‘The Sex Lives Of College Girls’ Co-Creator Justin Noble On What’s In Store For Sophomore Year At Essex College
SPOILER ALERT: This post contains details from the first episode of The Sex Lives of College Girls Season 3.
Like many of us, Kimberly, Bela and Whitney think they have pretty much everything figured out after surviving their first year of college. And, like many of us, they are very wrong.
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In Season 3 of The Sex Lives of College Girls, it’s sophomore year for these ladies at Essex College, and they very quickly realize there is still a lot to learn about, well, everything.
“At the end of the day, they still don’t know sh*t, and they’re making a million mistakes, and it’s funny to watch them flounder and try to figure out what’s next,” co-creator Justin Noble tells Deadline. “They’re starting to figure out who they are as people. They’re learning important lessons about identity…and that’s fun to see.”
In the interview below, Noble spoke with Deadline about the first episode of Season 3 and all that’s to come.
DEADLINE: What were some of your goals with Season 3, now that they’re in sophomore year and have made it through their first year of college? What did you really want to highlight about these characters?
JUSTIN NOBLE: The show starts with these four timid girls who are showing up not knowing what they’re doing on a college campus. Sophomore year just seems so funny, because you just come back with this air of like, ‘Oh, I’ve been here for a full year. I know exactly how to handle this.’ But, at the end of the day, they still don’t know sh*t, and they’re making a million mistakes, and it’s funny to watch them flounder and try to figure out what’s next…they’re starting to figure out who they are as people. They’re learning important lessons about identity and just their own characters, and that’s fun to see starting to get together the in this chapter of the coming of age story.
The other big agenda item was making the world feel bigger. I remember my first year, I feel like I had my insular, small group of friends. And then my sophomore year, I was like, ‘Oh, now I’m in this group over here, and I’ve made 15 new friends through them, and I’m doing this over here,’ and it just gets bigger and expands outward. I definitely feel that in this season, for sure. I definitely feel it on the page, because every script is so much longer, because there’s more girls, more stories, and it, frankly, was as much as we could possibly produce in the time we had allotted. But I think the episodes are longer and fuller and feel good for it.
DEADLINE: So many viewers had said they wished the episodes in the first two seasons were longer, and this season really delivers on that. What was the experience of essentially doubling the runtime of many of these episodes?
NOBLE: I was psyched. Mindy and I, when we came in and started the show, we were like, ‘We want to do an hour long premiere.’ So we did a longer episode for the first ever episode. But adding new characters is really the thing that made it feel so seamless. Adding not one but two new girls, who we have to juggle major stories for, made it so that the episode sort of had to be longer. We didn’t really have much space. A show like Brooklyn Nine Nine, I could write that in my sleep, because I did for a million years. And it was like, you get two full stories and maybe a third story, more like a runner. Then, on our show, we were juggling four and just squeezing them in as best we could. Now, sometimes, we’re having five. We can let them breathe and have more fun and allow more comedy moments. Because the thing that gets cut in TV, if you have to shorten it, is the jokes, because you need the story, so the jokes fall out. In this Gregorian calendar year of 2024, can we please just have comedy? Can we just keep the jokes where they are? That’s my big thing, and I’m so happy to have a show that can deliver on both, being full of jokes, but also tell important stories.
DEADLINE: I have to say, I was devastated for Kimberly about the Kamala Harris dinner she missed.
NOBLE: I think Whitney was less interested in that dinner than the idea of letting Kimberly find out about that dinner.
DEADLINE: Can you tell me about deciding how to end Renée Rapp’s arc in these first few episodes? By the end of the first episode, it seems like she’s exploring transferring to MIT.
NOBLE: This is Leighton Murray. Leighton Murray only knows how to win. There’s no losses for Leighton Murray. She would not accept such. So her making this choice to know herself deep as a person, so much so that she has to make a choice that she wouldn’t enjoy necessarily, felt like the ultimate bookend to the girl who came into college pretending to be something she’s not. She really has learned. She’s almost accomplished the task of college by the end of her start of her sophomore year. She’s figured out who she is as a person. She knows what’s next, and she’s off on her way. I think that’s something to celebrate. [There’s a] touching scene where the girls are saying goodbye to her, oh my god, that was a tough night, because it was just so real. It was just real behind the scenes, real in front of the scenes, and I think it really shows in the episode. I’m so proud of the way it turned out.
But the other fun thing is that it felt true to me, because my freshman year in college, one of my best friends, I remember talking over the summer, and she was like, ‘I’m not coming back.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean? You’re like, one-third of my social life? What do you mean you’re not coming back?’ It happens. College is a time where you’re with these people for this one little moment in time, and one year of college is just a smaller version of that. But as we started talking about new characters for the show, it led to this creative revolution. I can’t even tell you how many note cards we had for different ideas, for different types of new characters who could be on the show. The show is called The Sex Lives of College Girls. There is no shortage of different types of college girls that could be on the show. Somewhere in a dusty cabinet, we have about 798 more examples of who they could be. So we could add two new characters a week for the rest of the show. Thank God, we don’t have to, but we could.
DEADLINE: I always appreciate that there is drama in this show, and the girls will fight, but there’s never cattiness. How do you continue to keep that a central thesis of the show?
NOBLE: I mean, I’m just, frankly not interested in having that cattiness or that girl-on-girl warfare. I feel like that’s why we chose a little chaos at the end of Season 2 with Whitney and Kimberly, but that’s why it’s so quickly resolved at the top of Season 3. We don’t want to see some prolonged fight between these girls, but we do want to honor the fact that life is messy in this era, and people go through little spats, and they get through the other side, and they’re better for it. Then, probably 15 years from now, Whitney mentions it in a toast at Kimberly’s wedding. That’s the way that story plays out.
But I think it’s just because my personal life is like, I’m friends with versions of all these girls. I was always that gay kid sitting at the brunch table with all the women who were telling crazy stories about, like, my friend Marla, who wants to go to the Olympic village to hook up with an Olympic athlete, and I’m like, ‘Marla, please do not do that.’ But then I’m sitting there being like, ‘Bela, should do that.’ So between that and hearing all of the amazing stories that like the writers bring to the writers room about the most embarrassing things they can remember from their own college experience, it just makes it easier to write a story about these girls who lean on each other. All they have is each other. So if any one of them wasn’t leaning on the others or wasn’t being receptive to it, get them out of there. Get someone else.
DEADLINE: For the recurring actors, as you’ve spent more time with them over the past two seasons, how has that influenced the way you write their characters?
NOBLE: I think we start to learn so much deeper what they would and wouldn’t do. We all care about [the show] so much. So when we’re talking about story, we really belabor, like, would the character do this? Would this feel real? Would this feel forced in execution? So I think the more that we’ve seen the show, frankly, the more we realize what the performers bring to the [characters]. They become externalized to us. They’re more than just words on the page, and we kind of decide what’s best for them, whether they like it or not. The character might be totally wrong about what they think is right for them. Look at Bela, everything that she does. It really makes us want to see new and exciting things for them. I think as the show continues, hopefully, I’d love to see more of them. I, frankly, need to see Lila have a long dating story. I need that in my core, and so I need the opportunity to deliver on it.
DEADLINE: She is always talking about Grindr. I need to see what she’s up to on there.
NOBLE: I mean, I gotta tell you, I really leaned into that for a minute, and then I was like, ‘I need to pull myself back.’ I would happily do a full episode where it’s just Lila on Grindr with her gay besties who we’ve never seen, and what that looks like that. Ilia would have a blast.
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