The Sex Lives of College Girls review – this comedy’s spectacular chemistry makes it the modern-day Friends

The Sex Lives of College Girls review – this comedy’s spectacular chemistry makes it the modern-day Friends

The gang of pitch-perfect actors give this show the perfect, elusive blend of truthful, joyful and funny

Amrit Kaur, Pauline Chalamet, Alyah Chanelle Scott and Reneé Rapp in The Sex Lives of College Girls.
Something special … Amrit Kaur, Pauline Chalamet, Alyah Chanelle Scott and Reneé Rapp in The Sex Lives of College Girls. Photograph: ITV

Ihave 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.

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