Sex Education is one of Netflix‘s most popular shows right now, with its latest season taking the streaming service by storm. The show follows Otis Milburn, a high school student whose mother is the resident sex therapist in his town. As you’d expect, plenty of awkward teenage conversations follow. Set in the fictional English town of Moordale, the show is purposefully very vague about the context around its world. Today, we’re going to dig a little deeper into that. Read on to see what the year in which Sex Education takes place.
Is Sex Education set in the present day?
Yes, Sex Education does broadly take place in the present day. However, the show has yet to specify exactly what year. You can likely assume, though, that each season takes place in the year of its release. As such, season 1 takes place in 2019, season 2 in 2020, and the recent season 3 taking place this year.
However, this isn’t confirmed, as Netflix have never specified the time period — and the show’s setting is similarly murky. A lot of the outfit and set designs are reminiscent of 80s fashion. Sex Education looks a lot like an updated version of The Breakfast Club. This is no accident, as the show plays on this nostalgia. That said, it does mix between 80s aesthetics and current technology, like smartphones, heavily.
As such, Sex Education definitely takes place in the 2010s and 2020s. The level of technology wouldn’t be there if it didn’t. That said, it does sometimes feel like, if a few elements were tweaked, it could take place forty years in the past.
In fact, the show runner, Laurie Nunn, once spoke to Thrillist about this exact question. “We all absolutely love the teen genre… so we really wanted to make the show have the feeling that it’s an homage or that it has this nostalgic backdrop,” she says. As such, the retro vibes are no mistake.
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