Review: 'It's a Sin'

“It’s a Sin” is a devastating, poignant and important portrayal of 1980s Britain’s gay community that celebrates the lives of those affected by the AIDS epidemic.

Source: Channel 4

Russell T. Davies, creator of “Queer as Folk” and “Years and Years”, brings a heartbreaking and trailblazing new journey to British television with “It’s a Sin”. Throughout five episodes, the series follows the lives of four friends in London as they explore queerness, sex, love, and friendship during the early years of the AIDS crisis. The Channel 4 production has broken streaming records on its network, massively increased the number of people getting tested for HIV, and opened up a conversation about the double standard held by viewers and the media regarding explicit scenes between people of the same sex. Everyone’s talking about it, and for good reason. The praise and popularity the series has received is well deserved – “It’s a Sin” is an undeniably important watch, joyful and devastating with every scene. 

The series opens with its protagonist Ritchie Tozer, an 18-year-old boy from the Isle of Wight who moves to the chaos and excitement of London for school. Here, he meets Jill Baxter and is introduced to a world of complete freedom and utter fun. Through the other two main characters – Roscoe, who runs away from his homophobic Nigerian family, and Colin, a boy from Wales whose inexperience and shyness leads to instances of abuse and harassment – the series explores what it was like to be young and gay in Britain in the 1980s. It is, of course, during this same time when the threat of AIDS, distant, misunderstood, and often ignored, changes their lives forever. And yet, amongst all the prejudice and tragedy, the series shines with humour, irreverence and humanity. We quickly fall in love with these characters as they fashion their identities around their community and found families, pursuing their dreams, and building a home in their shared flat known as the ‘Pink Palace’. Thus knowing and loving them so well, it is all the more shattering when one diagnosis follows another, with many of the characters facing the ‘death sentence’ that AIDS represented at the time. 

Stylised and dynamic, “It’s a Sin” is fun and stunning to watch even as you’re trying to hold in the tears. The acting is particularly remarkable, with all the main cast delivering heart-wrenching performances. It is also worth noting that Davis purposefully cast queer actors to play queer characters, which is evident in the sincerity and rawness of their portrayals. Unfortunately not all of the characters’ stories are fully developed, and as some viewers and critics have pointed out, the series largely focuses on young cisgender gay men even though AIDS disproportionately affected the transgender community and poorer, often homeless, members of the LGBTQ+ community (which Ryan Murphy’s “Pose” so wonderfully explores). However, the characters we do see are incredibly well written, with Jill (played by Lydia West) as the beating heart of the series, caring for her friends, providing unwavering support to those affected by the virus, and loving them fiercely until the end. Jill is loosely based on Davies’ own friend Jill Nalder, an actress and activist, and she feels like a uniting force for the series and its characters as well as a homage to all the caretakers and loved ones of those who died of AIDS. The acting and the writing are combined to create nuanced characters which we quickly become emotionally invested in. Even characters like Ritchie’s mum, Valerie (played by Keeley Hawes, who is extraordinary in the series’ final episode), whose morals and actions could have easily made her into a complete villain, are complex and riddled with conflicting emotions and ideas that make her undoubtedly human. 

“It’s a Sin” masterfully displays the misinformation, distrust, fear, and shame which surrounded the initial shock of AIDS and the crisis which followed. It is extremely emotional to witness the pain and injustices the LGBTQ+ community suffered at the time, realising both how grateful we all should be of how far we’ve come as well as how much work there is still to be done. Although everyone will enjoy this series, it particularly speaks to a generation of young viewers and to our so-called unprecedented times. Watching the confusion and terror that AIDS created appears eerily familiar in the context of Covid-19. It is especially poignant now to see the series’ characters experiencing the constant anxiety that they might have contracted HIV or that they might be unknowingly giving it to someone else, feeling isolated, shunned by their loved ones, fearing intimate touch, dealing with uncertainty at such a young age, and getting used to a reality of listening to an increase in death rates and attending funerals. And, of course, this was a much more aggressive, lethal, and under-addressed and under-researched virus.  

It is exactly its ability to understand and portray the structures of power, thought, and society which perpetuated the stigma around AIDS and demonised those suffering from it which makes “It’s a Sin” so convincing. Through its main characters as well as some smaller roles played by stars such as Neil Patrick Harris and Stephen Fry, the series exposes the different sectors of society which were at play at the time and allowed the epidemic to develop the way it did. “It’s a Sin” makes it very clear that it wasn’t only AIDS which killed, it was also the shame. The emotional reality of the epidemic proves to be as devastating as its physical impact for the characters in the series: the fear of losing their jobs, being outed not only as gay but also as HIV-positive, being rejected by their communities and their families, legally banned from living in certain places or even dying with dignity, all the while the source of their deaths remained hidden to those who knew them and the general public. Though I will never be able to understand what it was like to live through this, “It’s a Sin” was a powerful reminder of the destructive power of shame, a feeling that anyone who is part of the LGBTQ+ community knows very well. AIDS amplified those familiar voices of shame – the ones we all carry inside us and that tell us we don’t belong – from both the outside and the inside. The series poses this theme at its centre, asking us to wonder what might have happened if people hadn’t been shamed into believing that their status as queer and sexually active individuals made them deserving of their suffering. Maybe the real people “It’s a Sin” speaks about might still be here, because no matter how devastating the series is, it is only a glimpse of this unmeasurable tragedy.

Amongst the tears that will inevitably and freely flow from your eyes when you watch the series, there is an undeniable sense of celebration. “It’s a Sin” honours the short yet beautiful lives of those who died of AIDS and the vibrant community they belonged to. The stories of these men, while tragic, are filled with the love and fun they craved their entire lives and which they got to enjoy. The series highlights the vital importance of support networks such as family members as well as the friendships that often replaced them. It is a display of true allyship and humanity, of compassion and unity in the face of extreme fear and loss, reminding us of the importance of knowing the past in order to continue to strive for a better future. In all its glory and pain, “It’s a Sin” fights shame with the only thing that can kill it: pride.