Sex Education

Season two packs in an astounding amount of stories that have real heart and skin to them, while also allowing significant space for pansexuality, queer sex and queer desire, bisexuality, and asexuality. It’s sprawling and intimate all at once, like several personal diaries strung together.

The parent’s problems feel minor to those of their offspring and their storylines can be a bit too drawn out. “Sex Education” easily overcomes that minor quibble because Nunn and her cast have created a universe of characters that you inherently want to root for. And it’s so entertaining that after eight almost-hour long episodes it somehow feels like a quickie. And, yes, that’s a compliment.

“Sex Education” imagines a more colorful, more livable, and more loving world. Even if it wasn’t also hilarious, charming, and chock full of heart, that would be reason enough to love it.

For the most part, the storytelling in Season 2 continues to be masterly—plot arising from character and observation, almost all of it tremendously satisfying. But as Otis’s behavior deviates farther and farther from what he might advise others to do, culminating in an excruciating scene of drunken public jerkiness, I found myself wishing that the writers had made different choices, my suspension of disbelief pierced. Other elements help compensate.

Otis, Maeve, and Eric’s stories are the meat of this season, but the most compelling threads emerge when the show grants unexpected complexity to characters in the periphery.

For eight hour-long episodes, Sex Education Season 2 manages to pack an impressive amount of storytelling into each episode. Realizing that this show works best as an ensemble has given it a new sense of purpose taking it beyond clichés.

The surreal glossiness in Sex Education is a joke and a cloak. Any realistic depiction of a chlamydia outbreak in a Welsh secondary school would be gritty. Here it is harmless and hilarious. It’s a schooling not just in sex, but in comedy, too.

While the second season retains much of the spirit of the first season, there were also many moments where I wondered what exactly Sex Education is trying to say.

The season’s later episodes effectively turn back towards the things that this show and only this show can do, and do so well. It’s a welcome return to what made the series special to begin with. But even towards the end, it can’t resist trying out familiar moves from many other stories about love, both young and old.