Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/HBO
Watching The Sex Lives of College Girls should make you want to crawl into your TV screen, bust into the world of Essex College, and gossip with a gaggle of university students. How can you not chastise a student who panics and says “Um, cool!” when her professor’s husband suggests the two of them should have sex some time? A stray “Don’t do that!” will come flying out of your mouth at every misstep, followed by bounties of giggles and gasps.
Reactions like these are a phenomenon brought on by shows like Sex and the City and Girls as well—two similar HBO series that perfected the four leading ladies formula, years before The Sex Lives of College Girls debuted. Viewers gasped when Carrie Bradshaw left a post-it note in lieu of a break-up. We still cry laughing about when Shoshanna bitched at her besties at the beach house. And we all yelped in disgust last year, when Bela (Amrit Kaur) gave a dozen hand-jobs to the guys from her school’s comedy paper at the beginning of The Sex Lives of College Girls. For viewers of these kinds of shows, hooting and hollering has become a rite of passage.
Mindy Kaling’s HBO Max series takes the four-women formula out of New York City and into an even more hellish landscape: college. Specifically, they’re at a prominent (and fictitious) Vermont institution that’s as expensive and as pompous as any other real Ivy League school. Laden with details like a riff on the Harvard Lampoon (here, it’s called The Catullan) and “ABC” parties (anything-but-clothes, where you wear dresses made out of paper bags or playing cards), The Sex Lives of College Girls is made for anyone who needs to laugh about the peaks and many, many pitfalls of college. Or anyone who wants to see what American university life can be like. Or anyone who’s currently in college. Basically, it’s a show meant for anyone who wants to have a good laugh, which should be all of us.