Sex Education's World Is Too Contrived To Take Seriously

The Netflix series has built up a bold reputation for tackling sexual truths in unabashed terms. But, writes Louis Chilton, its palatable, culturally arid setting prevents it from baring all

- Louis Chilton

There is a conundrum at the heart of Sex Education. Netflix's popular comedy-drama has always sold itself as a sort of unfiltered, scandalise-your-mum enterprise, a zeitgeisty teen show that's technically "unsuitable" for most teens (but they'll watch anyway, of course). It's kind of like Skins, but if it was markedly more progressive, and 80 per cent more twee.

The title alludes to the amateur sex therapy dispensed by school-aged Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), but it also tilts at the fourth wall: Sex Education functions as something of a didactic sexual education for the audience itself. This is how horny everyone really is. This is what your teenage kids are really getting up to. This is what young people really think about sex in 2023 - and here's how that could improve. It wears its frankness on its sleeve, modesty be damned. Except that doesn't really describe Sex Education at all. For all the illusion of candour, of straight-talking boldness, the series itself - which returned to Netflix for its fourth and final season on Thursday - is wholly disinterested in honesty. It is one of the most cynically ersatz TV shows to have graced our screens in years, shunning any true sense of reality for a homogenised, culturally arid pastiche.