Experience Overrated

Dana messages me occasionally with a show she swears will change my life. Her taste is genuinely scary—ignore one of her recommendations and you fall out of touch with what’s actually happening in culture. So when she texted about Sex Education, I didn’t protest.

Otis Milburn, awkward and inexperienced, lives with his mom, who’s a sex therapist. Years of absorbing her books, videos, and relentlessly direct conversations have made him an accidental expert. When his private life leaks at school, Otis sees an opportunity—he could turn this weird knowledge into actual social capital. He and Maeve, sharp and deliberately strange, start an underground advice practice for the sexual problems plaguing their classmates. Analyzing everyone else’s dysfunction, Otis starts to realize he might actually need help too.

It’s the kind of Netflix show that lands on the sympathetic side—likable characters, reasonable stories, gentle mirrors held up to the world. First love, coming out, masturbation, a whisper of Oedipal texture. It won’t reshape culture the way American Pie supposedly did. Nothing quite reaches the flute in the pussy level of alchemy, the kind of reference that lasts twenty years. But for anyone fumbling through inexperience or trying to get past it, there’s something solid about watching other people navigate the same confused mess.

You don’t always need something that promises to change your life. Sometimes you just want to be entertained, to think about sex and desire and what wanting feels like, without it demanding profundity. Sex Education is that. You pick things up. Maybe a technique, maybe just permission to wonder what you actually want. Dana was right. Usually is.