Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Sex Lives Of College Girls’ On HBO Max, A Mindy Kaling-Produced Comedy About 4 College Freshman Navigating Big Changes

There’s a reason why Mindy Kaling is so busy these days; she not only creates shows that millennials and zoomers can identify with, her old-school comedy chops come through in characters that even grizzled Gen Xers like us could appreciate. Her latest series, The Sex Lives Of College Girls, is about what the title indicates, but there’s definitely more to it than that.

THE SEX LIVES OF COLLEGE GIRLS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Two people making out outside, with one saying “I want to fuck you so bad.” Then a car pulls up, and a mom (Nicole Sullivan) says, “Can you stop? We’re dropping our daughter off at school. I can see your erection.” The daughter in question yells “Mom!”

The Gist: Four freshman girls are dropped off by their parents at Essex College, a prestigious liberal arts institution in Vermont. Whitney Chase (Alyah Chanelle Scott) is in a car with her mother Yvette (Sherri Shepherd), a U.S. senator from Washington state who thinks Vermont is “full of potheads making maple syrup.

Kimberly Finkle (Pauline Chalamet), the embarrassed new student who was in the car with her mom that saw a dude’s erection, comes from a small town in Arizona that’s painfully white. She’s looking forward to being in a more inclusive environment, but also has to navigate being one of the people on campus who doesn’t come from money.

Leighton Murray (Reneé Rapp) is a legacy attendee; both her father (Rob Heubel) went there and her older brother Nico (Gavin Leatherwood) is an upperclassman. She’s looking forward to being roomies with her high school besties, whom her dad thinks treats her like crap. She’s shocked when the two of them specifically request to not room with her.

Bela Malhotra (Amrit Kaur) has one mission at Essex: Get a staff job at the renowned satirical magazine there. She hopes to become a Seth Meyers-style double threat — writing and performing — but she’s also looking to bump uglies with a dude with abs, given that “four months ago, I was an Indian loser with cystic acne, sweaty armpits and glasses.”

During their first week of orientation and classes, the roomies get to know each other and navigate all the changes. Bela finds out that there are only two slots for women on the magazine staff and does something to make herself stand out, thinking she took her power back (she didn’t). Kimberly’s boyfriend comes up from Princeton on the weekend, and they both lose their virginity to each other — then he dumps her. She’s also getting goofed on at her work study job because she’s so sheltered and white.

Whitney is already in a secret affair with her soccer team’s coach, but realizes how secret it is when she runs into him and his wife. Finally, Leighton skips a party at Nico’s frat in order to go to a local casino and find women for booty calls. She’s deeply in the closet, to the point where Nico keeps trying to set her up with his frat buddies.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Given Mindy Kaling’s involvement — she co-created the series with Justin Noble (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), it’s not a stretch to say that The Sex Lives Of College Girls feels a lot like The Mindy Project and Never Have I Ever, with rapid-fire dialogue and lots of pop culture references. It also feels like grown-ish, which we’ll come back to below.

Our Take: One thing that Kaling has always been adept at is creating endearing characters and setting up their backstories well. She knows, especially after her years cutting her sitcom writing teeth on The Office, that character-driven humor has a whole lot more impact than gags. Sure, her writing is gag-heavy, especially when making references like Bela does to Ben Affleck’s back tattoo, but The Sex Lives Of College Girls doesn’t rely on those gags nearly as much as Kaling’s other shows have (though a Timothee Chalamet reference would be a fun meta moment, given his sister Pauline plays Kimberly).

By the end of the first half-hour, all four girls are pretty well-drawn, which makes their navigation of college life unique to them. It’s not like we haven’t seen this show before, and even recently — Kenya Barris’ grown-ish is on its fourth season covering this ground. And it’s also not the first time we’ve seen a show where Kaling writes an avatar of herself at a certain age — Bela could be the slightly older version of Never Have I Ever‘s Devi. But because Kaling and Noble have done such a good job defining these four characters, we’re on board with their journeys by the end of the first episode.

As the season goes along, and the stories become more about their friendship and how they’re individually dealing with the new freedoms they can experience away from their parents, we should get away from the more cliched aspects of setting a comedy at some prestigious college. We’re also hoping that, despite the title of the show, the stories won’t all be about who they’re each crushing on and/or smashing with. The glimpses we’ve gotten of the season indicate that there’s a nice mixture, so we think that Kaling and Noble have gotten the tone right.

Sex and Skin: A little bit at the end of the first episode, but both Chalamet and Kaur show some tush in subsequent episodes — the second episode is called “The Naked Party,” after all.

Parting Shot: Leighton brings an online sex match up to a hotel room, they strip down, and she goes down on her.

Sleeper Star: Sherri Shepherd gets some good lines as Sen. Chase, especially when she tells Kimberly and Bella “If you could not tweet at all for the next four years, that would be great.”

Most Pilot-y Line: When Kimberly’s work study coworker Canaan (Chris Meyer) tells her that his mother smoked crack, and Kimberly believes him, you wonder just how sheltered she was out there in Arizona.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Mindy Kaling’s knack for creating three-dimensional characters makes The Sex Lives Of College Girls a funny and addictive show, despite the fact that there’s really no new ground being broken by its premise or characters.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Sex Lives Of College Girls On HBO Max