Sex for all ages
Gillian Anderson in Sex Education
F
ew series by the streamers have made as much noise as Netflix’s Sex Education, which brings the genre of the US high-school teen drama to the UK – and adds plenty of gauche sex. The global giant released the second season of the comedy-drama in January. A few days earlier, the first episode was premiered at a joint RTS Cymru Wales/Bafta Cymru event in Cardiff.
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Jaws dropped around the cinema during what we can safely say – even this early in the year – will be 2020’s most astonishing opening sequence. Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) is shown trying and failing to control his newly discovered sexual urges in a scene that ends in excruciating embarrassment in front of his therapist mother, Jean (Gillian Anderson). Season 1 of Sex Education was a huge critical success and, almost certainly, a
commercial hit for Netflix. The US streamer is famously reticent about releasing viewing figures. “We didn’t have any idea that people would respond to the show in this way and, particularly, that the breadth of audience would be as it is,” said executive producer Jamie Campbell, creative director of Eleven Film, which makes the series. Campbell was speaking as part of a three-person panel with casting
Netflix
An RTS panel reveals how the explicit scenes required for Sex Education were filmed only once the cast was comfortable
