From co-creators Mindy Kaling (The Office) and Justin Noble (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), the 10-episode HBO Max original comedy series The Sex Lives of College Girls follows college roommates Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet), Bela (Amrit Kaur), Leighton (Reneé Rapp), and Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott) as they arrive at New England’s prestigious Essex College and try to acclimate to their new surroundings. As they get to know each other, they’re also getting to know themselves better, living life on campus with all of the freedoms that come with that.
During this interview with Collider, executive producers Kaling and Noble talked about creating a college experience that’s a bit of their own wish fulfillment, how much they each learned by working with their writers’ room staff, that the nude party in the series was inspired by a real-life event, the deliciousness of the Kimberly-Nico (Gavin Leatherwood) dynamic, getting to see these roommates grow together, what they enjoy about writing comedy, and the challenges of making a comedy during COVID.
Collider: Mindy, you currently have both Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls. I know it wasn’t your idea to do a show based around a high school girl, but now that you’ve done a show set in high school, and now a show set in college, what has most surprised you when it comes to what you’ve enjoyed about telling those stories?
MINDY KALING: It has been surprising that, for the past couple years, I’ve been writing these shows where the median age of the characters is 17. What I think has been really fun about it is that young people with big personalities who desperately seek a sexual awakening are just fun to write. They’re funny. Justin, who worked on Never Have I Ever and Brooklyn Nine-Nine before that, what we both responded to was these young women and these diverse women who just want so much. They have so much ambition for their lives. With this one, a lot of it is romance and sex-related. He was the perfect choice to bring along on this show.
Justin, what has been unexpected for you, in exploring the lives of four college girls?
JUSTIN NOBLE: I’ve honestly just had a blast. It’s been the most fun project, ever. I can never repay Mindy enough for bringing me in to explore this with her. It has been great to write a wish-fulfillment of what I wanted my college experience to be, and I hope an audience relates that, on some level, or at least part of our audience. My college experience was as a closeted gay boy who had next to no sex. I was the guy sitting there wanting to hang out with my female friends and know everything they were up to, and that’s continued since college and hasn’t really stopped yet. So, it was exciting for me to surround myself with smart female comedians, like Mindy and like our amazing writers’ room, and just hear their takes on this college experience. It made for such an easy job, to just sit there and say, “That’s so funny. We should do that.”
Justin, as a showrunner, what’s it like to have a scene for a nude party? How was that to stage and shoot?
KALING: That actually comes from Justin, who went to Yale and said, “Let’s do a naked party.” If you saw that in a Will Ferrell movie, you’d be like, “They just did this for a movie. This isn’t real.” And Justin was like, “I have been to a nude party.”
NOBLE: It was attached from our first meeting about it at Warner Bros. I was like, “I think we should do this thing. It’s so crazy and out there.” It’s a tradition at Yale, where I went to school, that they do these naked parties and they act like it’s so normal, but everyone is just pretending. No one in their right mind would think it’s normal, but everyone’s like, “It’s great. We just don’t have clothes on. I’m definitely not looking down at everything I don’t see when I’m in English class with you.” But I will tell you, the thing that’s crazier is going to a naked party when it’s on set for a television show that you’re making. That feels much weirder. I thought it would feel like it did in college. The whole crew, for two days, was just filming in a room.
KALING: And it was during COVID. I’m very repressed and have been repressed since birth, so I found the show very titillating and fun, in that way, to be in these scenes. And I learned so much. Our staff was filled with women, diverse women and, frankly, more sexually advanced women than Justin and I because we needed that for the show. Every day, I felt like I was like learning something new. Some things horrified me, and some didn’t. More than any show, just what we learned every day, anthropologically, was interesting.
NOBLE: For me, it was physiologically. Now, I know what a UTI is like. That wasn’t information I had before this show. Now, I can at least hold a conversation about it.
Personally, I love the dynamic between Kimberly and Nico. What can you say to tease their relationship and how that will evolve this season, and what we’ll get to see with them?
KALING: I think their relationship is so delicious because it’s very triggering for me to like someone who is older and so much cooler and more sexually advanced, and to get these little glimpses that they might like you back. I love watching them together. There’s a reason he has a reputation on the show. There’s a reason why maybe it would have been better for her to tell Leighton about it. He’s a classic bad boy, and we’ll find out why.
Clearly, all four of these young women are exploring and trying to figure out who they are. How much will they have grown by the end of the season, and who would you say grows the most?
NOBLE: I think that they all grow, similarly. One of the things that most attracted us to the project was the idea that they all grow together. At this stage in their lives, they’re growing as individuals, but they’re also growing, in terms of their relationships and how much they lean on each other. I think they all grow in different and unique ways, but not so much growth. When you’re 18 and 19, you have so many things about you that aren’t quite fully cooked yet, so it’s just about charting that little map towards adulthood.
KALING: The other thing I would say about these characters, in this first season, is that there’s obviously so much fun stuff that happens to them, but they are really a lot of trials that they have to go through, each of them. We wanted them to go through serious shit and traumatizing shit, and seeing how they deal with it. By putting those characters through the ringer like that, it helped us have them depend on each other a little bit more. They really don’t want to. They’re randomly assigned roommates, and some of them say, “I don’t wanna be living with you.” Life can be really hard on campuses for young women and we wanted to show all of that, and not just the fun, sexy part, but the parts that were a little uglier, to be honest.
NOBLE: There’s a forced confidence that exists when you go away to school for the first time. You’re away from your parents and you’re like, “I’ve got this.” But then, you’re 18 and 19 years old, and eventually life reminds you that you don’t have everything figured out yet and you need help. Whether that support system is your family back home, or your friends back home, or the new people you just met in your life, you’re gonna need them to get through the next couple of stages.
I’m definitely a tough sell on comedy, and I laughed out loud with every episode. What do you guys love about writing comedy? How does it feel when you write something that you hope is funny, and then you hand it over to great actors and they either meet your expectation or exceed it?
KALING: Well, thank you for saying that. That means a lot that you liked it. I come from The Office and Justin comes from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. We’re from this old-school, hard joke writing type of world and it means a lot that you said that, so thank you. It’s tough. We write in a vacuum, and then we cast it. It wasn’t like we wrote this for Ted Danson, or had someone in mind. We knew that this would be an open casting call and we would just be finding people. None of these people are L.A.-based. They’re from all over. They’re all over the country, and Pauline [Chalamet] lives in France.
So, we had to adapt to what their strengths were, going into it, which is a fun part of the show. But the challenging part about doing the show during COVID is that it’s hard to learn the strengths of the actors when you can’t spend any time with them and you really don’t know what their face looks like from the nose down. We couldn’t have a bunch of dinners and have everyone over to the house. So, I’m so impressed with this cast that they were able to be so funny without the normal stuff that they’re used to and that they should be able to have, when you launch a show.
NOBLE: Even from a production standpoint, Mindy and I both love and joke so much, but during COVID, it’s so hard to run in and say, “Oh, I have a new joke that I wanna give you,” on the day because you’ve got a mask and a face shield. And the number of times I would run up to one of our performers and they’d be like, “I can’t hear the alt-joke you want me to do.”
KALING: And the COVID supervisor is throwing you off the set.
NOBLE: Yeah, so that made it a little challenging. It boils down to us both being perfections about trying to make things as funny as we can in the moment. So, I’m so thankful that you said that.
The Sex Lives of College Girls is available to stream at HBO Max.