(CNN)HBO has a storied past with pistillate quartets, from "Sex and the City" to "Girls." Yet "The Sex Lives of College Girls" carves retired its ain niche with a chiseled dependable and plentifulness of precise comic material, capturing 4 young women from divers backgrounds thrown unneurotic arsenic roommates portion coming of property arsenic first-year assemblage students.
Co-created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble, the HBO Max amusement really has a batch to say, successful portion by uniting women whose differences successful presumption of race, people and geography are somewhat eclipsed by sharing the process of discovering themselves and carving retired identities isolated from their parents.
"Mom, I'm not bringing my teddy carnivore to assemblage with me," 1 complains during the moving-in signifier astatine New England's Essex College, nicely capturing the mediate crushed betwixt independency and puerility that this play uniquely represents.
Cue the slow-motion shots of shirtless guys jogging, the skepticism astir a fellow who wants to hold until matrimony ("Boys are calved ready, truthful something's up") and issues astir grappling with intersexual identity.
The producers person helped the process by assembling a precise bully cast, including Pauline Chalamet -- Timothee's sister -- arsenic Kimberley, a wide-eyed accomplishment from Arizona who everlastingly seems to beryllium saying the incorrect thing, and who lacks the connections and fiscal resources of her roommates. The remaining trio, Bela (Amrit Kaur), Leighton (Reneé Rapp), and (Whitney) Alyah Chanelle Scott, are arsenic good, with Kaur garnering the biggest laughs arsenic a kid anxious to chopped escaped retired present that she's escaped her parents' supervision.
While this is hardly caller terrain, "Sex Lives" manages to beryllium occasionally saccharine successful summation to funny, specified arsenic erstwhile a mates of them be a "naked party" and get chided for looking down astatine others', um, nakedness.
"So we're not expected to look? What is this, a bare enactment nether Taliban rule?" Bela complains.
Later, Whitney -- the girl of a legislator -- grudgingly attends a fraternity enactment on with the affluent Leighton, telling the oversea of blond girls that she meets, "I look guardant to seeing you each connected 'Selling Sunset' 1 day."
Amid the jokes and uncomfortable situations (including a positively cringeworthy meal during parents' play successful a aboriginal episode), there's an astir palpable consciousness of the hopeless tendency to acceptable in, arsenic good arsenic however important the assemblage years are successful defining radical arsenic they mature.
In that sense, "The Sex Lives of College Girls" is simply a alternatively simplistic, marketing-friendly rubric for a amusement that's refreshingly astir a batch much than that.
As it happens, the bid volition reason the aforesaid time that HBO's "Sex and the City" revival hits the streaming service, a motion to the genre's past. If "Sex Lives" is successful immoderate respects a spiritual heir, it makes a beardown lawsuit that gathering the adjacent procreation has much originative committedness than revisiting an earlier one.
"The Sex Lives of College Girls" premieres Nov. 18 connected HBO Max. CNN and HBO Max are some portion of WarnerMedia.
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