Sex of College Girls
See? That doesn’t work with one of the four main words missing, now does it?!?!
Spoilers for Sex Lives of College Girls follow
I simply must begin this newsletter by saying happy Onyx Storm week to all those who celebrate. I got the third-to-last copy at my local bookstore at 10:45AM on Tuesday morning, and somehow resisted the upsell from the clerk to pay an extra $5 and snatch up their only remaining copy of the special edition. What’s so special about the special edition, you ask? As the clerk informed me, only half-laughing since he knew this book was paying his salary, the special edition has dragons on the edge of the pages. I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this shortly, as soon as I finish the porno, sorry, novel.
Another much-anticipated third installation this winter was season three of Sex Lives of College Girls. I’m a big fan of the show- making comedies about colleges is notoriously difficult, shows about women and their loves lives are notoriously few and far between, and shows with actual jokes are a hot commodity in 2025.
Sex Lives of College Girls season two wrapped up with some pretty juicy storylines left open-ended. Kimberly kissed Canaan and Whitney saw them! Leighton quit the sorority she spent all season trying to get into only to have Whitney move in and take her spot! And Bela is looking to transfer schools after royally fucking up over and over again!
I turned on the first episode of the new season during nap time, pumped for a little broad comedy break. Things were going great: I was lying down, zero toddlers were asking me for grapes, and I couldn’t wait to see what ridiculously thirsty one-liners Bela had for me this time.
And then…wait…Kimberly and Canaan immediately called it quits. Bela just…didn’t transfer. Whitney left the white sorority to room with her friends again. Why did they bother setting up all that juicy conflict just to immediately resolve it? And, what- what’s going on here? Leighton’s girlfriend is moving to Boston? And now the math classes aren’t challenging enough for her, and she has a chance to transfer to…MIT????!!!
UH-OH.
Alert! Alert! Alert! WE HAVE A MAIN CHARACTER UNEXPECTEDLY LEAVING A SHOW, PEOPLE!!! THIS IS NO LONGER THE FRAT PARTY-FUELED SEX POSITIVE ESCAPISM YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE WATCHING!!!
Yep, somehow I was the only person on the planet who totally missed the news that Renee Rapp wriggled out of her Sex Lives contract to pursue her dream of being a very sexy gay pop icon. And now my relaxing tv time became a forensic investigation: what would the writers do? A well-balanced foursome where one of the characters leaves is a rare opportunity for writers- like a total solar eclipse for scientists, or witnessing a blue whale give birth. And considering the total shitshow that has been And Just Like That… sans Samantha, I was worried.
I have some personal opinions about Renee Rapp that I am going to attempt to leave out of the following analysis, but I will voice them here to be fair. I think she is a bonafide phenom. She lit up the first two seasons and elevated the show from decent to very good. Her performance in season one is nothing short of star-making- and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that she was going through the same journey off-screen that her character faced on-screen. It just had that transcendent “can’t look away” quality to it.
The show replaced Rapp with two characters: another blonde, hard-edged lesbian who is NOT Leighton because she is British, you see. This character’s name is Taylor, and she does very, very little all season except create some distractions for Bela (Bela is now a sophomore mentor, or FAF, as the show calls them), plus she gives the show a reason to introduce Ruby Cruz (of Bottoms), who is absolutely fantastic and bizarrely underused. The other character is Kacey, the new roommate and a former pageant girl slash transfer student who came to Essex to follow her boyfriend, who they immediately find out is cheating on her (because she wants to wait until marriage to have sex). She is extremely unlikeable. Leighton was also unlikable except she was extremely likable because she was smart and acerbic and confident, yet had a soft underbelly. Kacey is…a type and not much more.
The Taylor character feels like a clear misstep…why bother trying to make another character so similar to Leighton, who is not at all Leighton? And I can see what the writers were hoping to do with Kacey- she’s someone who can serve some high status to the other girls- but her opinions are often so dated that there is nothing likable about her. She’s also got such tunnel vision that she’s not very conflicted. And we know that characters without conflict are a waste of space.
So what did Leighton do for the structure that’s missing now? Leaving the actor’s charisma aside. It’s allllll about power dynamics. The way tv shows work is in how the characters relate to each other. Leighton’s character was so essential to the dynamic that I wonder why they didn’t recast her. I’d be curious to know if they talked about it.
Leighton was rich and cool and from the city. Whitney’s mom is a senator, sure, but she’s so focused on soccer she doesn’t have quite the polish or status of Leighton. Leighton was outwardly embarrassed by all of the things her roommates did. And she generated a lot of comedy by calling them out on how ridiculous and broad they were. She’d never be as absurd and sexual as Bela, she’d never be as naive as Kimberly, and she’d never take school or soccer as seriously as Whit. The others could be broader comedy tropes because Leighton could cut them down in a moment with the perfectly placed jab. Leighton was, ironically, the funny straight man. Kacey is also ridiculous. And thus, she does not work.
Without Leighton, and with the addition of Kacey, the other characters’ personalities get shuffled a bit, a la Miranda in Just Like That…, though not as egregiously inexplicably. Leighton was always the super smart one (even if she wanted to hide it- what a great conflict!). Kimberly was academically overwhelmed. But if you add Kacey, who’s a bit naive as a virgin who transferred for her boyfriend, then Kimberly can’t be the naive one anymore. So the show makes HER the nerdy one, giving her a new goal to be a supreme court justice- an impossibly lofty goal that we’ve never heard about before. Episodes 3-6 are strange, as Kimberly tries to worm her way into Tig Notaro’s law seminar, or symposium, or whatever, and claims she can’t date a super hot guy because she’s too nerdy for him (this was NOT a problem when she was going after Nico in season one). It’s jarring, for her character to suddenly change. And Bela needs to stay at Essex- since Leighton is actually transferring. So the writers have her atone for her sins, become a FAF and thus become incredibly boring. She gives up on comedy, and has no conflict for most of the episodes. Whitney is stuck between two guys, but her story only really gets cooking in episode 9, when she quits soccer. That storyline might have worked- if given the proper runway. You have to think that the writers imagined conflict between her and Leighton as Whitney took part in the sorority she thought she always wanted to join, but of course that story was off the table.
There’s also no accounting for the two episodes of time they lost to write Rapp off the show. There’s a montage at the end of episode 8 where all of the characters kiss somebody, and in it, Kimberly kisses one of her classmates in a library so suddenly and strangely, it’s proof that they had to shift stuff around to make it work. The nude pic story that follows is great, but the changes in her character and lead-up to that moment were jarring.
The good news is, episode 9 is back to its usual goodness because it’s found the conflict again. Kacey is trying to have sex with her new theatre boyfriend, and that’s fine. Taylor is still a misstep. But Bela’s comedy career is once again at odds with her romantic life (her new boyfriend doesn’t want her to tell stories about sex at a storytelling show! Yes! Great conflict!). And Kimberly’s nude pic situation, plus the gross senator coming to speak at Essex, feel like fresh and relevant storylines to actual college students, something that the first season did well.
So overall, losing Rapp may have taken the show down a notch, and it certainly made season three much, much worse. But it’s not its fault! It had to adjust! I don’t think Kacey and Taylor were the right character replacements for Rapp, but whatever choice the writers made was going to feel weird. And you know these writers are good, because they have managed to right the ship. I just hope the show’s audience and Max stick around long enough to give the show a fourth season.