What is the best way to deal with the potential teen embarrassment of everyone finding out your mom is a sex therapist? In Netflix's Sex Education, it's making yourself into an on-call therapist for your fellow students -- and gaining popularity in doing so (as well as a very intimate knowledge of your peers). The British comedy series comes from Laurie Nunn, and stars Asa Butterfield (Ender’s Game) as Otis, the reluctant teen expert on sex. Gillian Anderson plays his mother, and according to the press release, "Otis decides to set up a Sex Therapy clinic at school for the hopeless students of Moordale High. Get ready for love, laughs, lube, and the best time of their lives."
From the trailer below, Sex Education seems less like a raunchy sex comedy and ore of a visual bildungsroman, dealing with Otis growing up, having his heart broken, and his friends (Emma Mackey, Ncuti Gatwa) dealing with their own personal dramas. It's not a great trailer, but it's informative and possesses some hallmarks of teen drama series: awkward boy, punky girl, clueless parents, social cliques, diving into pools with your regular clothes on, running and jumping through sunset-lit fields. You know, the usual! The real question is, can it reach the heights of the UK's awkward teen comedy Inbetweeners? We shall see!
The series premieres Friday, January 11th on Netflix; check out the trailer and synopsis below:
Here's the official synopsis for Sex Education:
Meet Otis Milburn – an inexperienced, socially awkward high school student who lives with his mother, a sex therapist. Surrounded by manuals, videos and tediously open conversations about sex, Otis is a reluctant expert on the subject. When his home life is revealed at school, Otis realizes that he can use his specialist knowledge to gain status. He teams up with Maeve, a whip-smart bad-girl, and together they set up an underground sex therapy clinic to deal with their fellow students’ weird and wonderful problems. Through his analysis of teenage sexuality, Otis realises he may need some therapy of his own.
