Warning: This review contains spoilers.
You can’t — and shouldn’t — get advice about college through TV shows, but that didn’t stop my 17-year-old self from obsessively binging “The Sex Lives of College Girls” in between writing essays and filling out the Common App. For someone with less experience than a benched Little League player, the absolutely absurd, and often cringeworthy, lives of suitemates Leighton (Renée Rapp), Bela (Amrit Kaur), Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott) and Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) became a cautionary tale and a source of comfort as I was gearing up for life after high school.
Most of “The Sex Lives of College Girls” lives up to its title, chronicling the egregious sexcapades of the group, but the show simultaneously serves as a heartwarming coming-of-age tale, with the girls navigating their identities and how they fit into the aptly-named Essex College. When the third season was released, I was eager to return to the world that prepared me for NYU, especially since I’m now the same age as the main characters.
But just like the shows’ protagonists, the new season sucked.
Much of the first half of season 3 is spent navigating Rapp’s departure from “The Sex Lives of College Girls” in pursuit of her music career. The completion of Leighton’s character arc is surprisingly well-executed: Essex doesn’t offer advanced math classes for her major, and she ends up transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Episode “Lila by Lila” provides a bittersweet goodbye to Leighton — and by proxy, Rapp — while coyly introducing her replacement.
Enter new suitemate Kacey Baker (Gracie Lawrence), a pageant-winning theater kid who’d probably shop at Dear Hannah Prep if she was 12. Surprisingly, Kacey integrates well into the cast, even if her character seems like a thinly-veiled attempt to push Lawrence as a musical talent. Kacey’s bubbliness and naivete surrounding relationships are a necessary reprieve from her more cynical suitemates. She wants to sparkle as bright as her rhinestoned Stanley cup and find her Prince Charming, even if that leads her to making embarrassing choices like blasting Disney princess music the first time she’s having sex. Too bad the circumstances surrounding Kacey’s arrival prevent a full appreciation for her.
It’s undeniable that there’s screen time devoted to the girls adjusting to sophomore year, new friendship dynamics and their living situation, but their romantic and sexual relationships now overpower the rest of the plot. Awful men are plucked from obscurity for the girls to preen and court, ranging from 20-year-olds asking for nudes to campus mascots who have sex with the fursuit on. You don’t want to root for any of the men to stick around, yet they’re ushered away far before you learn anything of value about them.
Even some of the girls’ long-term boyfriends face this treatment. Whitney’s boyfriend, Isaiah (Devin Craig), is regarded as a liability and embarrasses her with his wealth, leading her to cheat on him with her ex, Canaan (Christopher Meyer). Instead of confronting Whitney’s infidelity, “The Sex Lives of College Girls” simply sends Isaiah into a vortex where he’s never seen again with an off-screen breakup. Kimberly briefly dates Eli (Michael Provost), who seems like a keeper until he abandons her at her first-ever rave in “Franklin the Fox,” where she accidentally drinks molly-laced water. Bela’s nice-guy boyfriend Arvind (Nabeel Muscatwalla) gets cold feet when he discovers her body count. And after getting cheated on, Kacey couples up with the theater program’s male tenor Cooper (Roby Attal), who ends things because he’s scared of moving too fast. While the dating pool at Essex isn’t much different from the real world, this season cycles through relationships much faster than before, allowing problems to jump out from nowhere just to fill episodes out.
“The Sex Lives of College Girls” is known for its ambitious plotlines, but season 3 is wholly overzealous. In “Welcome Back to Essex,” Whitney ices out Kimberly for dating Canaan over the summer, which she immediately forgets about once Isaiah is out of the picture. Bela abandons her love for comedy until very late in the season, effectively trashing one of most interesting storylines surrounding the misogynistic culture and corruption within The Catullan, Essex’s satire publication. Omissions like these make season 3 feel like a separate entity from the other two installments of “The Sex Lives of College Girls.” It’s frustrating to balance focus between the huge, recurring cast when the plot’s muddied by out-of-character decisions.
The season does have its moments, but they were scarce and left much to be desired. Bela’s new on-campus job as a Friendly Advisor and Friend, or FAF, provides a mentorship role, especially for first-year college student and new character Taylor (Mia Rodgers) who struggles with substance abuse issues. Taylor’s presence leads Bela to accept her queerness, but even her coming-out arc is rushed and saved for the season finale. Whitney exposes the toxic hustle culture and lack of mental health resources within Essex’s athletics department, but the pacing of this story felt as anxiety-inducing as the character’s battle to balance sports, science labs and cheating on her boyfriend. Kimberly becomes enthralled with student protest on campus after a conservative speaker is invited to the school, which had the potential to be captivating but resulted in a primitive lesson on First Amendment rights that someone aspiring to be a Supreme Court justice should already know.
As much as I want to blame growing up, Leighton’s absence or the random departure of Catullan editor and Bela’s ex, Eric (Mekki Leeper), for the derailment of “The Sex Lives of College Girls” season 3, rushed plots and half-baked resolutions seem to be the primary culprits. The show’s complete change of pace and decline in quality from the last two seasons makes me genuinely concerned that it won’t be renewed, despite its wild popularity among Gen Z viewers. But if the show lives to see funding for another season modeled after this one, I think it’s finally time for us to break up.
“The Sex Lives of College Girls” is streaming exclusively on Max.
Contact Dani Biondi at [email protected].
