While Sex Education quickly became a massive global hit for Netflix from the moment it first aired in 2019, writer and creator Laurie Nunn admits that the British teen comedy had a troubled road for many years before it ultimately got made.
Speaking at Dublin’s screenwriting festival Storyhouse, Nunn told an audience that after being sent a seed pitch from UK production house Eleven, she wrote a pilot episode for the show, which was called Student Bodies at the time. Channel 4 ultimately ended up commissioning the script where it was “in development for two years before it fell apart and then came back to life.”
“We really thought we were going to get the greenlight because we’d worked so hard on it,” she said. “The commissioner there at the time really loved the project and was a real champion of it and they were really looking for teen content. Then she moved somewhere else and there was someone new who just did not vibe with it at all.”
Nunn revealed that she received a “strange round of notes” from Channel 4 requesting they take the element of a kid giving sex therapy to his classmates out of the script. “They liked the characters, but they thought the hook was too heightened. And I just couldn’t really see a way to write my way around that.”
Nunn ultimately walked away from the project, something she said she “deeply regretted because for two years I didn’t get any work.”
“I was very much thinking about retraining at that point, because it was quite a bleak time,” she said, adding she would have trained to be a therapist.
When Netflix stumbled upon the project, the streamer’s UK commissioner at the time, Alex Sapot, was keen to back the show. With Catastrophe director Ben Taylor aboard to direct, Nunn said she recalls going through a “more intense pitching process” at the time.
“We felt that if they were going to put up all the money, we had to prove that we had something that was returnable, something that they would want to invest in.”
She continued: “And also because I was such a green writer, I think we really felt like we needed to give them a whole package and make them feel secure.”
The series lasted four seasons before Nunn felt the story was coming to a natural end. She had been working on the show for nine years – seven years in the Netflix version of it – and Nunn, who had fallen pregnant, was tiring of the American schedule.
“We would be editing one series and we’d also be in the writers’ room for the next series,” she said. “We didn’t even get a day off when the show would come out because the schedule was so tight.”
Nunn continued: “By the fourth series, I was pregnant and just exhausted, and I think I just felt like I wasn’t going to keep producing good work. And then this slightly weird thing happened where I actually realized that a lot of the story – probably about 70% of storylines – felt like they had come to a natural conclusion.”
Nunn admitted that “there are a few characters whose endings still keep me up at night a little bit.”
She added: “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.”