Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Other Doctor Lives: Sex Education: Series 1, Episode 1 (2019)

I’ve been enjoying DuckTales more genuinely than I thought I would when I started watching it, but now that I’m through with season 1, I’ve got to put it on pause. There’s a new Doctor coming to town, and that means Other Doctor Lives is turning into All Ncuti Gatwa All the Time. He doesn’t have a ton of credits to his name, but the most prominent is definitely his regular role on Sex Education, which we’re starting today.

Otis is the type of unpopular kid who endeavors to stay under the radar. He wants to be unnoticed, drifting anonymously through school. This is in no small part because he knows that his personal life would put a huge target on his back: his mom runs her sex therapy practice out of her home office. Otis squirms at her casual openness about sexual subjects and her seemingly incessant desire to psychoanalyze his own discomfort with sex, but when his secret gets out, an enterprising girl at his school sees a business opportunity in his humiliation.

This pilot is pretty good. It introduces the main characters in semi-broad strokes that glimpse at further depth, and while those glimpses are a bit routine—the bully is secretly insecure, the much-maligned “easy” girl is clever and observant—there’s enough here that suggests the show is going to stretch the archetypes.

When it comes to the sex stuff, the series goes for some easy laughs, such as Otis’s mom Jean coolly asking a patient, “Margery, how are you getting on with your [strap-on] penis?” It gets into the horror that a teenage boy would experience having a sex therapist for a mom. Besides the general skin-crawling discomfort of Jean asking Otis about his masturbation habits (or lack thereof,) I enjoy the scene of Otis going into a blind panic trying to prepare the house for a classmate coming over to work on a project. There’s a diagram or Karma Sutra drawing on every wall, a fertility statue on every surface. Even the cacti are suspect!

Gillian Anderson is a great choice for Jean. She has this chilly, clinical quality, but she combines it with a deadpan openness that really works for the character. She plays well off of Asa Butterfield’s Otis, an awkward everyman who’s just trying to survive adolescence. I like Emma Mackey as the shrewd Maeve, the girl who sees potential in Otis’s secret, and Connor Swindells is solid as Adam, a bully who’s having trouble “performing.”

Ncuti Gatwa plays Eric Effiong, Otis’s best and possibly only friend. Like Otis, Eric is a loser, but unlike Otis, he doesn’t want to spend his high school years hiding out and avoiding attention. He wants to be in the thick of things; he knows the popular kids’ business, and he carries himself with an optimistic buoyancy. Convinced that this is their year, he enthuses to Otis, “We shall transform from lonely caterpillars into…awesome killer whales?”

Eric is both the Black best friend and the gay best friend, the one who’s tormented daily by the knuckle-dragging Adam. But even though his characterization flirts with tokeny archetypes, the dialogue, and Gatwa’s performance, is keeping it from feeling flat. This is my first episode, but so far, I’m reminded a little of Andrew Rannells’s performance as Elijah in Girls. While Elijah is a character whose screentime almost always revolves around Hannah, Rannells plays him like a rounded person with offscreen adventures we don’t usually see. Similarly, in Gatwa’s hands, Eric doesn’t feel like just the “gay bestie.” I liked that he’s a confident dork who shoots his shot when he can. Yes, he may be on the receiving end of some intense bullying, and he doesn’t just brush that off, but his bright, hopeful personality is in stark contrast to Otis’s nervous wallflower.

First impressions of Sex Education:

Accent Watch

To my ears, it sounds somewhere between RP and London. It’s not Multicultural London English (MLE,) a la John Boyega, but I feel like this is something in his speech that sounds a little different than the non-Black characters.

Recommend?

General – So far, I think I would. Interesting premise with a lot of potential—there’s a lot of room to delve here.

Ncuti Gatwa – I would. At this point, the role is decidedly supporting, but Gatwa is really fun in it.

Warnings

Tons of sexual content, brief violence/threats, language (including sexist and homophobic slurs,) drinking/smoking/drug use, and thematic elements.

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