‘The Sex Lives Of College Girls’ Co-Creator Explains Why Everything Fell Apart In The Season 2 Finale

Katie Campione
·10 min read
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SPOILER ALERT: This post contains plot details from the Season 2 finale of HBO Max’s The Sex Lives of College Girls

Everything is in shambles. Or, at least that’s how it seems after the Season 2 finale of The Sex Lives of College Girls. As the school year at Essex College came to a close, the four women at the center of the story seemed to be finishing their first year on a high note — until they weren’t.

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Leighton [Reneé Rapp] broke up with her girlfriend, dropped her sorority and jumped head first back into a relationship with her ex, Alicia [Midori Francis]. She is, perhaps, the only one who seems to be in a good place by the end of the season (though rushing back into things with Alicia is bound to cause strife at some point).

Meanwhile, Whitney [Alyah Chanelle Scott] caught Kimberly [Pauline Chalamet] kissing her ex-boyfriend Canaan [Christopher Meyer] in the courtyard as she was on her way to tell him she wanted him back — and now she’s moving out to live in Kappa. And Bela [Amrit Kaur] is thinking of transferring schools after she betrayed her fellow writers at the Foxy, belittled a new writer, and cheated on her boyfriend with a famous comedian.

The series has been renewed for a third season, which will presumably pick up at the start of sophomore year. While everything seems uncertain right now, series co-creator Justin Noble assured Deadline that, eventually, these ladies will find a way to work it out.

“They’re teammates. It’s them against everyone else,” he said, adding: “Our show, I pride it on not having a lot of female-on-female warfare. Our girls get along. They’re there for each other.”

Noble spoke with Deadline ahead of the finale to discuss why and how everything fell apart during the final episodes of Season 2, and how the women might begin to put the pieces back together.

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DEADLINE: Let’s start with Leighton. I’m sure there will be mixed reactions to her reigniting things with Alicia, but I really loved it for her. Why did you decide that was where she should land at the end of Season 2?

JUSTIN NOBLE: I think we start Season 2 with her doing the thing that she couldn’t quite do in Season 1. She comes out to all these people, and that opens the door to a hallway full of other doors of comedy opportunities for her. Do a lot of people who just come out after a closeted stint have a pretty promiscuous phase? Yes, they do. So she does that. Do a lot of those people then get STIs? Mhm. So that happens. Then my own personal favorite, which is like dating your twin, the doppelbanger, which I feel like I’ve just seen so many friends do and it’s like one of them leaves the brunch table and you’re like, ‘Is anyone gonna point out that they’re identical?’ But the goal for the season was to introduce Tatum in that light, episodic comedy love interest vibe, like we would see on a show like a Sex in the City or something, but then to have it surprisingly evolve into more depth. The interesting flip on it is that there was more there than we ever would have guessed when we first met them. When they first met, Leighton’s desire for her felt so superficial. It culminates in this moment that I really love with her dad, sitting outside that restaurant saying, ‘I really liked this girl for you.’ For Leighton, who’s just come out to her dad moments earlier, her dad saying that to her has to have a profound effect on her. It solidifies that she had probably been thinking that too. I think she really fell for Tatum and felt that there was something there. Gracie’s performance as Tatum is just so flawless. She just matches Reneé every step of the way. But Reneé and Midori were fantastic in Season 1. I loved every scene between them, but there was this one roadblock between them which was that Leighton wasn’t out. For Alicia, that was a line in the sand. I think both of them had really good points on why they just couldn’t be together that I think we should respect, and halfway through Season 2, those boundaries are gone, but I think we’re so wrapped up in Tatum that we don’t really remember that the boundary with Alicia is gone. So we reintroduce Alicia because there’s nothing really holding her back anymore. She has most certainly heard about Leighton’s journey through campus, and there was something there that was undeniable. So Leighton has to choose, and I think seeing a reflection of a part of her personality in Tatum was enough for her to see, ‘Maybe this isn’t the right choice for me.’

DEADLINE: I’m glad you brought that up. Leighton telling Tatum that she saw parts of herself in Tatum that she didn’t like was pretty brutal, but also felt like a moment of needed self reflection.

NOBLE: I love that line. I remember laboring over that line. The network called it out at the table read, and I was like ‘Great. It works.’ But I do think it’s true, and I think it hints at the backbone of the show, which is that these girls are 18 and 19 years old and they’re finding themselves. I think it shows incredible self awareness for Leighton that she says that out loud.

DEADLINE: Well, Leighton is potentially the only one who had a somewhat happy ending. The rest of them are walking away from their first year with a lot in shambles, especially Kimberly and Whitney. How did their friendship get so messy so fast?

NOBLE: I just remember at the end of my first year of college, that is the ultimate test of how close everyone has gotten. It’s very easy to be a good person and get along with your roommates. You had no idea who they were before you moved in. You learned about them. You love them in these ways. You don’t like them in these ways, because they have weird habits. But what a test you’re given when you’re able to change it up if you so choose. So I love that the finale starts with Whitney and Kimberly both from these like vulnerable places, being like ‘You’re the one thing I’m sure about.’ And then with one swift move that is immediately exploded in a way that I think is interesting because our show really doesn’t do that. Our show, I pride it on not having a lot of female-on-female warfare. Our girls get along. They’re there for each other. So it’ll be interesting to see how we would tackle this situation between Whitney and Kimberly because you can see both sides of it. Whitney and Canaan were done. Kimberly and Canaan exist together in a realm that’s completely independent of Whitney, and we meet Canaan with Kimberly, not with Whitney. But at the same time, Kimberly knows enough to lie the next morning and not admit what happened. So something in her knows that this was a little bit of a move. Whitney feels the same way, and she has a knee jerk reaction and she decides she’ll live with the people she fears in the world most. We’ll have to see how Whitney and Kimberly get past it for sure.

DEADLINE: I do think you’ve built enough of a foundation that it feels like they can get through it, even if it may be rough.

NOBLE: That’s the tone that we’ve tried to spend 20 episodes cultivating so that people would know that that’s the case. Travis is catty, and Jocelyn can get a little catty. Otherwise the girls should be able to work their stuff out, but it might be a bumpy road on this one. There’s a lot of baggage attached to it.

DEADLINE: It was starting to feel like Whitney had finally sorted things out, too. She also declares her major and tells her mom she wants to start forging her own path. 

NOBLE: In a lot of ways, Whitney’s Season 2 is like the inverse of her Season 1. She enters Season 2, and her social life pain is firing on all cylinders. She’s with Canaan. She’s in Kappa. But otherwise, she doesn’t know what the hell is going on. Then the season watches her flip that. She finds something for herself that I think is more meaningful in the biochem journey and who she wants to be. But then a lot of the other things start to fall away.

DEADLINE: We haven’t even talked about Bela yet. Is she really going to leave Essex?

NOBLE: I think that Bella has a lot to figure out. When she’s giving that laundry list of items at the end of the episode, you really do realize that she has surprisingly not had the track record at Essex that her upbeat, positive energy self probably thought she had. I think it hits her fast, and I think the perfectionist in her just has to cut and run. It’s like, ‘This is too much to fight backwards from. I should start fresh somewhere else.’ She’s on the poster. We’ll have to figure that out.

DEADLINE: Throughout the season, she comes across as if she has no idea how hurtful she’s being, but in that moment, it’s like it comes crashing down on her. Was it willful ignorance, or did she really not realize she was being so problematic?

NOBLE: You’re really tapping into something that was super important to me. My writers would laugh at me if they knew I was talking about this. One thing I was just dead set on and couldn’t get out of my head this season was this like dumb little comedy area about a mental health bubble being on the campus, because I wanted to set it up as this stupid joke about bureaucratic band aids on mental health. But Bela is this character who has, in my opinion, never had self reflection. I think she runs from one situation to the next. She is literally running to the writers room at SNL. So she’s doing anything she can for her entire life until she gets there. She’s not thinking anything other than, ‘Does this help that happen?’ In Episode 7, we get this glimpse of her at the end going down the path and sitting in this mental health bubble and thinking, and we’ve never seen that from her. That’s the show giving her an opportunity saying, ‘Hey, sometimes what you’re doing can hurt other people.’ She thinks about it, and then the finale gives her a test, and she fails miserably. It couldn’t be easier for her to just be gracious and kind to this younger writer. Instead she just has to talk about it in the most ambitious terms. I think she’s trying to be good. She’s trying to be a good person. She’s trying to be helpful, but it’s become her view on the world that she’s like, ‘You’re not good enough Georgia.’ And it comes to bite her. I think that she’s as surprised as we are when she’s hearing that list at the end.

DEADLINE: When Georgia starts tweeting about what Bela said to her, the girls are honest with her but also try to lift her back up. Why was it important for you to make sure they were still supporting her even when she’s totally in the wrong?

NOBLE: They’re teammates. It’s them against everyone else. I think that that’s true with a lot of friend groups. It’s so easy to judge someone and to correct someone’s behavior. But if you care about them, sometimes you just need to decide, is this person ready for that? What do they need right now? I think there’s a difference between immediately being like, ‘Yeah, you shouldn’t have done that,’ versus like, ‘I’m gonna pull you back up, and then tomorrow when we’re getting breakfast, I might say, Well, maybe you could have done it this way.’ That’s more the world that our girls live in.

DEADLINE: Last time we talked, you told me it was important for you to flesh out their school years, as opposed to one season per year. Have you decided how you might construct the timeline for future seasons?

NOBLE: Once we start talking about what’s the next chapter for each of these characters, then the timeline follows. I don’t think we’ll be filming the 33rd season of Pauline Chalamet playing Kimberly at whatever age, although I would love to see it. I would love to have them decades older and still in college. That would be fine for me, but probably bad for the show. I think there’s a lot of story left to tell for each of these girls, and I think the finale shows that there’s a lot of throws forward that are like ‘Oh god, they better get to work right away to fix this sh*t.’

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