De acordo com este artigo em Cosmopolitan , os anacronismos são deliberados:
Emma Mackey - who plays the wonderfully whip-smart Maeve, and is the real brains behind Otis' operation - and Ncuti Gatwa, who stars as Otis' out-and-proud best friend - told Cosmopolitan.com/uk the reason behind the show's '80s feel.
"The whole aesthetic of the show is completely inspired by John Hughes and that '80s high school aesthetic that we all know and love, and it's quite universal," Emma explained.
A few of John Hughes' fan favourites include Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club.
"There are a whole range of films that we loved growing up, and that's why the production team chose that because it works and it appeals to people," she added.
"It's almost nostalgic in the way we tried to add that classic high school, and pushed the heart and soul with a British twist; with a bit of British seasoning," Ncuti added.
Emma joked: "Yeah [otherwise] we'd all be heads down on our phones, and it would be quite a boring show!"
Gillian Anderson confirma isso em uma entrevista com a TV Insider :
If Sex Education sounds less like stuffy British fare and more like American teen comedies of the '80s, such as The Breakfast Club, that's no accident. Says Anderson, "Our executive producer was obsessed with [John Hughes films] and was trying to find something that was going to fit the bill."
Criador da série Laurie Nunn conversou com Thrillist sobre o programa:
Thrillist: There is an '80s vibe to the show, in the costuming and the music choices. Why did you want to tap into that aesthetic?
Nunn: It was a very conscious decision from myself and the producers and director Ben Taylor who is also an executive producer on the project. We all absolutely love the teen genre, particularly the John Hughes films of the 1980s so we really wanted to make the show have the feeling that it's an homage or that it has this nostalgic backdrop, but that we are talking about very contemporary, modern themes and storylines for the characters. So in a way we were also trying to take this tried and tested tropes of the genre and sort of flip them on their head and show a different perspective on it. I think those two things together and then with the Britishness just make it feel like it's its own thing.
Nunn's exploration of the universality of being an awkward, sexually inexperienced 16 year old is inspired by her love of iconic teen movies and TV shows and the YA genre. "We really wanted to pay homage to the John Hughes films of 1980s," said Nunn. Netflix's commissioning editor Alex Sapot described the series as "a real homage to John Hughes, the '80s" and "an interesting intersection" of the John Hughes aesthetic and Laurie Nunn's modern voice. Nunn added that their aim was to harness this inspiration and "take tried and tested tropes and subvert them and look at them from a new perspective."