Sex Education: Season 2
... or Odenwaldschule on optical cocaine
Sex Education Season 2 is here, released on the 17th of January — a Friday, to suit your binge-watching needs. All eight hours of your time expended for the pure pleasure of see beautiful people worry about their sex lives and other dramatic tropes. Everything is perfect: the screenwriting is in top form, the characters are all well etched for a nominal viewing, the cinematography lulls you into thinking the show is better than what it is but the greatest achievement of it all is that Netflix hides in the background without once making its presence too imposing on the screen.
I don't pay for a Netflix subscription, my partner does along with four other people for a sum of €3 a month. That's a paltry sum for enticing me to binge-watch for hours, the economics don't add up in the end. So for the quantity of content I get for the price point, I must be fed absolute visual junk to while my time away before the start of another day as a productive member of the society.
This is my general gripe with almost all of Netflix's shows these days, they have an interesting hook and after a few episodes they plunge into private label factory produce with stock characters, story arcs and music choices. The writing usually is top-notch, following all the rules of an efficient drama but this perfection in everything lends a sterile viewing environment where the sense are numbed for the lack of any challenge.
Sex Education has an interesting premise but when viewed away from the binge-watching euphoria, it is nothing but shallow. It feels like a fictional version of the Odenwaldschule, where everyone sleeps with everyone else and no real studying seems to happen at any given point. Everything is focused around sex for the students, teachers, the headmaster and even the plumbers and shopkeepers in this fictional village. There is no sport, no classes and no other aspect of teenage life that demands attention, the most popular things to do seem to be a visiting a Sexual Councillor, either real or fake.
The sappy character arcs can be seen episodes away, giving enough time for one to cook, to take a nap or check the occasional Reddit post. The show doesn't demand any serious attention as it's not made to start a conversation but rather to serve as a primer for an awkward small talk incubator at a work lunch or an excuse to have that Netflix account running for one more month. Sex Education is all those sappy Saas-Bahu soaps but with a greater budget. The idea is just the same, to be hypnotized for a little while and go about the day without thinking much. While I'm unconsciously entertained, I am not going to sign-up for Netflix anytime soon.
If you're looking for something memorable and consuming only a fraction of your time, I recommend Napoleon Dynamite from which this show invariably draws a lot from. But if you just want to look at pretty people having a cornucopia of frivolous sex problems, then enter the black box and get some subliminal Coke advertising in the process.