Sex Education: The show that changed sex on TV forever

O'Brien had mainly worked as a movement director in theatre before Sex Education, but says the show has "absolutely" changed her career trajectory. She has since worked as an intimacy co-ordinator on other zeitgeist-grabbing series including Normal People, I May Destroy You and It's a Sin, and is now training a new generation of intimacy co-ordinators to meet growing demand. O'Brien says the industry "turned on a dime" when the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal broke in 2017, highlighting the potentially vulnerable position of younger actresses, particularly on male-dominated sets.

"There were suddenly all these conversations about best practice and codes of conduct for intimate scenes, and a greater awareness of the need to work with respect," O'Brien tells BBC Culture. Though actor Sean Bean opined in 2022 that intimacy co-ordination can "spoil the spontaneity" of a sex scene, his viewpoint runs counter to the industry trend. "If a production has intimate content, [producers] will look for an intimacy practitioner now, but there's currently a void of people who are fully qualified to do it," O’Brien adds.

When O'Brien was hired by Sex Education in 2018, the role was more obscure. "But I never felt any kind of pushback from anyone on the show because they knew [intimacy co-ordination] was really needed," O'Brien says. "Right from the start, Sex Education didn't pull any punches. It was dealing with some really full-on issues head on, but also with plenty of humour." She and any actors filming an intimate scene that day would precisely choreograph their body movements "first thing in the morning", thereby removing any potential anxiety. "That way, they could focus on characterisation and storytelling when it came to filming," O'Brien explains. Her role was essentially to ensure that the show's talented young cast – which included new Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa and Aimee Lou Wood, who won a Bafta award for her performance as Aimee – "knew exactly what they were doing and felt completely at ease".

Combined with the forward-thinking, sex-positive scripts written by Nunn and the show's writing team, this rigorous approach to intimate scenes has really paid off. "No show since has come close to matching Sex Education's unique combination of fearless, candid and authentic sex on screen," entertainment journalist David Opie tells BBC Culture. Everything from anxiety surrounding masturbation to vaginismus – a condition causing a person's vaginal muscles to tighten involuntarily when penetration is attempted – have been explored sensitively and with a deft sense of humour. Though the new season storylines are being kept tightly under wraps ahead of its premiere, it seems safe to presume that Sex Education will continue to push the envelope. Opie notes that other teen-oriented series including HBO's dark addiction drama Euphoria can be "equally explicit", but says "they're often missing the heart that Sex Education brings to the bedroom every time".

A ground-breaking approach

Empathy and warmth have been baked in from the start – as has a pronounced nostalgic quality. Though Sex Education is set in the present day at Moordale, a fictional British secondary school, the show has a retro US aesthetic conceived as an "homage" to the iconic 1980s teen movies of director John Hughes. Characters wear varsity-style bomber jackets and share confidences while leaning against high school lockers – just like Molly Ringwald in Hughes films like 1984’s Sixteen Candles. "The pitch of the show is so heightened," creator Laurie Nunn told The Guardian in 2020. "It's about this kid [Asa Butterfield's character Otis] who gives out sex advice in the toilet cubicle. It needed a really heightened world to match it."

The overall vibe may be heightened – Gillian Anderson relishes her role as Otis's mother Jean, a disarmingly frank sex therapist – but culture writer Lucy Ford salutes the show for placing "less of a gloss on sex" than many equivalent series. "For its audience of young people, I can imagine this makes the prospect of sex – whether they're having it or not – much less intimidating," she tells BBC Culture. In a way, the show's nostalgic veil creates a kind of visual comfort blanket that allows the writers to confront challenging and taboo aspects of sexual intimacy.

Superfan Sam Thomas, who is working on a book series inspired by the show's sex-positive approach, says Moordale is the "inclusive fictional high school" he wishes he had seen on screen as a teenager. At Moordale, all pupils are given space to find their place on the sexuality spectrum – whether they are gay, straight, bisexual or something else entirely. In season two, Ola (Patricia Allison) embraces being pansexual, while Florence (Mirren Mack) gradually realises that her lack of sexual desire means she is asexual.

When Thomas was growing up in the UK in the late 1990s, a controversial piece of legislation called Section 28 – which has since been repealed – prohibited teachers from "promoting" same-sex relationships in schools. "I was homophobically bullied every day and my teachers were unable to do anything about it," he recalls. "My own memories of sex education were condoms being blown up into balloons and thrown around the class while our teacher looked flustered trying to explain the birds and the bees." When he watched Nunn's show nearly two decades later, Thomas realised "everything [he] had missed out on" during his own paltry sex education classes. Thankfully, lessons are more progressive these days, but O'Brien says people still tell her the show serves as "part of their own sex education". "We know that teenagers turn to pornography online as a place to learn [about sex], but Sex Education offers an alternative," she adds.

'Funny and heartfelt'

Sex Education set out its stall in its very first episode by showing Adam (Connor Swindells) dealing with anorgasmia, a form of sexual dysfunction in which a person cannot climax, and Otis grappling with an inability to masturbate. The first episode of season two brought Otis's storyline full circle by opening with a bracing two-and-a-half minute masturbation montage that shows him pleasuring himself in several different locations. O'Brien also helped actress Aimee Lou Wood to co-ordinate a candid masturbation scene that really resonated with viewers. "She told me the after the scene aired, she was getting hundreds of messages a day from people saying how important they found it," O'Brien says.

When she worked on the season two storyline in which Lily (Tanya Reynolds) deals with vaginismus – a condition rarely spoken about, let alone portrayed on screen – the show's "detail-oriented approach" came into its own. "Everyone involved was committed to making it as authentic as possible," O'Brien says, which meant she was given "time and budget" to research the full range of vagina dilators available on the market. For this reason, O'Brien believes "viewers with vaginismus were able to watch those scenes and think, 'I feel seen'."

Sex Education has carved out a reputation for exploring facets of sexuality that other shows would neither think nor dare to. "One scene that really sticks out comes in season three when Eric and Adam try to have sex for the first time, only to realise that they're both bottoms," Opie says. For him, this moment was not just "funny and heartfelt", but also "ground-breaking" because it is "rare to see the mechanics of gay sex play out so poignantly in a teen setting".

Opie also believes that Sex Education has made great strides by approaching more familiar storylines in an uncommonly nuanced way. He cites the fallout from a sexual assault that Aimee experiences in season two as an especially powerful example. "In most shows, [it] would have been covered in one or two episodes max, but in Sex Education, Aimee's trauma doesn't magically go away when the credits roll," he says. Ford also hails the way this storyline "portrays the slow-burn of trauma" in a heartbreakingly realistic way. "At first Aimee laughs off what happened to her, but it slowly starts to eat away at her confidence and she feels embarrassed to talk about how much it is affecting her," Ford notes, calling the overall effect "gut-punching".

With Sex Education's final season about to premiere, Ford says it is still too soon to say whether its impact on how sex is portrayed on screen has been "cataclysmic". However, she believes the show has definitely changed the way that teenage sexuality in particular is depicted because it tackled "things like virginity and awkward fumbles" with a refreshing lack of shame. O'Brien believes the show has already helped to "normalise" sex on screen by paving the way for more relatable and mundane moments "where someone kisses you with morning breath or farts in bed". However Sex Education's legacy develops in the coming years, there is no doubt that it has meant a tremendous amount to viewers who may have learned something about their own sexuality from watching it.

The final season of Sex Education is available on Netflix from 21 September.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.