"I looked at some cheese and got an erection.": SEX EDUCATION on Netflix

Gillian Anderson always seems really good about picking her projects. I remember reading or hearing an interview with her about Hannibal and she chose it/stayed with it because everyone treated her very well.

I was thrilled to see the actors who play Adam and Lily show up in Emma when I saw it a couple of days ago. Got to feel a lot of the cast will be moving onto other big film projects soon too.

I would not have guessed that the actor who plays Eric is 27, while Maeve is clearly 31 (ok, the actress is 24).

Meave always gives me an ilx alum Adam Schefter vibe! Which I enjoy.

ALUMN. Sorry.

Got to feel a lot of the cast will be moving onto other big film projects soon too.

Shall I bring up that once upon a time Otis was Martin Scorsese's Hugo?

And to think I only knew him from some godawful autistic-genius-child film

Oh yeah, he was Ender too.

And how they got Gillian Anderson on board.

She seems to be trying to work close to home as much as possible these days*, and more & more to alternate stylised productions with performances demanding "realism."

* eg The Fall, War & Peace, The Crown, this, Bleak House, Moby Dick, Streetcar Named Desire and All About Eve, quitting American Gods when Fuller & Green were fired, quitting X-Files definitively after the second reunion album...

Otis is in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas too!

Can we talk about the relationship between Eric and his father which contrasts smartly with that of Adam and his father? Key episode was the one where Adam and his father are dressed almost identically, at the same time Eric is as far away stylistically from his dad as possible, yet his father is the one who’s caring and empathetic. Subverted expectations in that despite his strong faith, he was the one showing tolerance and understanding. Not sure why he didn’t feature in S2.

The little speech Eric’s dad gave him right before the dance.... I lost it.

v impressive how in S1 they didn’t tie up what happened to Eric in an episode or two. The reverberations continue for a long, long time.

I liked the bit when one of Amy's friends slapped her ham sandwich out of her hand and she went 'My ham!'

also i think it might be genuinely educational for a younger audience too?

Definitely. This show is full of great advice

I’m really mad at this stupid show for only having two episodes because I need more. The ending of that last one killed me. Fuck that sneaky MFer who deleted Otis’s vm. Lily is definitely the MVP overall and I would like to be best friends with Eric.

As I just posted in the next flix thread by mistake (3x) Jacob is hot.

yeah. I’m a het man but every time the camera lingers on him for more than a second or two I need to cross my legs

His eyes oof.

i am dying to know about the Jakob 3xs person. I was looking him up under Babylon Berlin?

Rahim was treated dirty in this.

oh derp. Jakob. Yes. The other thread confused me and I thought you had a thing for gingers. yes mf'ing tall swedes for the win.

He coded as Danish to me but we didn't check

yeah i felt legit terrible for rahim - he did everything right and still got the shitty end of the stick

jakob's cocky grin - man, what a dreamboat

i thought danish too and then i checked.

maybe it was playing true to young love where you choose the person that treated you like shit but who at least made the base level amount of apology for it. (eric/adam)

The actor who plays Jakob is vg in (the Swedish, non-Branagh, superior) Wallander; his cocky grin plays a starring role in that but he's handy with his meaty old fists too.

I bet he is.

Ok so very weird but I also thought Danish and was calling him the hot Dane until I looked it up.

Watched s2 on a dull Sunday. It continues to be...fine. I will give them props for making drunk Otis a pure shithead.

God I love this show so much.

All the cars are from the 80s too. And the bikes. And Otis' clothes are straight from photographs of my brothers in the 70s.

And I adore all the houses. So much. And the roads. Em and I talked about moving.

It feels a little like Breaking Bad to me in its own awareness of its status as a TV programme, and the hieightened reality that goes along with that - the colours, the costumes, the sets, that slight air of visual and narrative unrealness that allows the emotions and characters to actually seem even more real.

Adam's arc had me in tears in the last episode about three times.

Honestly I'd probably have liked it more were it not for the final beat with the voicemail. The whole scenario was contrived and shitty in both concept and execution in a way most of the show manages to avoid being.

I didn't like that final beat with the voicemail but I kind of accepted its necessity from a 'setting up s3' pov.

Em and I talked about moving.

Ah, the Forest. Where I was told by an estate agent DURING A VIEWING that I wasn't Foresty enough to buy a house there.

What’s your beef with the voicemail???

tt keeps badgering me to take us to the Forest of Dean and learning that this show is filmed there will probably not alter that

Proud to say I called it as Wales within a few minutes

I thought it was the Pacific Northwest until I looked it up.

What’s your beef with the voicemail???

On a show that's ostensibly about the need for communication and openness, it feels like a cheap stacking of the deck to have a character we barely know diabolically intervene to counter a straightforward attempt at said communication. And as other people objected: a) who confesses love in a voicemail? b) why would she leave her phone behind at all? c) does she not have a passkey or fingerprint check like everyone else? Because the plot needs it to happen in order to keep things delayed, is why, not to serve the themes/thesis.

Definitely feel like the ending of S2 was setting up a potential coercive control storyline for S3.

I watched both series in the space of a week, if that, and loved it. Thought the non-specific style, time and location was great in setting up a slight suspension of disbelief, and probably was good for making it a bit more universal.

X-Post Ok fine I agree on b and c but I think given the situation he totally might have done it in vm.

I had the same thought, not really about the mechanics of it (although considering the casual approach to time periods & technology, maybe they should have just given her a landline & answering machine!), but that communication is such a primary theme in the show. And I hate plots that rely on miscommunication/misunderstandings (that could easily be resolved if characters actually had a conversation) for too long.

xp

which contrarily was what worked about the Rahim storyline, here's a character who's so upfront and transparent and mature, but the people around him are just not like that (yet, presumably), incl his partner, and he winds up screwed because of it.

I've bailed on the second season. The writing took a nosedive and like a lot of second seasons it just feels rushed.

don't think you'll find many agreeing with you there

Ech. My appetite was more than sated with the first season and, to murder that metaphor, all of that nourishment started to feel like excess. I found Maeve (who I totally fell for: who didn't?) increasingly unbelievable and the more they explored the different characters the more they seemed to hollow them out. I may just be dead inside.

I can kind of see that. Season 2s are often very difficult after a great first season.

If I could pinpoint a moment when I thought, nah, I can't be bothered any more: the first glimpse of the relationship between Hendrix and Ms Sands.

oh yeah, i totally would play candy crush during those scenes.

nice that you knew their names.

i love this show

otm about eric i love him and his smile so much. adam too, just perfectly portrayed & acted, so human. he even looks like his dad. rahim too, just the best, that whole plot w/ the bus toilet was incredible, his arc w/ adam & poetry was so good. ruby's arc i just loved so much, she became one of my favorite characters

i've never really cared for otis all that much tbh he kind of has that entitled nice guy attitude. like he's major self-centered dick most of the time but occasionally has some good things to say so he wants all this credit. ok dude. you're petty and small much of the time.

i wanted maeve to experience a little more joy in s3, she deserves it bc she has to carry so much. i also wanted her to get w/ isaac instead of otis.

jakob got like 100x hotter in s3 and i can't really handle when he is onscreen bc of it

cal saying to jackson "you understand this would be a queer relationship, right?" was so good that whole scene was so well done

yes

jackson’s confused but interested look, alert, freaked out, trying to be cool, and i’m wanting cal to help him, answer the questions jackson surely has, but that’s so much to put on someone who’s that age and still figuring it out! what, is cal supposed to be the nb queer whisperer guru teacher in addition to everything else? and then they say as much later, listen, it’s enough what i’ve got going on, i can’t carry you. cal deserves some joy too

totally

i feel all of that

something i was confused about was the “school forum”. did that happen? did it happen offscreen? i guess that’s where they made their film and rehearsed the teaches of peaches?

in any case i thought the way that was treated was really unexpected. i was anticipating a real michael clayton style gotcha - the recording played over the PA for all the press to hear. but they didn’t do that. it wasn’t about the head teacher. it was about them. and their movie was.. weird? naff? fuzzed out and amateur? the sound kind of too low, the picture quality bad? they could have made it a clean home run, a triumph, but it was so anarchic and messy and uncomfortable

realised part way through that Adam reminded me of Simon Ritchie / Sid Vicious to look at

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2021 season is nominated in the ILX TV poll, with voting ending this weekend:

ILX's Best Television of 2021 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 31, 2022

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

I delayed watching Season 3, I wasn't sure I was ready! But having almost finished it now--did a lot of things get choreographed like REALLY broadly this season? Whole insights and plot developments went by in one or two lines, sometimes feeling like just a device to move things forward? It made the progress seem too easily won, for me. Feels like they painted themselves into a corner with the student forum and then just made it go away. Hope was really well written and played, though, wasn't she?? The terrifying insidiousness of the evil in the guise of respectable banality.

Don't love how Lily's storyline was played. At all.

At the same time I think I laughed more at this season than any other, and Jean continues to be the most relatable character to me by miles and miles, but I also love Eric, he's really the voice of reason and living in your own truth in S3, isn't he? He fought so hard in the first two and he's becoming himself so beautifully.

Jakob is SMOLDERING hot and absolutely infuriating, I want his stuff off my counters too and PLEASE STOP SHOUTING. Aimee is a pure pleasure, the most genuine person. Love every bit of the arc with her and Maeve and their support of each other, how sometimes you get the family you get, and sometimes you get the family you make.

Ahh I love this show so much!

The outro song of the last episode just made my heart explode.

I hope Maeve In America is its own story arc and not an excuse to not have her in the cast all season. I look forward to the consistently execrable American accents (although Cal's is pretty good--oh that's because they're from Minneapolis, which I just looked up!).

dua saleh was great in this, and her music is damn good too

i'm thinking back to lily's story l4urel and yeah it was a bummer.. what specifically didn't you like about it?

I truly thought things were going to take a darker turn. The harm done to Lily was so profound I was worried they were taking it to a self-harm place, esp since she hadn't been to school and didn't know about the student revolt happening. The big musical scene at the same time as Lily was possibly about to hurt herself seemed especially garish and performative. I really thought they were purposefully contrasting Lily's suffering with the other kids getting over-hyped in a spectacle that didn't do anything to heal the students most hurt by Hope's oppression. Like a lot of things this season, I thought big gestures were used in place of character development or a more painstaking plot.

I really like what you said about how moral the show is! You're a much more keen critic of media than I am.

really good posts yall, and voodoo chili is otm about Saleh

I'm sure it's been noted, but Eric's sojourn in Lagos was a wonderful part of the season

SO lovely. I would like them to say more about how he felt seeing his intersecting identities all represented, but I get that they have a lot of story and a growing cast of central-ish characters to get through.

is it wrong that I think of Jakob as dime store Mads?

I definitely do. Of course a dime store Mads is still worth a fortune.

Hm I don't really see it, plus they're from different countries

I thought the same thing, and wish he had been cast as a wink to their Hannibal relationship.

Eric Is The New Dr. Who!

Amazing

Lily & Ola depart:

https://ew.com/tv/sex-education-tanya-reynolds-exits-series-before-season-4-lily/?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgJotJx8Iio

Final Season Drops September 21st

Trailer NSFW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WldgrH9SvbE

Saw that it dropped last night, not seen any of it yet.
Had assumed that Ncuti having been cast in another significant role might have meant it was over.
But looking forward to watching it.

The reviews are not good, but I'm looking forward to checking in with our old pals anyway.

Have watched first episode. Lots of changes but still great. Absolute ROFL at one bit.

Oh man, that Ep 4 cold open...

https://www.businessinsider.com/look-inside-sex-education-house-up-for-sale-otis-jean-2023-10

The iconic house from the hit Netflix show "Sex Education" has gone on the market for £1.5 million, or around $1.8 million.

The Norwegian-inspired chalet, which is located in the English village of Symonds Yat in the Wye Valley, dates back to 1912 when it was used as a salmon fishing lodge, real estate agent Knight Frank's website says.

I thought this season was mostly good, but the extended descent into metaphysical nonsense absolutely had me rolling my eyes. Mostly satisfied with the ending though.

I keep seeing Ncuti here and wondering how or if it is going to tie in with his performance as the Doctor. Nit really seen the breadth of hys talent since I've mainly seen him in this and Barbie and I'm not sure that's even a shaped part.

I spent some time in the Wye Valley this past summer. It is absurdly beautiful.

And if you're in the area, make sure to visit the cute little tourist town filled with bookstores, Hay-on-Wye, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay-on-Wye

I found the liberal plot points gish gallop to be delightful and how zero characters ever pushed back on any of it whatsoever at any point