Ask Your Mother, She Knows Everything

I have a friend who only contacts me to recommend films and series. That’s the entire relationship as far as WhatsApp is concerned—months of silence, then a message that amounts to: watch this or your life is smaller than it needs to be. The aggravating thing is that Dana is almost never wrong. Her taste is genuinely first-rate, the kind where ignoring a recommendation feels like a deliberate act of self-harm. A few days ago the message arrived: Have you watched Sex Education yet? If not, do it. So I spent the last few evenings bingeing the thing.

The setup: Otis Milburn is an awkward, virginal teenager living with his mother, a sex therapist. He’s absorbed enough of her books, videos, and aggressively open dinner-table conversations to have become an accidental expert on the mechanics of human sexuality—despite having essentially no firsthand experience of his own. When this leaks out at school, he teams up with the sharp and contrary Maeve to run an underground sex-therapy clinic for their classmates. The irony, which Otis arrives at slowly and the audience sees coming immediately, is that he probably needs the therapy himself.

Sex Education is the kind of Netflix series that’s good at being kind to you. Nice characters, satisfying arcs, social commentary that holds a mirror up to teenage sexuality—first love, queerness, masturbation, a light coating of Oedipus complex—without ever making anyone genuinely uncomfortable. It’ll change the world about as much as American Pie did, maybe slightly less. The flute-in-the-pussy scene is simply too legendary to compete with. But you don’t need everything you watch to rewire your brain; sometimes it’s fine to let something wash over you and spend a few hours thinking about sex. That’s a perfectly valid use of an evening. Thanks for the push, Dana.