Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sex Education’ Season 4 on Netflix, A Bittersweet End To One Of The Best Shows About High School Ever

Netflix’s Sex Education has been one of the streamer’s best original shows from the last few years, providing solid dramatic comedy and loads of sex, and catapulting many of the show’s young actors, like Emma Mackey and Ncuti Gatwa, to stardom. With several supporting cast members departing the show this season, the show’s fourth and final, the students who remain have to navigate life at a new school that’s the polar opposite of their old one, but they’re still teenagers, so their hormones, complicated family lives, and friendships are still running the show.

SEX EDUCATION (SEASON 4): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Maeve Wiley (Emma Mackey), is trying to study in the library at her new American school, but she’s getting distracted by a couple of students who are getting it on in the stacks.

The Gist: Quick refresh: Sex Education Season 3 left off with a few major life changes for the core cast members. Otis and Maeve, the duo who ran the sex clinic at Moordale Secondary, finally kissed, but the timing couldn’t have been worse, as Maeve was on her way to America that very night to enter her gifted and talented writing program. Otis’s mother Jean (Gillian Anderson) gave birth to her new baby, Joy, but learned that her boyfriend Jakob (Mikael Persbrandt) might not be the father. Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) and Adam (Connor Swindells) broke off their secret romance after Eric told Adam he needed to be with someone who was able to be public about their sexuality. (Something Adam struggles with, he’s so closeted and unable to emote, much like his estranged father and former headmaster.) And then at the end of the season, Moordale Secondary was closed down leading most of our students to enroll in a new school called Cavendish.

As the new season begins, Maeve is living in America and studying at her prestigious writing program where she’s learning from a famous writer named Thomas Molloy (Dan Levy) who’s equal parts genius and asshole. Most of her other classmates from Moordale, including Otis, Eric, Aimee, and Ruby, are enrolled at the uber-progressive Cavendish, which is a complete 180 from stuffy Moordale, while Adam has decided to drop out. (Notably missing from this year’s cast are Simone Ashley as Olivia and Chaneil Kular’s Anwar, who, it is explained, are now attending a different school, and Tanya Reynolds and Patricia Allison, who played Lily and Ola, respectively. Their whereabouts aren’t disclosed.)

Maeve and Otis have been enjoying a phone flirtation since she left, but heir relationship has suffered due to the distance between them, and they’re proving to be pretty bad at communicating via text, with their tone and time delays constantly being misinterpreted. (The entire first episode is based around Otis’s inability to take a dick pic to send to Maeve in response to a nude photo she sent him, which leads to all sorts of drama and Otis accidentally revealing photos of his penis to the entire student body at his new school instead.)

At Cavendish, Otis had planned to get his sex clinic up and running but it turns out, there’s already a student sex clinician on campus named O (Thaddea Graham), leading to a tense rivalry between the pair all season long. (While it was a semi-plausible premise that Otis might be able to glean knowledge from his sex-therapist mother and turn that into a side hustle at Moordale, the entire situation between Otis and O feels forced, as these two vie to be the school’s #1 therapist, despite the fact that they’re, you know, completely untrained adolescents. (That’s the one of the two disbeliefs that the show begs us to suspend: One, that these teens should be calling themselves therapists, and two, that you can easily bike anywhere in this sprawling, hilly landscape that stretches for miles.)

At home, Jakob has left Jean and he’s not in the picture to help with 8-week-old Joy, and she’s struggling with depression, and also in denial that she’s depressed. To distract herself from her post-partum emotions, she takes on a new job as the host of a talk radio sex therapy show (with her new boss played by Hannah Gadsby), but Otis starts to stress out that his mother is taking on too much, especially when childcare starts to fall on him. This results in Otis calling his aunt, Jean’s globe-hopping and generally flighty sister Joanna (Lisa McGrillis), who shows up to help with the baby, to Jean’s dismay.

With Cavendish being progressive and queer-friendly, Eric has assimilated nicely and he falls right in with the school’s popular clique, Abbi, Aisha, and Roman, but as the season progresses, he endures a religious existential crisis. Aimee is still trying to heal from her sexual trauma and using art class as a way to do so, and she and Isaac (George Robinson), Maeve’s former crush/neighbor who also happens to attend the school, develop a friendship that’s sweet, despite an awkward start. Ruby, who has always been used to being popular, isn’t used to her new school’s vibe, but as the season progresses, we learn that it’s not simply because she’s lonely now that her clique has disbanded, she actually has a traumatic history with a Cavendish student she knew from childhood.

As for the Groff family, whose dysfunction and estrangement are one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the show, it feels like they’ve been painted into an isolated corner. They’re still given plenty of screen time, but with Adam now out of school and working on a farm, he rarely has contact with Eric or any of his other former classmates, and the season is spent focusing on rehabilitating his relationship with father, Michael (Alistair Petrie). The relationship between these two broken men has been one of the show’s most emotional aspects of the show, and though it remains complex and acted perfectly by Swindells and Petrie, it’s never fully integrated into the rest of what’s going on in the series.

Our Take: Sex Education has always managed to be the kind of show that combines laughs, usually mined from sex, with tears, as many of the students endure heartache, often suffering through their adolescent trauma alone. This season is no different, though – Otis’s dick pics aside – it feels like the sex component is less about horny teens figuring out their bodies and more about how to navigate more mature relationships during a time of transition and upheaval – each character seems to be facing an existential crisis of some kind at various points during the season.

The show has integrated most of the characters into the new school setting, which is a convenient plot device: having all the students relocate to a new school means it’s not that strange to place Maeve’s former crush, Isaac (George Robinson) into the mix, along with Abbi, Aisha, and Roman, dynamics between the students has changed, as all the Moordale kids assimilate into life at Cavendish. By removing Olivia and Anwar, this sets up formerly mean-girl Ruby (Mimi Keene) to be out of her depth at her crunch new school which forbids gossip, embraces kindness, and is antithetical to everything Ruby was at Moordale. (Fortunately, Ruby gets a lot of backstory this season that adds to her already interesting past as a poor kid with a sick father, and she, like Adam, becomes one of the more sympathetic characters on the show.) Supporting characters Jackson (Kedar Williams-Stirling), Cal (Dua Saleh), and Viv (Chinenye Edeuzu) are all more visible this season, but it’s hard not to feel like they’ve been given nothing but kind of sad, “problem of the week” stories for themselves.

If there’s one glaring misstep this season, it’s that the show’s tone feels a little like a public service announcement. What the show has done so well in the past is illustrate the importance of inclusivity, sexuality, and communication just by letting the story illustrate those things, the “show, don’t tell” model of storytelling. This season, there are more than a few instances where the show’s stories feel less organic and more like a “The More You Know” PSA (remember I said this when you get to the episodes with Viv and her new boyfriend), and an episode about ableism ends up more like an after school special where the gang all learns a lesson about differently-abled classmates. These things should be portrayed onscreen, but the way the show handles them this season feels a bit heavier-handed than in the past, and we get exposition-filled speeches instead of actual human behavior.

This is not to say that the season is bad, on the contrary, it’s still a great show. And with this being the final season, the series tries to do right by the characters as much as possible, but in comparison to past seasons, some of the magic is noticeably missing.

Sex and Skin: Sex Education has never been shy with the graphic sex scenes, and this season, the show really outdoes itself. Plenty of sex (real sex, phone sex, self-pleasure, take your pick) are depicted. And a carousel of dick pics.

Parting Shot: Despite the fact that Otis and Maeve have phone sex and she reassures him she’s coming back to him after her program is over, Otis freaks out when she tells him she’s hanging up to go get dinner with her new friend Tyrone. Otis frantically does a search on his phone to look up Tyrone, who is now (in his head) a romantic rival.

Sleeper Star: It’s hard to pick one single underdog in the cast since the majority of them have blown up since the show first premiered (remember, Mackey, Gatwa and Swindells all had cameos in Barbie) but Gatwa’s Eric is, as always, the scene stealer of the show.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Despite the fact that Sex Education has gone through some big changes this season, it’s still very well worth a binge for the genuine laughs and heartfelt emotion that each episode brings.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.