars than midterms. It’s about wanting sex, having sex and regretting sex.
“Sex is so much more than the act,” Chalamet, sister of star Timothee Chalamet, told The News. “It’s everything before and everything after.”
By design, the sex isn’t always great. More often, it’s not even on the table as much as the perpetually horny Bela searches for it. On the cold, brick campus of Essex, which Kaling described as a Northeast Hogwarts, it’s all messy.
It’s realistic about college. Students have sex with people who are right for them and wrong for them, strangers and The One.
“It’s like a love letter to that period in our lives … that period of time when you’re 18 to 21 and pretending to know everything that life is going to throw at you,” Noble said.
The humor is in the disorder, but also in the four women — random roommates thrown together by fate or the housing department.