Otis is engaging in casual sex. Photo / Sam Taylor/Netflix
REVIEW:
Is there a more comically horny streaming series right now than Sex Education?
Actually, we should clarify that Sex Education is intentionally comical. Sex/Life is also comically horny, but one suspects the laughs were not deliberate.
And the very excellent Pen15 is also horny and funny, but it is a cringe comedy, capturing the full awkward gamut of puberty in the more puritanical America.
Anyway, back to Sex Education.
Netflix's British comedy returns for its third season with a brazen three-minute montage of a dozen-plus characters having sex – and different kinds of sexual play as well. It's all part of the show's frank and open approach to youth sexuality.
It's actually refreshing this colourful, honest and non-judgmental series doesn't treat sex with kid gloves or mince words with euphemisms. A penis is a penis. A bendy penis is a bendy penis. It's neither risque nor clinical, it just is.
Set in a high school in the UK, this almost out-of-time series with its vibrant, '80s aesthetic started off as a story centred on Otis (Asa Butterfield), a sensitive, knowledgeable but inexperienced teen who starts a sex clinic at his school, solving his classmates' problems for a small fee.
There are many, many problems and questions given how uncomfortable adults are when it comes to teen sexuality. Or how teens internalise shame about their own bodies and desires.
Otis's mother Jean (Gillian Anderson) is a sex therapist, so he's always grown up around these discussions.
Over the first two seasons, Sex Education leaned more and more into its young ensemble cast, and that's really been to the show's benefit, able to showcase a range of sexual experience and inexperience, proclivities and explorations.
In case you're wondering, the actors are in their 20s, and the show has been an advocate for on-set intimacy co-ordinators.
In the aftermath of season two's chlamydia outbreak and the sacking of the school's headmaster Michael Groff (Alistair Petrie), Moordale has a new head in charge, the young and seemingly cool Hope Hadden (Jemima Kirke), who immediately wins over the students with promises of reclaimed greatness.
But the disarming Hope's agenda and vision includes a disciplinarian regime at a school that has allowed difference to flourish. She certainly doesn't want the choir to be singing about tits any more.
For the students, that means no facial piercings, hair dye or cool make-up. Plus – the worst – school uniforms, that killer of individuality and expression.
Hope is an interesting educator in that she doesn't present as a Miss Trunchbull, but rather how unassuming but charismatic personalities can slowly impose an authoritarian rule without fanfare.
At first, everyone is so wrapped up in their own dramas to really notice. Otis is having casual sex with Ruby (Mimi Keene), who is several rungs above him in the social standings, while Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) and the always surprising Adam (Connor Swindells) are figuring how to be a couple.
Elsewhere, Maeve (Emma Mackey) must learn to trust again while Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood) finds herself unable to enjoy sex or her body after the bus incident in season two. And Lily (Tanya Reynolds) and Ola (Patricia Allison)'s burgeoning relationship isn't the smooth sailing you'd expect.
Jean's pregnancy has progressed, and she's faced with the challenges of people's expectations of her as an older woman.
A new character played by non-binary musician and actor Dua Saleh gives the show another entry point to explore the multitudes of teen sexuality and identity.
Sex Education's writers, led by series creator Laurie Nunn, are nimble at weaving the show's many storylines so that everyone gets their due, and it all feeds back into the story's overall plea for understanding and embracing difference.
And it's all done through good humour, compassion and a really entertaining story about enjoying sex.
Ebony Lamb performs Successful Feelings. Made with funding from NZ On Air. Video / Locals Only