‘SEX ED’ GETS EVEN MESSIER
Netflix dramedy lusts for laughs in Season 2
Netflix’s “Sex Education” doesn’t just do love triangles. It does love squares and pentagons.
The series, set at the fictional Moordale High School in England where every student is having sex or trying to or wanting to, picks up with a chlamydia crisis on campus.
Otis, the awkward teen played by British actor Asa Butterfield, has shuttered his clinic — a valiant and necessary but utterly chaotic attempt by a virgin to teach his classmates about sex — in his efforts to move on from his endless crush on Maeve.
He’s also trying to keep new girlfriend Ola, whose father is dating Otis’ mother — played by Gillian Anderson — , a licensed sex therapist who works out of their house and has trouble separating personal and professional.
The comedy-drama does a lot of sex. Messy, awkward, uncomfortable sex. Gay sex. Solo sex. Bad sex. Sometimes they talk about sex, then have it.
It’s been more of an education for Butterfield, 22, than the sex-ed classes he got in school, which he says weren’t very good.
“They taught you the biology of it, but most of it you just have to figure out yourself,” he told the Daily News recently.
For Butterfield that sometimes means learning on the job as he filmed “Sex Education,” whose second season premieres Friday.
“We all very quickly got very comfortable around each other,” said Butterfield, whose previous credits include “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” and “Merlin.”
But as much sex as the show has, it’s never just random.
“We ended up devising a rule of thumb: if there’s a sex scene shown on screen, it can’t be gratuitous,” director Ben Taylor told The News. “It can’t just be titillating. It has to forward the show and it has to be funny.”
British shows, Taylor said, “have a reputation about being shy” about sex, whereas American shows have had less reluctance to show skin, sometimes at the cost of narrative. The director pointed to “Game of Thrones” and star Emilia Clarke, who said after the HBO drama wrapped that she was “uncomfortable” with all her character’s nudity.
“‘Sex Education,’ on the other hand, was written in a way that never felt like it was trying to be sexy or there for the sake of showing teenagers having sex,” Butterfield noted.
This year, the stakes are higher: careers are threatened, families fall apart, marriages are broken. But at its heart, “Sex Education” is still about the people.
“What’s elegant in it is that the bad stuff isn’t bank robbers and murderers and car chasers,” Taylor said. “The badness of it is real. It’s frailty and f—kups. It’s just not being able to communicate well and not letting someone know how you feel in the right way and the entanglement of romance that that leads to.”
“No one wakes up in this world and wants to cause trouble or upset,” the director adds. “It happens in spite of that. It’s a very, very humanlevel story about muddling along and bumping into each other.”