New British miniseries It's a Sin is vivid, heady — and often-times, a hard watch.
Despite that, it has become the "most binged new series ever" for UK television network Channel 4 (home of Black Mirror and Black Books).
LoadingIt's a Sin (available on Stan here) was created by Welsh screenwriter Russell T Davies, a legend of British TV who broke new ground with Manchester-set series Queer as Folk (2000-2005), rebooted Doctor Who in 2005, and was behind the critically-acclaimed Hugh Grant-led BBC comedy A Very English Scandal (2018).
With an impressive CV already, Davies told The Screen Show: "The response [to It's a Sin] has been absolutely phenomenal. I have never seen anything like it."
In the Evening Standard, he wrote: "A silence has been breached ... The lost and forgotten have called across 40 years, wanting to be remembered and celebrated and loved."
What's It's a Sin about?
Simply put, it's an HIV/AIDS drama — following in the footsteps of works like Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Rent, and locally, Timothy Conigrave's Holding the Man.
The five-part series begins in 1981 when a group of gay friends — including Ritchie (played by pop star Olly Alexander), Roscoe (Omari Douglas), and Colin (Callum Scott Howells) — and their straight friend Jill (Lydia West) move into a London flat together.
The boys, escaping from rejection and discrimination in their family homes (while still facing it in workplaces), are experiencing newfound liberation and sexual awakening.
But their freedom is threatened by a mysterious "gay cancer", which by the end of the first episode has killed Colin's mentor (Neil Patrick Harris).
The rest of the series traces how the HIV/AIDs epidemic wreaks havoc on the lives and hopes of these young friends.
What's the back-story to the show?
"It's something I've carried with me my whole life, looked at my friends die from this," Davies said on The Screen Show.
"I did think for decades really about how to do this as a drama, and the key ... [was to show] that slow encroachment on the corners of the picture."
HIV creeps like a spectre into his characters' lives — at first in terrifying news clippings, leaflets and rumours.
"In many ways, a drama like It's a Sin had to be written with hindsight to show the impact of the start of things in 1981," Davies told The Screen Show.
"Part of the shame and fear and ignorance of the whole situation was the fact that people didn't know it was happening, or turned their eyes away from it or ignored it, and to some extent legislated against it."
Davies wrote in The Guardian about his long, painful journey to writing a show with AIDS at its centre, including how he chose to make Jill — who he based on his childhood friend Jill Nalder — a key part of the series.
Of all the characters, it is Jill who never turns away, who wades through the misinformation and the fear to try to help her friends.
Despite Davies' credentials and considered approach to the work, he says he struggled to find a network willing to make the series.
This sounds incredibly sad, how much heartbreak am I in for?
A lot.
But Davies is careful about the kinds of punches he wants to pull, choosing to portray death off-screen.
"I've watched pieces like this before and sometimes you can fetishise death ... but I thought I'm going to filter out a lot of the anger from this and make it more of a story, not just a polemic," says Davies.
Jonny Seymour, one half of Stereogamous (who describe themselves as "The gayest band since The Village People"), told ABC Arts that the show left him "howling crying".
He recommends watching It's a Sin with a friend.
"People have to be warned that any story told in the 80s about gay life is going to have an unhappy ending ... although the truth of it is that we have survived and it's gone from a death sentence to a chronic manageable illness in Australia."
Nic Holas is an activist, writer, and co-founder of The Institute of Many, an organisation advocating for Australians living with HIV.
"Once I got to the end of the five episodes, I just had this huge cry for myself as a person living with HIV, for the thousands of people living with HIV whose stories I've heard over the years, and all of the beautiful elders in my community who are still with us today, and the thousands that I never got to meet, who didn't make it out of the 80s and 90s," says Holas.
LoadingWhat does the show 'get right' about HIV/AIDS?
Seymour was born in Tasmania, where homosexuality was not decriminalised until 1997; he describes finding a "refuge" when he moved to Sydney in 1990, at 20 years old.
"The parallels in the show are so clear; all of us had that experience of going out and seeing people — and then people vanishing ... And the stories of people going home, that's very relevant for Sydney as it was in London, because people got sick and a lot of them did go home, and you never saw them again," he says.
Seymour says the show manages to capture the galvanising, community-building aspect of the epidemic.
Tommy Murphy, an Australian playwright and screenwriter who adapted Timothy Conigrave's ground-breaking memoir Holding The Man for the stage and screen, praises the show's "honest, unapologetic depiction of sexuality and sex".
"That's crucial for an HIV/AIDS narrative because sex is at the heart of the matter. And the joy of sex is so important in a story like this," says Murphy.
Holas agrees: "It's really important that we hear and understand that the kind of sex that we enjoy isn't dirty, it isn't unsafe."
"Our sex is not the cause of that [HIV]. It's society's lack of humanity towards us that [enabled] it to just spread so quickly and a lot of internalised shame that prevents us, I think, from truly getting on top of it — which is why Jill's monologue at the end of the show about shame is just so remarkable and so extraordinary."
Stop Everything! co-host Benjamin Law says: "I don't think we can intimately ever understand how devastating it is to lose an entire generation of young men especially, but also women."
"This is a generation whose battle scars have not been honoured in any official way, and popular culture is an important way to do it."
What does it get no-so right?
Davies had originally planned eight episodes of It's a Sin, but it was whittled down by Channel 4.
That could account for some omissions from the story.
Seymour points out that it was mostly women who worked as nurses and orderlies caring for AIDS patients, and it wasn't just men who died from AIDS-related illnesses.
"I think there was some erasure of women in this story," says Seymour.
What do I watch now?
Law recommends Holding the Man (Stan), Angels in America (the 2003 HBO miniseries is available on Foxtel Go and Binge) and the 2018 book The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai.
Law, Seymour and Holas all recommend Ryan Murphy's HBO series Pose (Binge) which is about the New York drag ballroom scene in the 80s and 90s.
Holas says: "I think we're finally are seeing more stories about the AIDS crisis through the eyes of storytellers who aren't white gay men; Pose is a really fantastic example of that, with trans women of colour leading the performance and story."
In terms of non-fiction, 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague (DocPlay) and the 2016 book of the same name by journalist David France cover the work of AIDS activists, while 2018 documentary 5B is about the first AIDS ward in the United States (available on several platforms).
Holas is appreciative of these works, many of which he describes as part of an "AIDS-nostalgia era of the media".
But he is concerned that sometimes these stories can treat HIV/AIDS as history, when it's still an issue in the present, with high rates of HIV infection and AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa and for Black Americans.
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2021-02-13 19:01:00Z
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