The gang of pitch-perfect actors give this show the perfect, elusive blend of truthful, joyful and funny
I have been remiss. I realise now, as its second series begins, that I have neglected to proclaim to you at every possible opportunity over these last few vexing years that help was at hand to smooth your passage through the dark days. I apologise unreservedly and say now: let The Sex Lives of College Girls (ITVX) comfort you and, also, I must state that it is not porn because I know that’s what you’re thinking. It is the creation of writer, actor, director and production powerhouse Mindy Kaling (The Office, Never Have I Ever, The Mindy Project) and Justin Noble (a writer on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Never Have I Ever) and is the perfect, elusive blend of truthful, joyful and funny.
It focuses on the adventures and misadventures (often genital based) of a quartet of roommate freshers at the fancy fictional Essex College in Vermont. Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott) is a star soccer player whose mother is a US senator, which in the first series made it all the more important that she didn’t find out Whitney was having an affair with her assistant soccer coach. The parents of Indian-American Bela (Amrit Kaur) were equally shielded from the knowledge that their daughter was less interested in her neuroscience studies than she was in becoming a comedy writer and topographer of shredded frat boys. Leighton (Reneé Rapp) is the rich legacy student from the Upper East Side – an all-American blonde from a picture-perfect family that will shatter if they discover she is gay. And sweet Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet – yes, sister of Timothée), as naive and enthusiastic as a labrador puppy, is a small-town scholarship girl who has to navigate all the barriers life among the moneyed elite brings. Individually, the actors are pitch-perfect. Together, they are something special. At their best they remind you of the Friends’ chemistry which – whatever you thought of the show then or think of it now – was spectacular.
