Laurie Nunn

A boy who cannot do the thing every other boy does alone sets up shop as a sex therapist. That is the joke Laurie Nunn built Sex Education (2019) on, and the reason the series works is that she never treats it as a joke for long. Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) has grown up in the house of a sex therapist, Jean (Gillian Anderson), and has absorbed all the words without any of the experience. Maeve Wiley (Emma Mackey) spots that this makes him useful, and the pair open a paid clinic in a toilet block nobody else wants. Nunn writes the consultations the way she writes everything else in the series: plainly, without euphemism, and with the awkwardness left in.

It is, so far, the whole of her reputation. Before it there were short films and a play, King Brown (2017); since it there has been little, because the series ran four seasons until 2023 and took most of a decade of her working life. That is an odd shape for a career, and it makes her hard to judge the way writers are usually judged, by the differences between one thing and the next. What we can judge is how she managed a long run. The first two seasons are the best of it: tight, filthy, kind about people who are usually the butt of the joke, with an ensemble in which almost everyone gets a voice of their own. After that it sprawls. Nunn keeps adding people and keeps finding second chances for them, and the generosity that made the early episodes so likeable starts to cost the later ones their shape.

Her instinct for the ensemble is the strength and it is also the problem. The series is warmest at its edges, with the pupils who queue for the clinic, and dullest at its centre, with Otis, who is the least interesting person in his own story and stays that way. We laughed at the clinic scenes more than we expected to, and it was the plainness that did it: a teenager saying the unsayable in a cold toilet block, and Nunn refusing to turn it into innuendo. That refusal is her real signature. She also had intimacy coordinators on set from the first series, a practice the rest of television has since adopted, and it shows in scenes that are explicit without ever seeming to be at anyone's expense.

"I wanted to sort of say through our characters that there are always second chances," she said in 2023, and that is what the series says, sometimes once too often. Whether she can say something else is what her next work has to answer. We would like to see her write something with fewer people in it.