New York, Nov 17 (TIWN): The title of “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” a new comedy that begins its first term Nov. 18 on HBO Max, is a work of clickbait-and-switch.

It is absolutely about college girls, and those girls do have sex lives. But anyone hoping for the scripted series version of “Girls Gone Wild” or Playboy’s “Women of the Ivy League” will have to look elsewhere. The show instead treats undergraduate intimacy with the friendly skepticism it deserves. There’s mortification, bewilderment, klutzy desire and sometimes, between rounds of beer pong, the stirrings of self-discovery. 

Created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble, the series stars Alyah Chanelle Scott as Whitney, a jock and a senator’s daughter; Renée Rapp as Leighton, a closeted Park Avenue princess; Amrit Kaur as Bela, a comedy nerd from a conservative background; and Pauline Chalamet (yes, she’s the sister of Timothée Chalamet) as Kimberly, a regular nerd and a scholarship student. Thrown together as suite-mates at a prestigious, Ivy-adjacent university, they confuse love with sex, sex with fun and rebellion with growth. For Boomer, Gen X and Millennial viewers who may assume that those self-assured Gen Z kids have it all figured out, “The Sex Lives of College Girls” passionately suggests otherwise.