Sex education, American style

Having had a heavy cold, and not feeling like doing anything too intellectual, I decided to take my sneezes to the sofa and watch something on Netflix.  I chose Sex Education, which is a Netflix Original written and directed by an irritating collection of writers and two directors, with a creator credit to Laurie Nunn. 

The first thing to know about the series, is that it is played with an English accent in some sort of parallel world where all the worst things about American education appear to have been transported to England.  The place and even the time of the series is left undecided, with a very American house, American school, and American high school values and problems transported to an English cast with English accents.  It jarred with me, very much, tripping me up with the inconsistencies which really would not be typical of any English setting.

There's a certain Stepford Wives vibe about the high school too - one of the main characters wears black and looks a bit gothy, but the rest of the school's rentacrowd seems to have been put through a advert-style superwash, they're clean and tidy and very much not the sort of crowd one sees pouring out of colleges and schools in the UK.  

There are all sorts of things which make you go "WTF?" For example: one of the girls in the group which are part of the main story, lives in what seems to be essentially a stately home.  Is it likely that one of the people at this state high school would be living there, in England?  No, she'd be at the private school around the corner or some public school or at finishing school.  It's almost a trope of the US coming-of-age film that there should be a poor girl and a rich girl made to rub along together.  It's not one in English film making on the whole because it's untrue.  We've had a lot longer to delineate the sides of the tracks. If it had been set a couple of years later with a university crowd, the mixing of high income and low income families would have been more believable. 

However, I'm a Quaker, and we are asked to find new light wherever we may come across it.  The meaning of that has always seemed to be that no matter how wrong something may be generally, there may be a nugget of truth in it.  And so I kept watching to see if the nugget of truth might be there.  

It's had universally good reviews as far as I can see, and that relates to the performances of the main actors, and the fact that it seems Americans can recognize truths in the situations dealt within the series very readily.  But that makes me wonder why they didn't go the whole hog and set the thing in the USA?  Maybe the disconnect and annoyance I felt when watching was deliberately caused.  I'm not sure what the English setting added to the programme. 

I got over the constant tripping up over these things, but it meant for me that it could never seem truthful, because it's in this fantasy place where US-style education  has taken over England.  Even the house where Gillian Anderson lives looked American.  It may be that it tells a truth for some US people about their teenage years.  It can't be a universal truth, because it doesn't resonate with me at all, and I was a teenager, once! It doesn't seem to tell the truth about anything contemporary... all the people with sexual problems would be googling for dear life, not paying good money to sit in an abandoned toilet with a virgin teenager, no matter how talented.

I'm assuming it can only be good for another series, as English schools do not allow people to stay in high school indefinitely, and the actors are likely to grow up inconveniently and stop looking like teenagers.  Although most of them don't look like any teenagers I ever met, anyway.