Speaking at the Dublin-based screenwriting festival Storyhouse (via Deadline), Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn detailed the show’s long and stressful journey to Netflix. Initially, the script was commissioned by the U.K.’s Channel 4, where it was “in development for two years before it fell apart and then came back to life.” Initially, Nunn’s team “really thought we were going to get the greenlight because we’d worked so hard on it,” she recalled, but that was before the commissioner they were working with left the channel. The person who took over apparently “just did not vibe with it at all,” and ended up giving Nunn a “strange round of notes.”
Essentially, the new person asked if Nunn could reimagine the script—then called Student Bodies—without the peer-to-peer sex therapy aspect. Anyone who’s seen the final version will know that that’s kind of the whole plot of the show. Nunn knew it at the time too, and stood her ground. “I just couldn’t really see a way to write my way around that,” she said, before temporarily stepping away from the project.
Eventually, Netflix found the dormant script and helped Nunn shape it into the show we know and love today. It officially ended with its fourth season in 2023, but according to Nunn, there could be more on the horizon. The creator “realized that a lot of the story—probably about 70% of storylines—felt like they had come to a natural conclusion,” she shared, but “there are a few characters whose endings still keep me up at night a little bit.”
“There is stuff I would have done a bit differently but maybe we’ll have a spin-off film one day and I can kind of wrap that up,” she added. Sounds like it’s time for her to pull a Sam Levinson and call all her big A-list actors back to the nest.
