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.

When is the series set? In the present, going by people’s mobile phones. But anachronisms clutter the screen at every turn. Most of the cars we see are decades old. Characters frequently use antiquated technology. It’s all a deliberate choice, of course – creator Laurie Nunn has claimed that these little unreal flourishes were made in tribute to the late Breakfast Club filmmaker John Hughes, whose 1980s oeuvre looms over the coming-of-age genre like Godzilla over the streets of Tokyo. Except it isn’t quite right to call them flourishes. These coy inconsistencies permeate almost every crevice of Sex Education; its entire vibe is one of calculated artificiality.

Season four begins with an episode that spotlights a kind of fable about sexting etiquette, as a spontaneous nude sent by Maeve (Emma Mackey) sends Otis into a panic. We see him prevaricate over a reply, taking naked photos of his own without sending them. He talks through his anxieties with best friend Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), ultimately making nice with Maeve and engaging in a spot of cathartic phone sex – but not before his nudes are projected to an auditorium of his schoolgoing peers. It’s quintessential Sex Education: taking a timely sex-related topic – here, sexting – and constructing a pithy, vaguely relatable narrative around it.

Taken in isolation, the storyline is fine (albeit slightly preposterous in its full-frontal comic climax). But this sense of relatability implodes when you start probing everything around it: the sets, the situations. Sex Education becomes “modern” only when the story demands it, and regresses a minute later. Part of the tension of season four stems from Maeve and Otis being separated by a continent: she is in the US enrolled in a creative writing course. The problem with this fish-out-of-water storyline, of course, is that the England of Sex Education already mimics America. The differences are lost in the blur. We cannot take these characters and their problems seriously because we cannot take their world seriously.

Of course, Sex Education is hardly alone in this half-hearted attempt at an Anglo-American cross aesthetic. Ted Lasso was another inveterate offender, crafting an utterly inauthentic image of London’s football scene, without even the integrity to convert sayings like “walk around the block” into regionally appropriate jargon. It is hard to shake the sense that series like Ted Lasso and Sex Education are blurring these lines for commercial rather than creative reasons: pandering to an imagined international audience that seems to crave the kudos of a British setting without any of the thorny cultural specificity.

‘We cannot take these characters and their problems seriously because we cannot take their world seriously’ (Samuel Taylor/Netflix)

Not every series needs to strive for realism. Television shouldn’t be confined to the rigours of aesthetic naturalism, and the idea of conflating different time periods and settings into one location might, in the right circumstances, work as an audacious creative choice. With Sex Education though, this confluence of times and places serves only to narrow its horizon, reducing its world to its most palatable, marketable form. Where’s the honesty there? For a series that purports to bare all, Sex Education ultimately keeps its privates well and truly hidden.

‘Sex Education’ is streaming now on Netflix