Netflix’s latest teen-sex comedy is sweet, raunchy
There is, as the title advertises, plenty of sex in “Sex Education,” the sweet and raunchily funny British teen comedy that arrived Friday on Netflix.
But the most engaging thing about it is the “education” part.
The series explores sex as a learning experience about who you are, what you want and how you relate to other people.
Its unlikely educator is Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), an awkward, inexperienced teenager. His mother, Jean (a wonderfully deadpan Gillian Anderson), is a sex therapist, with a frank manner and a limited sense of personal boundaries.
In a flashback, she explains sex to a very young Otis this way: “Intercourse can be wonderful. But it can also cause tremendous pain. And if you’re not careful, sex can destroy lives.”
Otis' adolescent anxiety about his body is intensified by the constant TMI factor of living with an oversharing parent in a house with erotic art on the walls and exotic implements in the drawers.
But Otis has picked up a lot through osmosis. When he talks a classmate through an uncomfortable sex issue (Viagra is involved), his friend and secret crush, Maeve (Emma Mackey), persuades him to set up a side gig as a “sex and relationship therapist” for his classmates.
The premise is farfetched, as even Otis’ clients admit, but living with Jean has given him a specific skill set and perceptiveness, and somehow he and the show sell it.
The series strains at first to establish the procedural format: a little bit “Masters of Sex,” a little bit “Doogie Howser, XXX.” But it blooms, over eight episodes, into a smart, sensitive look at teens finding their place and figuring out the owner’s manuals for their bodies.
Creator Laurie Nunn has managed to make a teen-sex comedy I haven’t quite seen before. Sex, in this show, isn’t an “issue” or a problem or a titillating lure: It’s an aspect of health.
So, yes, there are stories about STDS and revenge porn, and, in the third episode, a remarkable, perceptive abortion subplot.
But there are also stories about fantasy and sexual compatibility and the gap between pornified expectations and mundane reality.
The series is generous in scope. Previous teen comedies tended to be about the desires of male virgins like Otis and their struggles to get laid. “Sex Education” centers and decenters Otis; he’s the protagonist but more comfortable observing and listening, as a supporting player in others’ stories.
One of the strongest arcs belongs to Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), his gay best friend, with whom Otis has an annual date to dress up in drag and watch “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
Eric, exuberant but naive, isn’t just discovering his sexuality but learning what he likes and how to present himself in the world.
There’s a great small moment where Eric, who is black, admires the “fierce” nailpolish on an older black man who cheerfully advises him, “Stick to the jewel tones.”
“Sex Education,” unafraid to have fun and be funny, is less like its stark British predecessor “Skins” than a well-executed American teen dramedy on the CW.
The big difference is its streaming-tv freedom to be as graphic as it wants to be — and it wants to be, from its opening seconds.