Let’s Talk About (Es)sex, Baby
A review of HBO Max’s ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls’
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The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰
Romance ✰✰
Sex ✰✰✰½
Storytelling ✰✰
Performance ✰✰✰
Yearning ✰✰✰
Light spoilers for season 2 ahead! If you’re not caught up, you can watch it here.
Written by Ali Romig
Ah, college. Remember it? That special time in life when your beautiful, wood-paneled suites were spacious enough for an overstuffed couch big enough to sit four. When your RA was so involved that they hosted weekly dorm meetings and provided a safe place to form real community with your peers. When the party themes were playfully raunchy, but stopped short of overtly problematic. Wait…none of this is ringing true? It isn’t for me, either. But does that really matter?
HBO Max’s The Sex Lives of College Girls, or SLOCG (an acronym that is almost as much of a mouthful as the title), returned for its second season last month, and once again it is making me nostalgic for college—despite the fact that absolutely nothing about this show bares any resemblance to my personal experience. However, its sophomore run does mirror my own in one way—it feels a little off. Don’t get me wrong, overall I enjoy this show. And maybe it’s because both seasons have aired November-December—when I think about watching it, I think about curling up with tea, surrounded by twinkling string lights, candle wicks popping gently in the background—but SLOCG often feels like fantasy in the same way a holiday rom-com might. It’s formulaic, idealized, and at times cringy, and we love it for that.
SLOCG—co-created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble—takes the tried and true “four-women'' formula and transposes it onto a college campus, making a somewhat underwhelming effort to subvert the stereotypes often found in these types of shows. In the first season, we met freshman suitemates Kimberly (the nerd, but she fucks), Bela (the slut, but she’s funny), Whitney (the athlete, but she’s smart), and Leighton (the bitch, but she’s gay) and watched their messy adjustment to life at Essex, a fictional Vermont university where the grand stone buildings and stained glass windows are meant to closely resemble any real life Ivy League school.
Since the show first aired, I’ve had trouble figuring out who the target audience is. Is it for current-day college students? I’m not convinced, since so much of it feels like a millennial's take on Gen-Z. Is it for adults looking to relive their golden years? Again, I’m not sure. Still, the show has garnered a fairly large following, especially online, and I count myself among its fans. Despite its flaws and the fact that about 72% of the jokes don’t hit for me, I find the show incredibly charming, if decidedly mid.
A lot of that charm can and should be attributed to the performances given by the core-four, who manage to elevate the sometimes-cliché writing and largely unlikable characters. Because if I’m being honest, these characters get on my damn nerves. Watching this show can feel like going out to dinner with an old friend that you no longer have that much in common with—sometimes confounding, sometimes disappointing, but always tinged with enough sentimentality that you feel encouraged to come back and try again. And this is where my earlier comment about the show’s sophomore season feeling slightly off comes into play, because while season 1 felt intentionally messy, this season the core storylines feel halting and cyclical in a way that makes me wonder if the show knows where it’s hoping to take things next.
The second season picks up right where we left off—with the girls coming back from Thanksgiving break1, still very much in their freshman year. Season one ended on a cliff-hanger for Kimberly (the splendid Pauline Chalamet—and yes, she is related to that Chalamet; they’re siblings), who’d just found out that her desperately-needed scholarship had been revoked due to her having cheated on a test. She spends the first few episodes of season 2 trying to figure out how to pay her tuition without getting her financially stressed parents involved.
First, she tries to get a loan but gives up on that after the benevolent co-signing professor’s husband tells Kimberly they should “fuck sometime.” Next, she tries transcribing closed captions for Sex Paradise: Australia for pay, but quickly learns it’s too difficult to understand the drunk, crying Aussies. Finally, she lands on donating her eggs. Once that storyline is neatly wrapped up (too neatly, maybe2), she moves on by becoming hookup buddies with their hunky new next door neighbor, a “climate refugee” from Kansas named Jackson (Mitchell Slaggert, who looks vaguely like a Hollywood Chris). Kimberly is probably my favorite character, mostly because I think Pauline Chalamet gives some of the best line readings on the show. But I do wish the writers would give her more to do, or at least vary her storylines. Last season, Kimberly came into her own sexual power by hooking up with Nico, a frat bro who she saw as “out of her league.” This season, Kimberly once again has to be convinced that she is hot enough for new boy Jackson to notice, and ultimately sleep with. It feels less satisfying this time around and I long for more forward momentum for her. But in the meantime, I’ll settle for watching her perfect line delivery.
Bela (Amrit Kaur) starts season two off strong, launching her new all-female comedy magazine, The Foxy. She even enters into an exclusive relationship with fellow on-campus comedy writer Eric (Mekki Leeper), but that quickly goes south when she sleeps with an established comedian and late-night talk show host in the hopes of making an impression on him. And this is the thing about Bela’s character that leaves me scratching my head; she’s impulsive and focused-oriented, and I appreciate the perspective of a young woman making mistakes when faced with the challenge of advancing on an uneven playing field, but while the first season handled Bela’s storyline with care, this season seems to be putting her in compromising situations just for the hell of it. This is further muddled by Bela’s contradictory ethos—her character is all about being sex-positive, but she repeatedly ignores other people’s boundaries and it’s never really addressed. I feel like we’ve moved on from the idea that women can blatantly objectify men without consequences, and it’s supposed to be funny simply because it’s the opposite of what you might expect. I’d love to see the writers take Bela’s character in a less obvious direction. Instead, I feel they threw that opportunity away in favor of the more scandalous (but less worthwhile) option.
Speaking of confusing choices, when soccer-star Whitney’s (Alyah Chanelle Scott) season ends, she is forced to figure out who she is without soccer. Unsure of what she’s passionate about outside of the sport, and after a failed attempt at “soccer with hands” (aka water polo), she decides to throw herself into…biochemistry. Seems random, but I’ll go with it! On top of losing soccer, she also loses her boyfriend, Canaan, after she jealously snoops through his phone. While this is an undoubtedly uncool move, I did feel like Canaan dumped her fairly hastily (the whole storyline felt like a rushed attempt to add drama and advance the plot).
Romantically and academically adrift in the biochemistry lab—where she’s discovered a genuine passion for science, which we love—Whitney discovers a slightly less genuine passion in the (surprisingly buff) arms of her insufferable, relentlessly-negging classmate Andrew (Charlie Hall). Listen, I love a good enemies-to-lovers romance as much as the next gal3, but it usually works better in fantasy—in real life stories, it gives me the ick. Even more so when this so-called love interest tells Whitney that he thinks she shouldn’t be in the lab because he finds her skirts “distracting.” (Isn’t that the same line incels have been using to keep women from advancing in scientific fields for years?) But instead of calling him out on his bullshit, Whitney kisses him! Granted, there is still time in the season for the other shoe to drop in this relationship, but I’m not sure I trust that’s where the writers are taking this. I would really love to be proven wrong, though.
Finally, we have Leighton (Reneé Rapp), our favorite MILF-loving queer girlie. Leighton’s brand of rich/dom/bitch is certainly somebody out there’s type—if not mine—and this season she’s newly out and embracing her slut-era! Only, it isn’t long before she ends up in the middle of a dozen girls who are all each other’s exes (funny) and hiding her recent chlamydia diagnosis from her hookups (not funny). After settling down a bit, she meets her ultimate crush, the only one who can out-judge her, the girl to top all girls—her doppelgänger, Tatum (Gracie Dzienny, who most recently starred in the ill-fated lesbian vampire show, First Kill). Tatum is older than Leighton and seems to be the only person who can challenge her in the very specific, very cringy way she likes to be challenged. And while this mostly makes for kind of uncomfortable, trying-for-cheeky banter, it also leads to some genuine growth for Leighton. In this season she comes out not only to her roommates, but to her dad as well, inspired by Tatum’s open dialogue with her own father. This scene is sweet (if a little surface-level).
One of the highlights of Season 1 for me was Leighton’s coming out scene with Kimberly, which felt gentle and nuanced in how it handled internalized homophobia. And while it can be exhausting to sit through multiple coming out scenes (not to mention how exhausting it can be having to come out over and over again), I have noticed that this season they seem to be glossing over these moments a bit more and not diving as deeply into the feelings, fears, or even excitement that might come with the experience. It almost reads like the writers are eager to not have to deal with this as a “plot point” anymore. This is mostly okay—especially when it’s portrayed as Leighton growing more confident in her identity—and I am happy to see her storyline develop past the drama of being closeted, even if I do miss some of the more thoughtful writing of past episodes. Last season, the main tension in Leighton’s relationship with her girlfriend Alicia was that she wasn’t ready to come out; Tatum seems less concerned with this. So of course, it’s when Leighton and her carbon copy are finally fulfilling their ultimate fantasy to fuck themselves that Alicia texts her: “I’m thinking of you.” I enjoyed Alicia’s character in Season 1; she is Leighton’s (and therefore Tatum’s) polar opposite. So I’ll be seated to watch this gay drama unfold in the finale!
The Sex Lives of College Girls isn’t perfect, but I honestly don’t think it needs to be in order to provide entertainment. It’s what I’d call a classic “comfort watch”—these are the shows we put on when we’re feeling anxious, bored, or even when we just need something familiar playing in the background while we do something else. SLOCG makes me laugh (sometimes), I know what I’m going to get from an episode, and I know that—for better or worse—these girls are going to end up okay. And that’s the thing: even though the characters are majorly flawed, I still root for them as a quartet, because they have the kind of chemistry on screen that makes watching them genuinely fun. And sometimes, that’s all you need from a show.
The Season 2 finale of The Sex Lives of College Girls airs tonight, Thursday, December 15th on HBO Max. And what more? The show was just renewed for season three!
The results from last week’s poll are in! Y’all are really doing this, huh…
Next week on The Yearning, Meg will write her first ‘From the Archives’ review and attempt to have an original thought on Clea DuVall’s heavily debated Happiest Season.
The timeline of this season is generally pretty confusing. It starts up after Thanksgiving break, which feels like a reset, but then they kind of skip over winter break and head into the spring in the span of two episodes. This doesn’t really affect the watch, just something I found interesting!
We should all circle back to the very real conversation of predatory egg donation companies and their presence on college campuses, targeting young people and misleading them regarding the risks and complications of what is a genuinely intensive medical process!
Gender neutral, obvi
Charming but mid lmaoooooo