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The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s is a topic that has been covered in many excellent pieces of art in the U.S., from Angels in America and When We Rise to must-watch documentaries like How to Survive a Plague. The U.K., however, has never had a TV series about the crisis, which took (and continues to take) thousands of lives.
That is, until It's a Sin, available now on HBO Max after first airing on Britain's Channel 4. The man behind the series is exactly who you would want to have written it—Russel T. Davies, the mind who created the groundbreaking Queer as Folk over two decades ago.
Amazingly, the original Queer as Folk did not mention HIV/AIDS at all, with Davies recently telling The Observer, "In 1999, I refused to let our lives be defined by disease. So I excluded it on purpose. The omission of AIDS was a statement in itself."
In 2021, in a world where PrEP is available and where 'undetectable = untransmittable' it's more than time to look at the ravages that HIV/AIDS caused to the LGBTQ+ community in Britain.
As has been the mode in Davies' previous gay men-focused shows like Queer as Folk and Cucumber, the action focuses on a group of young gay men, this time led by the frontman of the band Years and Years, Olly Alexander. The action roughly covers a decade, with HIV going from something you heard rumors about in whispers to something that was killing your friends every day.
Much, of course, has been made about how this show is coming out in another health crisis caused by a virus, but as the show suggests, it is a mistake to make direct comparisons between then and now.
Imagine that we lived today in a world where governments did almost nothing to help those with COVID-19 for years, and members of those governments were going on TV saying that those with COVID-19 were receiving punishment from God for their deviant sexual practices. A world where even mentioning one of the groups most likely to catch coronavirus in a school was enough to get you fired from your job.
This is the world that Ritchie (played by Alexander), Ash (Nathaniel Curtis), Roscoe (Omari Douglas) and Colin (Callum Scott Howells) live in in It's a Sin, where government inaction cost lives, and when the famous AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance public information campaign comes years too late to save a lot of their friends and lovers.
It's a Sin, however, is not that interested in playing politics with the AIDS crisis. Waiting this long for a show about the British AIDS crisis has had the effect that some of the anger has faded and many of the questions about how it all happened have already been answered.
This lack of one particular point of view allows some of the characters to be more interesting and complex than they otherwise may have been. Ritchie, for example, is a struggling actor in the 1980s who lives in an almost entirely gay world. And yet he voted Conservative under Margaret Thatcher even as they laid down the foundations of Section 28, a law that would make the so-called 'promotion of homosexuality' in schools illegal.
He also is the last of his friends to take HIV seriously, talking them all through why the whole thing is a hoax in a hyper-kinetic sequence at the show's heart. Were Ritchie real and living today, he definitely would have made an appearance on Gays Over Covid, the controversial Instagram account dedicated to pictures of gay men flouting coronavirus rules.
This means that the show can focus on its characters and how they lived through a decade that was both terrifying and liberating. The show is at its best when it is showing us the every day beats of gay male friendship, full of ever-evolving private jokes and moments of camping around that men would have to tamp down in their everyday lives. It is not every writer who could make the single syllable "La" a catchphrase that is destined to be used among LGBTQ+ friends for years to come.
Notably, all of the shows many LGBTQ+ roles are played by people of that community, almost certainly a first on TV. The debate about who should be able to play gay roles rages on, but It's a Sin does show that an all-queer cast does bring a dash of realism to a show that gives a sense of life to even the most thinly-drawn characters.
And It's a Sin does have some thinly-drawn characters. Davies has said the show was pitched as eight parts but has been released as five, a big mistake from whoever commissioned it. This does make the whole show seem rushed, and means that even some main characters get very little to do. Ash, for example, gets really only one big scene, where he is forced as a gay man to remove all the books that could break Section 28 from the library of the school he is working at. The rest of the show he spends pining over Ritchie, even as he is sometimes the worst.
Even a character like Jill, the group of gay men's other housemate at their home the 'Pink Palace' suffers from this problem. Though in dedicating herself almost totally to her friends during this crisis she joins a pantheon of characters both fictional (Emma Thompson in Angels in America, Sarah Bernhardt in Pose) and real (Princess Diana, whose advocacy for those with AIDS is credited with bringing the public's attention to the issue.)
However, when Ritchie's flinty mother (Keeley Hawes) asks her in a late scene why she does not seem to have a life outside of this, it does rather seem to be Davies bringing attention to the gap in his script. However, Lydia West's incredibly winning performance papers over those holes, making her perhaps the most engaging of the show's characters.
While the show as a whole has a subtlety to it that completely brings to life Britain in the '80s and the attitudes of the day, the same cannot be said for the soundtrack choices. Davies was 17 to 27 years of age in the 1980s, a time when a person is perhaps the most engaged in the music around them.
There is no excuse, then, for the soundtrack that is somewhere between a cheap "Best of the 80s" compilation and someone Googling "big 80s hits." A character goes to America on a work trip? Cue "Kids in America!" Someone is visiting a big gay party for the first time? Cue "Tainted Love!"
These reservations aside, It's a Sin will forever be a landmark in British LGBTQ+ television—though the fact that Davies was forced to tell the story of an entire generation over a decade in five episodes (half the number he was given for Queer as Folk, the events of which take place over a few weeks) suggests that we still have a long way to go.
It's a Sin is streaming now on HBO Max.
