Sex Lives of College Girls EP, Cast Tee Up Leighton’s Exit, Talk Premiere’s Kimberly/Canaan/Whitney Resolution
Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Sex Lives of College Girls Season 3 premiere. Proceed at your own risk!
Bela was the one hoping to transfer when The Sex Lives of College Girls Season 3 kicked off on Thursday, but by the premiere’s end, it was Leighton who was eyeing a move.
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The development is not entirely surprising: Reneé Rapp, who plays the blonde Essex College student, announced in July 2023 that she would be exiting the Max comedy after appearing in a handful of Season 3 episodes.
The season opener set the stage for Leighton’s departure by first revealing that her girlfriend Alicia is leaving school to go work for the mayor of Boston, but the couple agreed to give a long-distance relationship a shot. Then Leighton was dealt a blow when her math class was cancelled, forcing her to take a lengthy bus ride to the University of Vermont to attend the class. When that proved to be untenable, Leighton’s professor at Essex offered to reach out about a transfer to MIT, which has a strong math program — and also happens to be in Boston!
Looking ahead at Episode 2, showrunner/executive producer Justin Noble tells TVLine that Leighton is “dangled an opportunity” with MIT and now she has to decide what she wants her future to be.
“I think that she, in her wildest years, did not think it would fall in her lap this way, and it’s almost like when someone’s bluff is called,” Noble says. “She knows that something’s not right and not serving her, and then someone hands her an immediate solution for it, but she doesn’t know that she’s prepared to accept it yet.”
“That tees up a story where she has to decide how serious she is about this, how much of a deal-breaker it is if she’s really struggling in this one area,” Noble continues. “Is she willing to upend every other aspect to right this other one? And that’s a complicated one, especially when she has all of her friends at this school, [and] her dad is comedically obsessed with the school.”
Elsewhere in the season premiere, Kimberly and Canaan reunited after spending the summer apart… and decided that their relationship felt weird. Worst of all, she couldn’t do this to Whitney, Kimberly confessed. With that, Kimberly apologized to her former roommate for kissing her ex-boyfriend and hurting her feelings, and the two pals made amends.
“The one thing that I think you’ll agree is super in the DNA of the show is, like, we do not have much of a taste for girl-on-girl warfare,” Noble says of the decision to bring Kimberly and Canaan’s romance to a quick end.
Yes, the writers “chose a little bit of chaos” when Whitney saw Kimberly and Canaan kiss at the end of Season 2. Noble believes it’s “totally understandable” that Kimberly would start to fall for “gorgeous, funny, charming” Canaan, “but we don’t want to show Kimberly and Whitney in a big, prolonged fight. It doesn’t feel like what the show is,” the EP explains.
“I also think it’s true to honor that there is some messiness. When people do live like this, people make mistakes,” Noble adds. “People need to see that these characters are not perfect, and never having any conflict whatsoever, that wouldn’t feel real at all. So, instead, we chose to tell a story where the conflict was brief. The conflict felt real, because it continued over a summer offscreen, and then we make our way to a resolution, because, really, what our audience wants is to see this group together.”
“And I like to think that 15 years from now, the way it ends is with Whitney making a very embarrassing speech about this at Kimberly’s eventual wedding,” Noble continues. “But they have to have their moment of conflict. Conflict is what shows us that our friends are our friends, when we can work through stuff like that. That shows us the relationship prevails.”
Pauline Chalamet, who plays Kimberly, is relieved that the romance came to a peaceful conclusion and that Kimberly and Whitney patched up their friendship.
“I think it was very representative of things that can happen in college,” the actress shares, “but also an example of when you have a really good male friend…and they treat you well and you laugh well together, and you start to get a little confused and you think, ‘Maybe we’re supposed to be more than friends? Maybe we’re getting along so well because we’re supposed to be together?’ I think that’s what Kimberly went through.'”
But then Kimberly, thankfully, recognized that she and Canaan are actually better off as friends and that “she really hurt Whitney in the process,” Chalamet says. “So that kind of growing up, figuring it out, was very hurtful to Whitney, and I think Kimberly realizes it a little late, but ultimately gets there.”
Meanwhile, Alyah Chanelle Scott (aka Whitney) says she was “really proud” of how the storyline was handled between Kimberly and Whitney.
“We’re friends, and it doesn’t necessarily always feel natural to prolong a fight with your friend when the basis of the hurt is that it was your friend who hurt you, not a boy who hurt you,” Scott shares. “Dealing with that felt more important to me than the other side of it. The boy will always be the boy. But it’s The Sex Lives of College Girls, so the girls gotta be together… For me and Pauline, it felt like that was more important to lean into, dealing with how you hurt a friend and how you heal a friendship.”
What did you think of the Sex Lives of College Girls premiere? Grade it below, then hit the comments!
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