‘Sex Lives of College Girls’ Co-Creator on Reneé Rapp’s Looming Departure and What’s to Come in Season 3

[This story contains spoilers from the season three premiere of Sex Lives of College Girls, “Welcome Back to Essex.”]

Sex Lives of College Girls picked up right at the start of the school year when it returned with season three, similar to how season one began. But this year, the girls are now sophomores.

Over the summer, Leighton (Reneé Rapp) and Alicia (Midori Francis) traveled across Europe with Leighton’s dad, Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) worked, Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott) was in Washington D.C., with her senator mother (played by Sherri Shepherd), and Bela (Amrit Kaur) and Leighton visited Whitney and even had dinner with Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff.

When season three picks up, Kimberly and Whitney are still at odds, not having spoken all summer because Kimberly lied to Whitney about kissing her ex, Canaan (Christopher Meyer), at the end of last year. And Bela’s efforts to transfer out of Essex College after hitting rock bottom are thwarted when a counselor, played by Rose Abdoo, tells her that her 1.8 GPA is too low to transfer to any school. So, she decides to turn over a new leaf: No more comedy or leading with her sexuality.

Elsewhere, the first episode also set up Rapp’s looming exit from the show to pursue a career in music full-time. Alicia tells her girlfriend that she’s leaving college for a job working for the newly elected mayor of Boston. Leighton, being Leighton, assumes this means their relationship is over, but Alicia tells her she loves her and has no desire to break up with her. So, they agree to take things one day at a time.

When the incredibly advanced math class Leighton signs up for doesn’t have enough people taking it and gets canceled, the professor suggests that she take a long bus ride to a local grad school and take classes there. But, after one day of commuting, Leighton tells the professor that she will never do that again. So, he offers to speak to a friend at MIT, who may be able to accommodate a transfer, which makes way for Leighton and Alicia to ride off into the Boston sunset together.

“Really, the only thing that could happen was that she would transfer to a different school,” co-showrunner Justin Noble tells The Hollywood Reporter of Rapp’s impending departure. “But as we started talking about it, [co-showrunner] Mindy [Kaling] and I were chatting, we’re like, ‘This is Leighton Murray we’re talking about. The only thing Leighton Murray does is win.’ There’s no world where she would leave other than to take a massive step towards what would be her best, most powerful life moving forward.”

Below, Noble teases what’s to come over the next nine episodes, talks about the introduction of two new characters who become a part of the Sex Lives of College Girls‘ core group and how much longer he sees the show running.

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So, what are your goals for season three?

This season is so interesting, because sophomore year is a really unique time in the college experience. You come into school as a first-year, and you don’t know anything at all, and you’re shell-shocked. Three months ago, you had to call your parents to pick you up at the mall because you got a Wetzel’s Pretzels with your friend and you needed a ride home. And now you’re like, “I’m a full-blown adult,” and life smacks you in the face. Then, sophomore year, you have the same thing happen but in a different way because it’s like, “Oh, I know everything about college. I’ve been here for a full year. Oh, you’re a first-year. You need to know how this works.” Meanwhile, based on when your birthday is, you are like six months older than these people.

It’s fun to see our girls start to interact with the class underneath them. It’s fun to see the world getting bigger. That’s what happens in college, in my experience, and in the writers’ experiences that we talked about so much. Your first year, you hang on to the people in your life so close, because you’re in it together, and you’re like, “This is my close circle of friends.” And then as you get more comfortable, you’re joining clubs, and you’re meeting more people; your world just gets bigger and bigger. I think we start to see that a little bit in the first episode. But obviously, we have a lot to accomplish between season two cliffhangers and switching up the cast a little bit. So we’re just starting to meet some people who we’ll interact with more.

What can we expect from our beloved quad, soon-to-be trio in the next nine episodes?

The thing about trios is that Bela has told us that is asymmetrical, and it’s not gonna work. So I don’t know. I feel like we won’t be in a trio for long.

In the first episode, we see Kimberly and Whitney at odds at the beginning. But by the end of it, they’re back in each other’s good graces. Was there ever a world in which they wouldn’t have been friends?

No, it’s just so not the DNA of the show. We’re not really interested in doing girl-on-girl warfare. I think that if we had done that, the audience would be like, “What’s happening? Like, why?” We want to be a show that people enjoy watching. We’re not The Bear. We’re not trying to produce anxiety-driving episodes of TV. At the same time, I want to make sure that we aren’t making falsehoods about perfect lives and people who never have any conflict whatsoever. I think it’s important to show that moment in friendships that happens regardless of gender, where it’s like, “Oh, there’s a little bit of messiness between someone liking someone, especially when everyone’s in close quarters.” But we wanted to quickly get by it and wrap things up and have our group back together. We have 10 short episodes to tell in a season. I don’t want multiple of them to have a fractured group.

In that same vein, do you think they would have been able to make up that quickly had Kimberly stayed with Canaan?

I think they would have been able to if Kimberly hadn’t lied. The lie is the thing. That felt true to the Kimberly character, to all of us, that she would lie about it. That was very intentional that we did it that way, because she’s so terrified to let people that she loves down. She tried to cover up her tracks as she figured out where she’s at with Canaan. Little did she know, Whitney witnessed the thing that she was not being truthful about. But, that being said, to answer your question more directly, Whitney and Canaan were done. Lila [Ilia Isorelýs Paulino] has a very fun run on that in the premiere. I think if Kimberly had just been honest and said she had a crush on Canaan and sort of done the girl code thing of being like, “I’m gonna gut check with you and ask how you feel about this,” I think Whitney Chase would have been like, “Yeah, sure, I’m good.” Even if she was harboring some feelings that were unresolved for him or anything, I think she still would have said it because you can’t just claim people forever. Some people absolutely do, but you have to see where your friends land on it. That’s part of being in a friendship, seeing what’s going to bum them out.

Closing the loop on the Kimberly-Whitney-Canaan triangle, what went into this vision to not have them pursue a relationship? Was it just the Whitney of it all, or did you want to see Kimberly with someone else?

It’s interesting. The show is called The Sex Lives of College Girls. It’s a lot about their relationships with their significant others, but the show is a love story about the friendships, and so anything that bumps on the friendship stories is gonna have to go away. The friendship stories are what’s front and center. So Kimberly couldn’t have stayed with Canaan if it was gonna bum Whitney out — and we chose a way to do it that would have — so they couldn’t be together. Also, there’s something interesting to me about crushing on someone and then being like, “It’s not quite right.”

I made out with my best friend in college, who was a woman, and we look back on it, and we’re like, “What were we both going through? What was happening where we, in a million years, thought that that would have been right?” Then, it just has led to such funny moments the rest of our lives. She officiated my wedding to my husband. I fainted at her wedding. I was her bridesman, and I fainted, and everyone was like, “Oh my God, he’s still in love with her.” And I was like, “No, I just stayed up making a gift for her.” But I think it is true that sometimes you don’t quite know what those feelings are, and you’re like, “I think I like them, like them.” And then you’re like, “Oh no, I don’t. I don’t.”

Bela is on a whole new trajectory this season. Why was important for her to hit rock bottom before deciding to change things in her life?

I think that she, over 20 episodes, had chosen a bunch of pretty selfish behaviors. We’re trying to tell a story about ambition, where a lot of people, especially in entertainment — and Bela pursues that — are so driven and ambitious, and they know how much of a rat race it is and how hard it is, and sometimes you end up stepping on people on your way up. Bela started doing that in college because she’s so pop-culture obsessed that she knows that’s what it is and that’s what it takes to survive. Meanwhile, she did not need to start that as a first-year student at a comedy magazine, and so I think she just had to learn that lesson, that that’s not the best way to collaborate with people. And I like that she has a bit of a redemption arc, and we’ll see where it leads. I think it might lead to some good character development for her. I love her season that’s coming ahead. But I mean, she brought herself to rock bottom for sure. Poor Eric. Look what she did to Eric [Mekki Leeper]. She had to sleep with John Reynolds!

How do you and Mindy Kaling go about planning the season beforehand?

I linger in the blue sky stage of what a season of TV can be for a bit. I’m not one of those showrunners who’s like, “I want to talk about it for five days, and then we’re going to dig in on what episode one is in detail.” We spend a bit in the writers room talking about the full season arc and putting up fence posts literally surrounding all four walls with different girls and what the start of their season is, the middle of their season, the late middle of their season, where we think they might end, and then we start to overlap them. So that it’s not like, “OK, well, if Kimberly’s learning this important lesson in the middle, maybe that’s not when Bela should be learning this thing, because it’ll feel too similar.” So we really plan it all out, and then Mindy sits in the room with us, and I pitch it all out, and she has very smart reactions to it all. And we go from there and switch things up. But we really take our time at those early stages.

This season introduces two new main characters, played by Mia Rodgers and Gracie Lawrence. What can we expect from their characters over the next nine episodes?

So to start with [Mia Rodgers’] Taylor, [who] we get a taste for [in the premiere], Taylor is absolutely going to be a complicated thorn in Bela’s side for a good bulk of the season. It’s just so fun and delicious for me because Bela is like the thirstiest character in television history. No one is more dehydrated than Bela Malhotra, and the idea that she would briefly have status and be like, “I’m an upperclassman over all you first years.” And then there’s this girl who’s like, “No, I refuse to give you my status,” and Bela having to suffer and be like, “But I do have status?” and then the girl being like, “Sorry, I’m just not going to give it to you.” It’s just a fun, interesting dynamic for them to have comedically. Taylor will have a lot of vulnerability that we’ll learn a little bit more about very soon, and we’ll get a sense of what her dating life looks like and her past. And she’s just performed so well and funny, and she’s an interesting flavor to the show that we haven’t had before. She’s very British dry, which I just love, too. I love British comedy, so it’s fun to have an actual funny British girl on the show.

Gracie, who we’ll meet in episode three, is so incredible this season. When we started talking about new characters that would be the same year as our girls — because Gracie’s character will be the same year, she’s a transfer student — the writers and I had like 800 ideas for what that character might end up being. Gracie’s character started as a card that said “girly girl,” because that’s not a flavor that we’ve had on the show before, and it prompted a super interesting convo with the writers, where they were like, “Would Kimberly be friends with a girly girl?” And then we’re like, “Would Whitney be friends with a girly girl?” Then we’d be like, “But it’s not bad. It’s not a bad thing to be a girly girl. It’s just a different thing than we had on the show.” So she kind of feels like a lot of people that we, in the writers room, knew in college, or our friends, or frankly, some of the writers were in college. But she’ll be around our girls quite a bit. She’ll have a lot of interesting events in her romantic world, and we’ll see Gracie Lawrence — who is an incredible, stunning singer in real life — have a little bit of a musical theater, girly journey.

Introducing these two new characters, was it to fill the hole that Reneé Rapp may be leaving behind? From the first episode, it seems like she may be heading to Boston with her girlfriend, which, if that is the case, is a very sweet storyline. What other storylines did you all consider as a perfect farewell for Reneé Rapp?

We honestly didn’t. We kind of landed on this pretty quickly. I mean, when you start to think about ways that college students leave, you’re pretty limited. It’s not like Reneé’s character was gonna go on a hike, and then Kimberly’s like, “You mean the rocky, dangerous hike near the cliff?” And then, she falls off or something. Really, the only thing that could happen was that she would transfer to a different school. But as we started talking about it, Mindy and I were chatting, we’re like, “This is Leighton Murray we’re talking about. The only thing Leighton Murray does is win.” So there’s no world where she would leave other than to take a massive step towards what would be her best, most powerful life moving forward.

The interesting thing is I very rarely think about the ending zone for the girls. I think about the chapters we’re in. I don’t really think beyond the season too much. Then, as we knew we were writing toward an ending for Leighton, I started to just see what the rest of her life would look like. It’s almost like I was allowed to think it because I had shut off that valve because I knew more was to come. But once I knew it was the end, it kind of felt like an appropriate tee-up to a future where Leighton just wins because we want the best for our girlies. We don’t want them to make too many mistakes. We want funny mistakes. We want Bela to have a horrific, ill-advised dating story. But we want them to land in good zones for their lives. So, yeah, we kind of thought that she would just pursue her own best life.

The other side of it is the Alicia side, which I am just team Leilicia and always will be. I cringe whenever anyone’s like “Tatum!” [Gracie Dzienny], and I’m like, “No! Why are you shipping pretty blonde girl with pretty blonde girl? It was a joke that she was attracted to herself.” I think we just did too good of a job in terms of shipping Tatum, but Alicia was fundamentally important in the life of Leighton. She changed her as a person through the women’s center, and I like to think of them together.

How will Sex Lives of College Girls look without Reneé Rapp?

It looks busier, frankly. It’s really interesting to say that about someone leaving, especially someone who was fundamentals of the first 22 episodes of the show. But we have more mouths to feed than ever. I’ve said before in press, but the sweetest criticisms we ever got in season two were people being like, “Longer episodes!” Then, as we introduced these new characters, frankly, I was like, “How are we going to produce episodes that have this many stories in them and serve as all these people?” Ilia is incredible, and we want to spend more time with Lila and Canaan and Willow [Renika Williams] and all these people. So, the scripts are longer. There’s more to do. We have five main girlies moving forward. So, it grows. The show grows and gets fuller and faster. It’s already so fast, but that’s just what the show is.

What can you tease about how Kimberly, Bela and Whitney are going to cope with the loss of Leighton?

I think that their loss is something that we really talked a lot about. It actually is fundamental in how we approached Leighton transferring, too. My first year of college, one of my best friends called over the summer and was like, “I’m not coming back.” And I remember being like, “What do you mean? You’re my social circle. What do you mean you’re not coming back?” I like that in the wake of her absence, these other girls need to figure out what that means for them, so as they have maybe a new roommate thrown their way, they’ll have to learn whether or not to embrace someone right out of the gate. But our girls are always a welcoming crowd, and we’ll see how it goes with all these new people in their lives.

How long would you envision the show running? Do you have a certain amount of years planned in your head?

This is a 34-season television show. We have it all figured out. Thirty-three is, like, a real toughie. We’re still working out what happens in season 33, and then it wraps up in season 34. (Laughs)

The only thing I’ll say is I think that this show is about college. I think that I don’t see a world where we would warp them out of college. I think college is such an interesting, fundamental time that we hadn’t seen much of on TV before. That’s the reason why we tried to pursue it creatively. It’s also why we’ve slowed it down and why two seasons got us through one year. There’s a lot of lessons to learn in college. Our show takes place in college, and we’ll see them through.

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New episodes of Sex Lives of College Girls release weekly on Max at 9 p.m. ET Thursdays.