If you’re like me, you probably have very few friends, even less life experience, and trouble with your emotions. So if you are like me, shows like Sex Education (season 3 is out on Netflix, watch it) were fucking golden.
For those who’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, Sex Education is a Netflix show set in and around a secondary school in England that tackles a lot of things around sexual and emotional health and well-being. The show talks about and shows people of different races, genders, and sexual orientations navigating various types of interpersonal relationships, romantic and otherwise. It is a brilliant piece of art that does so much more than entertain. Like the title says, “Sex Education”, will teach you about sex. It’ll also teach you about yourself.
The show works great for something I like to call TV therapy, that is where you (the watcher) swaps yourself out for a character who you happen to relate to and use that to work through your emotions. The reason this is so effective is that the characters in Sex Ed, unlike most other TV shows, are very far from perfect and they recognize that. They are teenagers, and like all teenagers they are selfish, and short-sighted, and very very flawed. But they recognize this (perhaps this is an unrealistic thing), and in the show take tangible steps to remedy these flaws.
Something else this show does very well is reiterate that there is no magic wand. That life is a constant battle. Even if you know what to do, and how to do it, it takes a long time to get done. Also, sometimes shit just doesn’t break your way. This goes a very long way in making the viewers relate to the characters. We can recognize their struggles because we’ve gone through or are going through, maybe not the same but similar things.
Sex Education is a brilliant show for multiple reasons, not least because it allows the viewers to look into themselves and discover things they might not have otherwise (except they have therapists).
