The Max series — created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble and starring Pauline Chalamet, Amrit Kaur and Alyah Chanelle Scott — returns after news broke that original star Reneé Rapp would be leaving the show.
The Max original series The Sex Lives of College Girls is returning to the streaming service next month.
The third season will drop on Thursday, Nov. 21, with one new episode in the 10-episode set dropping each week at 9 p.m. ET through Jan. 23.
The coming-of-age series, following a group of students at New England’s prestigious Essex College, was created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble and originally starred Pauline Chalamet, Amrit Kaur, Alyah Chanelle Scott and Reneé Rapp as the core suitemates experiencing college life together.
But news broke over the summer of 2023 that Rapp, who has gone on to launch a hit music career, would be leaving the series during its third season. She will appear in a few episodes, as a recurring guest star, not a series regular, to set up her character Leighton Murray’s departure from Essex.
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The Mean Girls star is shown in some of the scenes in the teaser for season three, where Kaur’s Bela also declares her desire to sleep with the school mascot, Chalamet’s Kimberly confesses that she “swiped right” on Whitney’s (Scott) dad, and the suitemates continue to party and hook up.
The heavy presence of Kaur’s Bela in the teaser, including hanging out with her suitemates, suggests that her request to transfer schools at the end of season two doesn’t last. And she seems to be enjoying the company of her friends despite feeling, at the end of the previous season, like she was turning people away.
The season two finale also saw Kimberly and Whitney deciding to be roommates before Whitney changed her mind after being upset that Kimberly kissed her ex-boyfriend and lied about it. Whitney had been planning to move into the sorority that Leighton turned down.
The Sex Lives of College Girls also stars Christopher Meyer, Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, Renika Williams, Gracie Lawrence and Mia Rodgers.
When asked about her exit from the show in a February Hollywood Reporter cover story, Rapp said the decision to leave “was hard for so many reasons” and recalled the difficult experience of coming to terms with her sexuality in her personal life as her character was doing so in the series.
“Recently, on TikTok, [I watched] this scene in season one, where I come out to another character as a lesbian, and I’m crying, sobbing,” she told THR. “And I hadn’t seen that scene in years. It is so interesting that at the time I wasn’t even aware that what I was experiencing in my own personal life was actually exactly what I was doing onscreen. I was in a relationship with a man, incredibly confused, unsure of myself, feeling so insecure in my acting. And I watched the scene the other day, and I was like, ‘Wow, I feel so lucky to have that.’ That’s something I would show my kids. So when I watched it back, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s hard to leave that.’ And I’m also so grateful that I was able to have that moment. Not only was it helpful for other people, it was crazy for me; crazy helpful and also crazy hard. Because I’m like, ‘Why am I freaking out all the time?’ I would go home, and I would call my friends, and I’d be like, ‘I think I’m a lesbian, but I really love my boyfriend. I would want to be with him, but I see him more as a friend.’ So not only was I doing that on the show, publicly, in a big way to so many people, and my family, who had no idea that I was gay, I was also going through it personally. It is fucking crazy to watch that back.”
She added, “Being celebrated for being out because of a TV show or celebrity or success or something was really interesting because I think it forced a lot of people in my life and my family to have to accept me in a weird way, and in some ways that are twisted, like, ‘Damn, we could have done that a long time ago without her being on a TV show.’ However, I think it made it a lot easier in ways that pissed me off, but I’m also really grateful for. That [show] was the most parallel experience in my life, and I remember doing that specific coming-out scene and not acting at all. At all. I was just sobbing. I see that, and I don’t see a character. I’m like, ‘That’s me.’”
Rapp has said she was thrilled to audition for the role, previously saying in a 2023 appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, before news of her Sex Lives departure broke, that she’d never been asked to audition for a queer character.
Still, she recalled having a “terrible” time filming the first season.
“The first year doing College Girls was terrible. It was terrible,” she said. “It sucked so bad because, at the time, I was in a heteronormative relationship. I hated going to work because I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m like good enough to be here. I don’t think I can be here. I don’t think I can be doing this.’ I was like, ‘Maybe I’m just trying too hard.’ And then I would come home and I would psych myself out, literally.”
She added, “I was just in a panic constantly. And I wasn’t [straight], but I was so freaked out by the idea of my sexuality not being finite or people laughing at me or me laughing at myself that I hated first year of filming.”