Sex Education Season 2 (review): Yet Another Life Lesson

Image courtesy of Netflix

By Francesca Faccani

Sex Education was one of the first TV shows on Netflix to openly address the nuanced topic of sex for a teenage audience. Last week Netflix released the second season of the show which was even more insightful, well-mannered, and hilarious.

Set in a fictional village in the UK, Sex Education follows Otis (Asa Butterfield), an inexperienced and naïve teen who’s struggling to cope with the fact that his mother is the town’s sex therapist. Accompanied by his exuberant best friend Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), they make their way through high school and embark on a journey, aiming to discover their sexual identities. Otis eventually falls in love with a girl named Maeve (Emma Mackley), the typical high-school bad girl, who actually turns out to be incredibly smart and well-read. At first, Maeve doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. However, together Maeve and Otis come up with the idea of setting up a sex clinic at school, as Maeve organizes the appointments and Otis offers some advice he has heard from his mother. While Otis and Maeve develop this service, Eric is left to figure out how to fit his homosexuality in his traditional and devoutly religious family.

At the end of the first season, Otis was left kissing the town’s newcomer, Ola, as Maeve watched shocked from afar. Maeve was about ready to express her real feelings for Otis up until that point. Eric’s storyline was left with him being intimate with Adam, the high school bully who had always picked on him.

The new season broadens its perspective and offers each and every peripheral character their own 15 minutes under the spotlight. The girls, however, are the undisputed protagonists of the new episodes. We follow them à la recherche of what unites them: the experience of sexual harassment. In the third episode, Aimee, Maeve’s best friend, is on a bus to school and is the victim of a sexual assault. She doesn’t pay much attention to that at first and sees it as a quasi-normal accident – until eventually, the memory of it comes back to haunt her.

This is only one of the many stories that the new season introduces.

The new season becomes more inclusive: Not only are there a multitude of new characters introduced and at the center of attention, but this new group also contains multitudes. They all differ from one another in their gender, sexual identity and social status, and each one of their cases is specially and carefully addressed. They talk about pansexuality, bisexuality, asexuality, consent, and dating as a disabled person. We don’t usually get to see these topics represented in TV, but Sex Education is refreshing in its honesty and inclusivity.

Moreover, Sex Education is the only TV show that is not afraid of using stereotypes as a way to get to the heart of an issue, only to wisely turn them upside down. This is easily revealed in one scene where Otis’s father comes to visit and tries not to be seen by his son while getting emotional. At the end of this episode, he bursts into tears and wisely lectures his son that “it’s alright for men to cry.”

Overall, this second season embeds less occasional sex and more consciousness; less naivety and simply more education.