What is with Otis’s striped jacket in Sex Education? From the beige jacket, to the everlasting-autumn colour palate of the foggy tree covered hills that surround Mooredale, to the strangely vintage car that Lily’s mother drives, (especially in her flashbacks) the visual aesthetic of the show takes it weirdly out of time. Like we’ve been launched back in time to the 80s-ish.
It’s simultaneously tied to the present by the rampant use of text messaging. But even with ubiquitous mobile phones, social media is strangely absent, depositing these characters into a rusty sepia bubble.
As if reflecting this 80s aesthetic evocation, the anti-sex education crusades by administration at Mooredale Secondary School also feel dated. While it’s a sad reality that teenagers are still faced with restricted access to comprehensive sex ed, the level at which the fight is taking place at Mooredale is a bizarre mixture of extremely detailed information about certain fetishes, and very basic “it’s called a vulva, not a vagina lessons.”
OK, so I finally finished watching Sex Education. I tried, back when it first splashed onto Netflix, but it didn’t hit right. It didn’t land for me, a new parent dealing with a completely different set of dramas and priorities. The borderline edginess of the Sex School’s shenanigans just left me wondering why I should care.
I came back to it a few years in, after the third season dropped, and happily finished it this winter, but after finally making my way through a show that has been recommended over and over again, I do find myself wondering what about it grabbed so much attention.
To me, Sex Education is fine. I like it, it’s pretty good, in the way that a lot of teen dramedies are, but aside from that, it’s primary premise, designed to set it apart: the frankness and openness about the varied, kinky, queer, and extremely active sex lives of teenagers depicted on the show, isn’t all that unique. Sure, Sex Education does things in a new way, it has Otis act as an amateur sex therapist to his peers, a way in to all the drama and titillating sexual issues creeping through the student body. But if that’s the hook, I’m not sure why the show is called Sex Education instead of Sex Therapy.
The problem is a tone deafness. Sex Education tries to do both things: to laugh at the ridiculous kids dressing up as penises and vulvas, and to claim that they are legitimately speaking truth to power. It’s sloppy. The messages are wishy washy, and poorly expressed, even in cases where there is a clear right answer, a clear moral high ground, they somehow fail to make their point in a satisfying way. Is this complicating our heroes and creating realistic villains? Not really.
And while there is fantastic queer representations with multiple queer couples and experiences of sex and dating taking up screen time, on the titular sex education front (you know that old abstinence vs comprehensive Sex Ed debate) the show doesn’t really lean into the empowerment messages it claims to represent.
Maybe the goal is to be subversive in a messy way, (these characters are really messy) but rather than have these stories come across as complex representations of the human experience, they felt too much like trying to be both retro and modern at the same time, and cancelling each other out.
Maybe it works on paper, but I just found it weird. And not as good as Heartbreak High.
