Series / Sexify

Clockwise from the top: Monika, Paulina, Natalia

Sexify (stylized as Sex!fy) is a Polish Sex Comedy streaming television series.

Natalia (Aleksandra Skraba) is a brilliant student at the Warsaw University of Technology who is starting her last semester, with her eyes set on a scholarship for best tech startup, which will get the winning project considerable funding. When her new professor tells her that her project, meant to optimize the users' sleep and shorten the time needed for it, isn't exciting enough to have a chance at winning, she is forced to change the direction of her project with only three months before the presentation deadline.

Meanwhile, Monika (Sandra Drzymalska), another student at the university who has never attended a class in her whole enrollment, is found out by her father, who kicks her out of her luxury apartment and has her move in to the same student dorm as Natalia. After a series of events during Monika's first night at the dorm leads her to Natalia's room, she inspires Natalia to change her project from aiding sleep into one that has to do with sex and female pleasure. The two of them revamp the project together and are joined by Paulina (Maria Sobocinska), Natalia's best friend who is bored to tears by the lackluster sex life she shares with her longtime boyfriend Mariusz and hopes that the project will help her with that.

The first season was released on Netflix in 2021. A second season premiered in January of 2023.

Tropes

• Actually a Good Idea: When Rafał prepares to present his nanogel project before the scholarship committee and Natalia tries to convince him to back down and let her enter her project (which was voted as the project to be submitted in the first place), she admits that however dumb she thinks the nanogel is, he has been able to sell the idea and there is clearly appeal to it for some, but in its current state, the project is woefully underdeveloped.
• And the Adventure Continues: The second season ends with Natalia booting up her programming environment and getting ready to start a new project, now that Sexify is officially dead.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: Discussed throughout Episode 3, where Natalia tries to find a sex toy that she can use to gather data from use by test subjects. It's pointed out that the notion of women being most attracted to large penises is mostly a myth perpetuated by porn and it's said by an employee at a sex shop that most female customers who buy sex toys don't usually buy overly large ones.
• Bittersweet Ending: By the end of the first season, the Sexify app has lost the start-up scholarship and Natalia, Paulina and Monika have all been expelled from the university without finishing their degrees. However, all three of them have grown as people and decide to continue the project with funds earned by Natalia when she sells her apartment.
• Bourgeois Bohemian: Monika's mother is a free-spirited, hippie type who holds classes and seminars about female sexual pleasure based on meditation and mindfulness, but is quite well-off.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Despite her complete lack of academic ambition, Monika is shown to be very mathematically gifted in one scene wherre she shows up a professor who calls her an inferior student to her father by solving a difficult equation on the blackboard.
• Caught with Your Pants Down: It's a Sex Comedy series, so it happens sometimes.
  • In one scene, it happens to Paulina when she tries out a vibrator bought for the Sexify project, and she is interrupted when Mariusz walks in on her.
  • In another scene, Natalia and Monika overhear another female student masturbating in the dorm shower, which she does because it's the only place where she has any privacy.
• Cool, but Stupid: Rafał's project, a nanogel conditioner that can change the user's hair color with commands via Bluetooth. The inanity of the project is a punchline almost every time it's brought up.
• Darker and Edgier: The series doesn't have the traditional feel of a Sex Comedy, instead being more emotionally-driven and far more serious in tone (indeed, expulsion is one topic discussed, despite its college setting, and treated extremely seriously).
• Dean Bitterman: The Dean of the university, especially when he finds out about Natalia's project and threatens to expel her, Paulina and Monika. At the start of the series, he also threatens to fire Dr. Krynicki if the project he submits doesn't win the scholarship.
• Distaff Counterpart: In Season Two, it turns out that Rafał and his former university roommate Grzegorz have created a cheaper, less genuinely helpful ripoff of Sexify created for men called "Sexiguy". Rather than offer actual help and exercises for intimacy like Sexify did, Sexiguy mostly spits out misogynistic, ego-boosting cliches.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: The major reason for why Natalia makes her app about sex is to boost its appeal for the scholarship. And since the series is a Sex Comedy, most episodes feature someone having sex.
• Extreme Doormat: Paulina tends to bend over backwards to live up to her family's expectations, even keeping a dorm room at the university while actively sharing an apartment with Mariusz to keep her conservative family from finding out that their relationship is physical out of wedlock.
• Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: In Season Two, we see that Dr. Krynicki had to take a job teaching computing to middle schoolers after being fired following the events of Season One.
• Fanservice: Lots of it, mainly involving young women.
• First Love: Adam, a friendly, open-minded sex shop worker, becomes the (apparently) first person Natalia has ever felt any attraction towards.
• French Maid Outfit: Paulina buys one of these in an effort to spice up her sex life with Mariusz. It just leads to another brief bout of the same boring missionary sex that she was trying to move away from.
• Freudian Trio:
  • Id: Monika
  • Ego: Paulina
  • Superego: Natalia
• Gag Penis:
  • When Natalia tries to make an optimal sex toy with a 3D printer, the changes made to its specifications during the printing results in the final result having a weird, mushroom-like shape that would be harmful to use as a sex toy.
  • While at a sex convention, Natalia tries a VR game where her player avatar encounters a man with several penises growing out of his body and with a head looking like the head of a penis; she finds the figure so horrifying that she suffers a panic attack.
• The Immodest Orgasm: Whenever women climax in the series, their orgasms usually take this form.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: Paulina's longtime boyfriend Mariusz is a Nice Guy, but a boring and lackluster lover. Their sex mostly involves her staring at the ceiling while Mariusz awkwardly humps her for a couple of minutes before collapsing on top of her and rolling off. And he doesn't seem to mind that he never makes her orgasm. Most of her arc in season 1 involves her trying to unsuccessfully spice up their sex until she ultimately breaks up with him in the Season Finale.
  • This gets deconstructed in the Second Season, which looks more at the male side of sexuality than the first did. The girls work on expanding the Sexify app with similar advice for men, but when they gather data on it, they learn how bad men are at talking openly about it, exaggerating or lying about their sexual prowess out of fear of being seen as inadequate. It doesn't help that they turn to quick and easy advice and encouragement from bad sources like the original Sexiguy app, that doesn't actually help with the more emotional and communicative aspects of sex. Tellingly, Rafał ends up losing his virginity to a woman he likes after listening to the app's advice, Adam and Natalia finally manage to consummate their relationship when neither of them feel any pressure and can take time for themselves, and Paulina has a brief but more saisfying sexual encounter with Mariusz in the church after talking more frankly about the problems they were having when they were together.
• Ms. Fanservice: Of the main cast, Monika is the one most often shown in states of undress and the one with the most revealing sex scenes.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Rafał, having mostly been an annoyance up until then, becomes the one who exposes Natalia's project to the school administration.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The only reason why the Dean doesn't expel Natalia, Paulina and Monika over the Copulatory is that if he does, he needs to explain why and he doesn't want the public to learn that there was what he considers a brothel in the university dorm.
• Putting the Band Back Together: In Season Two, when Natalia needs help developing Sexify, she and the others bring in supporting characters from the first to program it, including Dr. Krynicki and Jabba.
• Raging Stiffie: In Season Two, when Adam is worried about failing to get an erection when trying to have sex with Natalia again, he takes a potency pill when he hears that Natalia is on the bus home. Unfortunately, she takes a detour and comes home later and Adam spends the whole evening with a very visible hard-on.
• Really Gets Around: Monika initially hooks up with guys a lot, but after joining Natalia's project and realizing that she's not really getting any gratification from it (she even admits earlier that she usually fakes her enjoyment), she takes a break from it to figure herself out more.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Natalia's professor, Dr. Krynicki. Throughout the series, he is supportive of her project and never discourages the idea of a sex-related app, and the issues he does raise about it, such as its exact function and how it can be tested, are fair points.
  • His discouragement of her sleep project is only because he doesn't think it will be appealing to a society in which the internet is so ingratiated and he stresses that she is the best coder in the class.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Monika has a contentious relationship with her ex-boyfriend; even though she's still mad at him for cheating on her when they were dating, she can only achieve orgasm when she thinks of him or looks at a picture of him. One time when she confronts him at his office, their heated conversation ends with them having sex on the spot.
• The Smurfette Principle: The scholarship committee only has one female member.
• The Stoner: Rafał's roommate, who makes penis-shaped weed gummies.
• Straight Gay: Natalia's balding, schlubby boss, Jabba, is revealed to be gay.
• Technologically Blind Elders: One of the first shown customers at the computer repair shop where Natalia works is an old woman whose computer has stopped working, which turns out to have been because she taped a piece of paper over the fan intake to keep dust from entering it, predictably causing the computer to overheat.
• Title Drop: In the last episode, the series title is used as the name of Natalia's app.
• Token Religious Teammate: Paulina comes from a Catholic family and is very religious herself.
• Wacky Startup Workplace: The Sexify office is this at the start of Season Two, with a barista, a juice bar, a yoga class in the office landscape and a slide going down from one of the upper floor offices. It gets deconstructed pretty quickly, though, because all those extra costs and other questionable spending choices have placed the company in serious debt, forcing Monika, Natalia and Paulina to seek outside investment. When Maks is brought in by Malgorzata, some of his first cost-cutting moves are to fire those superfluous people.

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