'It's a Sin' Is One of TIME's 50 Most Underappreciated TV Shows
Time · LC · trust 10/100
No TV program since Angels in America captured the scope and pain of the early AIDS crisis like this five-part drama from Queer as Folk creator and Doctor Who reviver Russell T Davies. But when it comes to style, tone, and personnel, the miniseries are about as different as two stories about the same plague can be. While Mike Nichols ’ 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning play was epic in every sense, from its spiritual grandeur to a cast led by Al Pacino and Meryl Streep, It’s a Sin —which made a splash on Channel 4 in the U.K. but barely seemed to ripple on HBO Max in the U.S.—thrived on intimacy. Spanning the decade between 1981 and 1991, it follows a group of initially college-aged queer men and their friends as they leave mostly intolerant homes and converge on London. The experience is exhilarating at first: clubs, parties, hookups, liberation, community. Then come the reports of a “gay cancer” afflicting otherwise healthy young men in New York and San Francisco. Inevitably, the epidemic crosses the ocean, taking the lives of some characters and turning others into dogged activists. It’s the vividness and verisimilitude with which these fictional people are drawn that make the show unforgettable. (Olly Alexander and Lydia West are especially great as, respectively, a theatrical loudmouth and his earnest best friend.) Before we get to know them as tragic figures, they are witty and artistic and innocent and curious. Those qualities don’t disappear once disaster strikes. They must, however, coexist with the rightful anger that creeps into later episodes, as individual and systemic homophobia exacerbates an already catastrophic situation. This turn made It’s a Sin a welcome corrective to the many AIDS narratives that have been quick to forgive the bigotry of the past—and to forget that silence really did equal death.
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