The Sex Lives of College Girls fans knew going into Season 3 that co-star Renee Rapp was exiting the streaming comedy, with new characters helping fill the void. On the whole, the show's creative team made the titular Girls' latest R-rated experiences as amusingly cringe-worthy as expected, bolstered by a welcomed screentime uptick for Ilia Isorelýs Paulino's Lila. Regardless, the entire season was plagued by an issue that popped up in nearly every episode, and it needs to end if it’s renewed for Season 4.
My Big Issue: The Sex Lives of College Girls' abundant and wildly obviously use of ADR throughout the season constantly took me out of otherwise enjoyable scenes and made me question what issues led to all the last-minute substitutions. It may seem like a nerdy nitpick, but I'll be shocked if I see a similar number of examples throughout the rest of the entire 2025 TV schedule.
What Is ADR?
Before pointing fingers too strongly, let's talk about what ADR actually is. The abbreviation stands for "automated dialogue replacement," but it's also known as "additional dialogue replacement" or "additional dialogue recording." It's essentially what's required when the dialogue audio recorded during filming isn't usable for one reason or another.
In those cases, actors have to re-record their lines from a recording booth, with an impetus on making the audio match up with the visual footage as much as possible. The more complicated version involves the audio paired with the actor's face, but in other instances, the newly revised dialogue is matched with footage of other characters' reactions, which likely would have been snipped out in the editing process.
Too note, ADR recording also includes a lot of the grunting, breathing, sighing and other non-dialogue sounds and reactions that are added to more action-oriented scenes. Fun fact: it's Chris Hemsworth's least-favorite aspect of filming MCU movies.
I Don't Get Why Sex Lives Of College Girls Season 3 Had So Many ADR-ed Moments
The image above is but one example similar to many moments during The Sex Lives of College Girls Season 3 scenes where viewers watch the back of a lead actor's head while their character delivers a joke where the audio sounds completely different from everything else in the scene. It's especially obvious during loud party scenes, where characters sound like they're inside a car trunk as opposed to the middle of a drunken frat house soirée.
More often than not, at least to my memory, Amrit Kaur's Bela is the biggest culprit, but she was far from the only one. Which just makes me wonder what happened that made so many lines unusable.
To be sure, I completely understand how necessary ADR can be, especially in scenes where loud noises are happening elsewhere. Sometimes an actor's microphone can pick up distinct noises that don't match up with the audio mix, or the actors' voices could be muffled. Sometimes entire sequences need revised audio when scenes are too expensive to re-film.
But given just how many times it happens in Sex Lives of College Girls, I don't think it was a matter of botched audio. Where comedies are concerned, ADR can often be utilized to reflect revised plotlines or alternate jokes. So is it possible that different storylines were originally in place for Bela and/or other characters, with late-stage changes requiring reconfigured edits?
Even that doesn't sound completely right, since most of the examples I can think of were just jokey lines, such as the moment referenced in the pic above, with Bela getting horned up about a male character's abs, as opposed to anything wholly plot-related. But I also can't imagine that so many of the writers' Season 3 jokes were substandard that more than a dozen of them were improved upon with ADR. Maybe we can just blame the 2023 strikes.
Though it didn't necessarily detract from my overall love of the series, I don't think I'll be able to think about Sex Lives' third season without remembering all the small-scale audio awkwardness. Get back into dorm life while waiting for Season 4 updates by streaming every episode with a Max subscription
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