The naked truth about Sex Education’s new sexting scene? It’s a barely believable turn-off

The Netflix series has built up a reputation for straight-talking boldness, for being willing to tackle sexual truths in blunt, unabashed terms. It’s a nice idea, writes Louis Chilton – but in truth the show that purports to bare all keeps its privates well and truly hidden

Phone ranger: Emma Mackey as Maeve Wiley in ‘Sex Education’ (Thomas Wood/Netflix)

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.

Where is Sex Education set? In England, we are told, though it resembles no part of the country I’ve ever been to. Moordale Secondary School – where much of the action was staged over the first three seasons – gives the impression that some sort of huge digger came and scooped up a Californian high school, dumping it in the middle of Welsh suburbia, plumbing and all. Students don’t wear uniforms, but dress in Americanised varsity jackets; the sport of choice seems to be American football. The new location for season four, Cavendish College, is hardly any truer to life.