After a two-year wait, Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble's raunchy college sex-comedy The Sex Lives of College Girls is back for its third season. With longer episodes, new relationships and enough theme parties to put the standard college house parties to shame, Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott), Leighton (Reneé Rapp), Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) and Bela (Amrit Kaur) kick off their second year at Essex College.
The end of Season 2 left the friend group on shaky grounds and their fates at their fictional New England college unclear. Leighton has quit the Kappa sorority and come out as a lesbian to her dad, Whitney is moving into Kappa after spotting Kimberly kissing her ex Canaan (Christopher Meyer), and Bela is on the brink of transferring out of Essex — but in classic College Girls fashion, these bumps in the road only make way for a whole new semester of outrageous antics and sexual exploits living up to the show's namesake.
Real-life interruptions, though, have overshadowed the fictional rocky start for the suitemates. In 2023, Reneé Rapp announced that she would be exiting the show to focus on her music career, and would only appear in a few episodes in Season 3. The writers clearly have their work cut out for them, tasked with wrapping up Leighton's storyline in just a couple of episodes. Rapp's onscreen goodbye with her suitemates is a moment of genuine sincerity to reminds viewers that, despite all of the hilarity and drama, College Girls is a coming-of-age story celebrating female friendship and female sexuality at its very core.
In a series that relies strongly on the chemistry of its four main characters, Kaur, Chalamet and Scott do their best maintaining the group's dynamic after Rapp's departure. Still up to their usual hijinks and sexual pursuits, Whitney grapples with balancing school and soccer, Bela takes up a new job as a residence advisor, and Kimberly is on a new academic quest to become a Supreme Court Justice in a class taught by Professor Friedman (Tig Notaro). The new semester also welcomes the next year of Essex freshman, with transfer student Kacey (Gracie Lawrence) and first-year British international student Taylor (Mia Rodgers) joining the cast.
Filling the Leighton-shaped hole in the friend group would be an uphill battle for anyone, and it's clear that the writers weren't looking for a 1:1 replacement. It feels highly unbelievable that Kacey would ever be friends with the other girls, but small differences have never stopped anyone from joining this unlikely group of friends. Kacey remains strongly cemented within her character's uptight, sheltered archetype, humouring the other girls with fake smiles and shallow niceties that make it hard to become emotionally invested in her. Kacey's lack of dynamism in the first few episodes of the season also pales in comparison to her larger-than-life suitemates, a flaw that's especially evident as her character leads her own C and D plots in an episode.
Unlike Kacey, Taylor makes her distaste for the people she perceives to be beneath her extremely clear, especially her residence advisor Bela. Taylor continuously rejects Bela's attempts at looking out for her, even after the two of them share a moment of genuine connection earlier in the season. When Bela takes Taylor to a queer speed dating event, Taylor shows little interest and acts coldly to the majority of her peers, an attitude echoing a similar sentiment that Leighton had towards the women's centre in earlier seasons. Perhaps Taylor's already established prickly personality will require a few more episodes of growth in order for her to be able to fully resonate with audiences.
Many familiar faces like Jocelyn (Lauren "Lolo" Spencer) and Willow (Renika Willaims) are sidelined for the new cast of characters. However, Lila (Illia Isorelýs Paulino) and Kimberly's dynamic remains successful when it comes to eliciting actual laugh-out-loud moments. Lila's extended screen time in Season 3 is welcomed, and her unabashed confidence proves well-matched with Kimberly's awkwardness, making the two of them a much-needed comedic duo.
College Girls shines the most with its on-screen chemistry between Whitney, Bela and Kimberly. In a season that struggles to piece together all of its many moving parts, the series still revels in its female-friendship driven sex-positivity, humour, and the messy, larger-than-life predicaments that the suitemates get themselves into. Despite the major changes in this new season, Bela never lacks zany one-liners, Whitney's continued search for identity while balancing school and athletics taps into the more realistic sides of the college experience, and Kimberly will always be her endearing, strange self. College Girls is whimsical, energetic, heartfelt and deeply unserious, and its essence still resonates in its third season.