The Sex Lives of College Girls Season 3 has come to a close, and change was certainly in the air for our favorite Essex students.
** Spoilers ahead for The Sex Lives of College Girls Season 3, now streaming on Max**
The most recent installment notably featured Leighton Murray’s (Reneé Rapp) transfer to MIT in pursuit of a more demanding math program, which also aligned with her girlfriend Alicia (Midori Francis) making the move to Boston. Series co-creator and showrunner Justin Noble spoke to DECIDER about the seamless two-episode exit, highlighting that they “wanted to stay true to the character” and “give the character a win.”
“This, at the end of the day, is a very optimistic, positive show,” he explained. “And Leighton Murray, of all characters, doesn’t know how to do anything other than win. So the only fitting choice was for her to move on to a next chapter in her life that would lead to a better future than she could have had before.”
Leighton’s departure made way for Bela Malhotra (Amrit Kaur), Kimberly Finkle (Pauline Chalamet), and Whitney Chase (Alyah Chanelle Scott) to welcome new roommate Kacey Baker (Gracie Lawrence). With respect to the Season 3 newcomer, who co-fronts the band Lawrence, Noble noted “it was shocking how quickly she just kind of slipped right in.”
“She’s just a truly incredible and positive human being,” he said. “So truly, she just slipped right in. Not much needed to be done, but we facilitated, you know, meet ups and things like that to make sure everyone was comfortable together.”
Noble, who said “so many parts” of his own college experience and that of “other writers and producers on the show” get channeled into his and Mindy Kaling‘s college comedy, teased that this season was no exception, as he pointed out the esteemed “50 Most List” that Kayce seeks out a spot on was “a real thing that happened at Yale when [he] was there.”
“It would just bring full chaos to the Yale campus of people who wanted to be on it, people who had strong thoughts about whether or not it should exist,” he recalled. “And so it felt like a natural story area, especially for Kacey, who as we learned in this episode, for anyone who hasn’t caught up yet, that she’s got some pretty significant confidence issues that are covered by a mask of fake confidence.”
In order to help bring both Lawrence and fellow newcomer Mia Rodgers, who plays Taylor, into the fold simultaneously, they “started filming with Episodes 3 and 4.”
Taylor is introduced as an international student in Bela’s FAF (Freshman Advisor and Friend) group, a central friendship that uniquely forms outside of the suite.
“It’s particularly difficult on the page to keep a character alive creatively if they are not in the same living situation. When we spend so much time in the show in the room where they all live,” Noble conceded. “But Taylor was just like such a loud and clear character in our heads that we were able to come up with plenty of opportunities to slot her in creatively in the stories.”
While the two get off to a rocky start, they ultimately develop a mutually beneficial friendship, one in which they “both become much better people just from being around one another,” Noble said. This is particularly apparent in a sort of full-circle moment at the end of the season, when Taylor gives advice to Bela on how to come out as bi to her mother, while Taylor is inspired to FaceTime her own estranged mother.
As for Kimberly and Whitney, who fortunately make up in the first episode of the latest installment after Season 2 saw Whitney catch Kimberly kissing her ex Canaan (Christopher Meyer), Noble noted that they had “absolutely” planned for an early Season 3 reconciliation between the two friends and roommates.
“We don’t want to see a prolonged conflict between these girls,” he said. “That would be so antithetical to the message of this show. It’s really the love story between friends who find each other in college. We’re not interested in a long girl-on-girl warfare arc. So it was always in the cards to kind of put them back together quickly, but in a way that felt real.”
In fact, Chalamet and Scott, the actresses behind Kimberly and Whitney, shared thoughts that “really changed up” the reconciliation scene and ultimately made it feel “so much better because they know their characters so well,” he said.
After choosing to prioritize her mental health and seek better treatment for the school’s student athletes, Whitney, who has seemingly “closed a chapter on soccer,” and also reconciles with Canaan, as they get back together after her brief rendezvous with Isaiah (Devin Craig). While Noble claimed this was “always” sort of the intent “behind the scenes,” he admitted he “had moments of slight concern” once he saw “so much Team Isaiah.”
While he understood Isaiah to be “someone you could see [Whitney] ending up with” as “an attractive individual” who “didn’t have a lot of flaws,” Noble also thought that “Canaan’s rep got done a little dirtier than it needed to.”
“I never thought that Canaan was burned. I thought he was just kind of like⦠he had hot guy trouble,” Noble said. “You know, he had multiple girls interested in him. And he probably could have communicated things a little more.”
Nonetheless, Noble deemed Canaan’s “redemption tour” easy, as fans can easily pick up on the “sweetness” between the two of them, and how much Canaan “really cares about Whitney,” particularly when she is “in a place in her life when she could really use some people around her who are helping her have some self-care.”
Meanwhile, Kimberly, who finds herself with “a new perspective on what her life might be,” may have also found herself “at the start of a little love triangle” with Noah (Trevor Tordjman), whom she bonds with in the Season 3 finale when a politician they both despise arrives on campus, and Eli (Michael Provost), whom she dates earlier in the season and initially felt “does not meet [her] goals,” comes to surprise her.
Noble also spoke to this season’s “big optimistic finale,” which viewers may have felt seemingly countered Season 2’s more chaotic ending, but in Noble’s mind felt like “what would be the next natural progression in the story.”
“This season, the girls have just been challenged so much, and just given the timing of each of their challenges and where they were climaxing, it felt like I was much more interested creatively in having this long ending sequence where we have this like symphony of wins for these young women who are standing up and getting everything that they deserve in positive ways at the end,” he said. “Kind of choosing joy in this finale as opposed to choosing chaos, which we have done in the past.”
He also said his own mixed feelings about cliffhangers in comedies factored into how he crafted the ending.
“I come from the network space where we used to do cliffhangers at the end of every season, and all it really does in a comedy is give you a new wrench that you have to then fix for two to three episodes at the start of the next season,” he said. “And I feel like when that’s happening, the people behind the scenes and the people at home who are watching it are kind of like, ‘Yeah, yeah, let’s get through this so we can get back to the DNA of the show that we love. That’s why we’re here.’ So I was much more interested in just showing these girls have a big happy ending. All of them get their big wins.”
While Noble told DECIDER there are “no status updates as of now” on a season renewal, he acknowledged that Season 4 would have “a lot of new threads to follow.”
“Even though we didn’t do like big old cliffhangers this season, there’s new doors opening,” he said. “They’re just sort of optimistic doors as opposed to pessimistic wrenches that the girls have to fix.”
Nonetheless, Noble is “excited” to put this Season 3 finale out into the world. He said, “We’re so happy that it’s just this big optimistic finale that chooses joy for all of our girls at the end of this third season and sends them off into exciting new chapters.”
Seasons 1-3 of The Sex Lives of College Girls are streaming on Max.
The post ‘The Sex Lives Of College Girls’ Showrunner Justin Noble Reveals His Real-Life College Experience That Made It Into Season 3: “Felt Like A Natural Story Area” appeared first on Decider.
