Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn : "It just felt like the right time to step away from the show"

Film And TV
17 Oct 23

Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn : "It just felt like the right time to step away from the show"

<i>Sex Education</i> creator Laurie Nunn : "It just felt like the right time to step away from the show"

With the final season of Netflix hit Sex Education having just arrived, Molly Cantwell gets the lowdown from series creator Laurie Nunn.

When Sex Education first came out, I remember not understanding why people were so obsessed about a show focusing on teenagers discovering sex. It took me a long time to eventually switch on that first episode - but when I did, I binged the two available series in about a week (lockdown, amirite?)

The single parent dynamic represented by Otis and Jean resonated strongly with me, as did the young women, Maeve, Aimee, Ruby, and more, discovering their sexuality and learning about their bodies.

Learning that the fourth season would be the last was a gut punch to a lot of fans - including myself. Why now? What would happen to the gang? Where would they all go to university? Do they stay friends? These were just a few of the questions fans had as the series came to a close.

However, teasing it out with Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn, it becomes clearer why it was time to call a halt.

“I’m feeling lots of quite complicated feelings about the series coming to an end,” she admits. “I’ve been writing the show for a pretty long time - I started working on it in 2014. I’ve been with these characters for so long, it feels quite sad to be saying goodbye to them. But I also feel excited to hear how people are going to respond to the new series.”

Surprisingly, the process of creating season four didn’t start with the notion that it would be the finale.

”When I started the writers’ room for series four, I didn’t go in thinking it was going to be the final series,” Laurie reveals. “But the way I work is quite fluid. We’re constantly working on the storylines, writing, rewriting - all the way through the process, even when we’re filming. The further I got into the scripting process, it started to become really clear that the characters were coming to the end of their journeys, and that these storylines felt really concluded.

”I felt really happy about where those characters were being left. It just felt like the right time to step away from the show. I’m hoping there’s still goodwill for the series. It feels like it’s a nice moment to say goodbye, rather than trying to keep stretching out a story that might have been more of a push if we’d gone for more seasons.”

While Nunn feels like it’s concluded, is she worried about fans feeling like they’re losing out on the characters’ university experiences?

”I’ve always said that I didn’t want to take them to university,” Nunn explains. “So I stayed true to that. I think the university experiences would be a very different show.”

From its conception, Sex Education has consistently represented a huge variety of people, from those with disabilities, to sexuality and gender. If you were struggling to identify something within yourself, Sex Education is the place to find a character to relate to.

“The real joy of making a teen show is that you usually get to cast very new, fresh faces,’ says Nunn. “It’s really one of the only avenues where you don’t necessarily need a star to make the show. It also felt like a really great opportunity to make the cast as diverse and interesting as possible. The more we wrote, we felt like it was an opportunity to tell teen stories from slightly different perspectives, or take some of those stock teen tropes you see in a lot of older films and TV, and turn them on their head a little bit. It’s very much become part of the DNA of the show.”

As Nunn mentioned, Sex Education has taken relatively unknown actors and brought them to the fore, several of them now starring in the likes of Doctor Who and Barbie. Is she proud of the accomplishment?

“I’m so proud of everyone who works on the show,” Laurie gushes. “Our cast is just amazing and I’m really looking forward to people seeing their final performances in these roles. It feels very bittersweet, but obviously it’s amazing to see all the great things they’re achieving.”

Speaking of the cast, this season the superstar Schitt’s Creek actor and creator, Dan Levy, makes an appearance.

“Basically, we heard Dan Levy had seen the show and he enjoyed it,” explains Laurie. “Somebody read an interview he’d given, and when we were in the writers’ room, really almost like a joke, we were just like, let’s write a character for Dan Levy - as if he would ever do it. And then we wrote this character, Mr Molloy, and we just all had him in our head.

”We asked whether he wanted to do it, and surprisingly for us, he said he was up for it. He’s really amazing – he’s very charismatic, but also, he’s playing quite a different character to what we’ve seen before. I’m very excited to see how fans respond.”

For the show’s final season, there is a major addition of trans characters and storylines. Does this have anything to do with the tidal wave of negativity trans people are currently experiencing?

”It does,” says Nunn. “In series three, we introduced the character of Cal, and I really learned so much through the experience of writing that storyline. From there, I knew I wanted to deepen Cal’s storyline in series four, but I also didn’t want that character to have to carry the weight of that representation. So, it felt really important to me that we widened it out and had multiple trans characters. We worked really closely with our writers and various consultants, and with the actors themselves. It was really a very collaborative effort.

“There’s a lot of incredibly toxic discourse happening at the moment, and for me, the thing I find so upsetting about it is that so often, trans people are not actually included in the conversation. That’s really something we wanted to change with Sex Education. We really wanted to represent actual trans voices in the storyline and make sure we were portraying something as nuanced and authentic as possible.”

Looking back on previous seasons, there have been extremely topical themes throughout, with a knock-on effect on wider society. How has Laurie felt about that?

“I spend so much time like locked away in a little room on my laptop, I sometimes almost forget that lots of people watch the show,” she laughs. “I’m so proud people have connected to the characters. The TV shows I really love and find comforting, I go back to again and again, because I want to spend time with the characters. So, if people watch the show and have even a little bit of that feeling towards these characters, I feel like we’ve achieved something good.”

Sex Education season four is available now on Netlfix.