Essex College Is the Backdrop for 'The Sex Lives of College Girls' Is it Real?

Co-created by way of Mindy Kaling, HBO Max's 'The Sex Lives of College Girls' options the trials and tribulations of 4 Essex College beginners girls. Is the faculty real?

Bianca Piazza - Author

The show is called WHAT? That's right, folks, Mindy Kaling didn't want to sugarcoat the rest when it got here to her saucy HBO Max dramedy, The Sex Lives of College Girls. In a nutshell, the sequence follows the once in a while specific lives of four college girls as they try to find themselves inside of the partitions of the famend Essex College. The opposites-attract dynamic between the random suitemates — Kimberly, Leighton, Whitney, and Bela — is possibly anticipated, some boasting rather drained college gal stereotypes, however that is what makes it kitschy and a laugh.

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Created by means of The Office alumna Mindy Kaling and Brooklyn Nine-Nine creator Justin Noble, The Sex Lives of College Girls — which premiered on Nov. 18, 2021 — is reminiscent of comedies like 2008's The House Bunny and 2019's Booksmart. All of these works highlight transformative periods in a gaggle of younger ladies's lives, exhibited thru the lighthearted and marketable lens of comedy, of route.

Thus some distance, the college-set dramedy starring Pauline Chalamet, Reneé Rapp, Alyah Chanelle Scott, and Amrit Kaur is doing smartly with critics, having earned an A+ Rotten Tomatoes score of 95 percent.

As we discussed, the backdrop of The Sex Lives of College Girls is the uber-prestigious Essex College. But is the school that hosts the team of ladies' concurrently attractive and studious shenanigans real?

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Is Essex College a real school?

In brief, sure and no. While Vermont's Essex College itself may not exist, the fictional school is in response to a mishmash of elite faculties sprinkled across New England. A bulk of the scenes were shot at Vassar College, situated in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Vassar's Thompson Library, inbuilt 1937, seems in several scenes. Locations like the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film, Blodgett Hall, and the Vassar athletic fields, too, are featured in the series.

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For Mindy specifically, it used to be essential that the sequence appropriately portrays what attending a liberal arts college on the East Coast is like. “What we truly wanted to do, Justin Noble my co-creator, and I, he got here from Never Have I Ever, used to be we would have liked to show what a in point of fact East Coast college experience is like for women,” The Mindy Project author instructed She Knows.

“There’s so many issues I’ve now not seen dramatized on TV, which is that it isn’t a melting pot, so much of occasions at those East Coast schools there are socio-economic differences between scholars," she continued. Mindy added that she met her own best friends while in college (she attended Dartmouth), and that strong bonds between women are created during transformative, exploratory years.

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Mindy Kaling aimed to create her young protagonists with compassion and heart.

“There's never this time, besides from when you start college, when you are sort of randomly assigned to live with three other people that you don't get to choose,” Mindy told Teen Vogue. Isn't that the truth. The surprise of what freshmen strangers you'll randomly be paired with is equally terrifying and exciting. You could be trapped with the rambunctious party girl, or the unambitious stoner who never goes to class, or the overly studious bookworm who spends her weeknights in the library and her weekends, well, in the library. It's a gamble — one that sometimes leads to beautiful, lasting friendships.

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“But I also wanted to make sure that no matter what kind of conflict they had or what kind of personalities they had or flaws, that I had a great deal of empathy and love for each of them. Because going into any show that you hope goes on for years and years, in order to invest, they have to be like, ‘What are their vulnerabilities?’" Mindy defined. With middle, variety, and comedically worked realism at its core, The Sex Lives of College Girls is a lot more than its raunchy name.

Episodes 6, 7, and 8 of The Sex Lives of College Girls air Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, on HBO Max.

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