Okay firstly, how fucking dare Sex Education highlight my lockdown sexual frustration with their sexy montages. Consider this a warning, don’t watch the first episode with your parents. Or maybe do, because the team for this series is taking their namesake very seriously.
This season is the sex education I wish they’d included on the NCEA cirriculum. I’ve learned more about navigating sex and relationships in the three days it took me to accidentally binge the show than I did in my entire high school career. Maybe not surprising considering they’d always screen that video from the eighties with a badly animated anthropomorphic condom.
Sex Education, Season Three really said “hold my beer, I’ll show you how it’s done,” when it took a deep dive into a raw, honest look at dating, trauma, bodies and relationships. Best of all, it depicts intimacy indiscriminately, devoting the same care and attention to platonic, romantic and familial relationships alike. And these relationships come in all forms. Finally, a series where queer, inter-abled and ethnically diverse relationships are allowed to be just that: not regulated to second-place, not othered, not romanticised, and firmly three-dimensional. Gay-best-friend who?
The result is a well crafted, deeply engaging, convincing and complex universe. The relationships are messy and intimate, they fall apart and they come back together, they’re heart-warming, they’re terrifying, they’re intense, they’re real. And the fuck-the-system anarchy that runs through the main plot is deeply cathartic, too.
“Bring a pack of tissues, you’ll probably need them.”
