Netflix's "Heartstopper" Will Make You Believe in Love Again
I laughed! I cried! I cheered! I felt emotions I haven't felt in years!
Yearning is, without a doubt, one of the most common emotions of the queer experience, which is why so much LGBTQ content revolves around it. Yearning over someone you can’t be with, for any number of reasons (society, family, the closet, they’re straight), is something that almost every queer person has to deal with at some point (or points) in their life. It doesn’t help that for as long as most of us have been alive, we’ve been bombarded by countless heterosexual romances where the guy gets the girl and they ride off into the sunset together to go live happily ever after. Queer people don’t usually get that ending in film and TV, and the stories that are told about us are usually downers. Obviously, there are exceptions (King of The CW Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon and its Hulu spinoff Love, Victor, Park Chan-wook’s slickly entertaining thriller The Handmaiden, Jamie Babbit’s cult classic comedy But I’m a Cheerleader, Daniels’ incredible Everything Everywhere All at Once from this year), but even these tend to have a tinge of sadness and darkness not present in many straight romances. Enter Netflix’s new YA queer romance series, Heartstopper.
Based on Alice Oseman’s graphic novel of the same name (and also adapted for TV by her), Heartstopper follows a gay 14-year-old named Charlie (Joe Locke) as he navigates high school along with his mates, Tao (William Gao), Isaac (Tobie Donovan), and Elle (Yasmin Finney), who has come out as trans and has transferred to an all-girls school. Charlie was recently outed against his will and is now one of the only openly queer people at his school. He’s in a toxic relationship with Ben (Sebastian Croft), a closeted popular boy who will only meet Charlie in secret and refuses to call him his boyfriend. However, when Charlie gets assigned a new deskmate, rugby player Nick (His Dark Materials’ Kit Connor), the two become friends, and Charlie develops an all-consuming crush on the ostensibly straight boy.
As any gay person can tell you, having a crush on a heterosexual is one of the worst feelings. In my time in high school and college, I definitely developed a few crushes on some straight boys that I shouldn’t have, and it sucks because you know that your feelings for them can never be reciprocated. There are numerous scenes of Charlie’s friends trying to dissuade him from pursuing Nick, especially Tao, who is constantly picked on by Nick’s rugby friends and doesn’t trust or like him. There’s also an excruciating scene where Charlie is messaging Nick and tells him “I’m glad to have a supportive straight friend like you” as a way to suss out if Nick is gay or not, which I couldn’t stop cringing at because I have had very similar conversations with guys in the past to try to figure out if they were into boys or not. It doesn’t help matters that Nick is being pursued by Imogen (Rhea Norwood), a childhood friend of his who has an impossible crush on him. In a scene that’s funny, sweet, and sad, she asks Nick out, and he wants to say no but he knows that her dog has just died, so he agrees to a date with her out of pity.
The show also follows Elle at her new school as she tries to make friends and fit in, eventually befriending lesbians Tara (Corinna Brown) and Darcy (Kizzy Edgell). She’s also dealing with a possibly unrequited crush of her own, as she realizes she has feelings for Tao, but she’s too scared to say anything because she doesn’t want to risk ruining their friendship.
Okay, I can’t say any more about how I loved this show without getting into spoiler territory, so if you haven’t finished the season yet (it’s only 8 half-hour episodes, a quick watch), be warned.
Naturally, it doesn’t take long for us to find out that Nick isn’t as straight as he seems (obviously, since rugby is famously the gayest sport), and he might also be developing a crush on Charlie back, but he’s still figuring out his sexuality, which has given us this iconic gif:
There are numerous agonizing scenes where the two are hanging out as friends, and both boys seem to want to say something, but neither of them do. Eventually, the two kiss at a birthday party, and their relationship begins to develop. However, since Nick isn’t out to anyone, the two have to carry on in secret, all while Charlie’s friends keep telling him to give up on Nick because they think he’s straight. There are sweet moments, such as at Charlie’s 15th birthday party when Nick gives him a framed photograph of them as a present, or when Charlie and Nick organize a triple date with Tara and Darcy in order to try to set up Tao and Elle, during which Charlie comes out to Tara and Darcy. There are also moments of struggle too, like when Nick invites Charlie out with his rugby friends and one of them calls Charlie a fag, or when Tao becomes angry at Charlie when he realizes that he was the last to find out that he and Nick are in a relationship. Eventually, Tao forgives Charlie, Nick comes out to his mom (Olivia Colman!!!) as bi (which he realizes when he watches Pirates of the Caribbean and realizes he used to love the movie so much because he had a crush on both Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, a feeling many of us can probably relate to), Nick takes his relationship with Charlie public, and the two go on an adorable beach date where they officially become boyfriends. The only loose end is when Elle almost tells Tao how she feels before chickening out, which I’m sure will be explored more in a second season. (I know there are a number of sequels to the graphic novel, but I haven’t read them yet so I’m not sure where the story is planning to go.)
I will admit, when I first started the series, I was a little worried by the twee aesthetic and wondered if it would be too tenderqueer for me, but the show quickly won me over, and by the halfway point I was trying hard to resist the urge to just binge it all in one sitting. A big thing I appreciated was that Nick and Charlie actually look like real teenagers (and not, say, Riverdale or Elite teenagers). A majority of gay media—and gay culture in general—is fixated on guys who are either gorgeous twinks or muscle daddies, two pretty unattainable body types for many of us, so it was really refreshing to see a queer show where the leads just look like normal people. Also, the show really nails the way that young people communicate with texting and social media. When many TV shows include social media, it often feels forced or wonky and you can tell that it was probably written by an adult. In Heartstopper, however, the social media is integrated seamlessly into the story, and it feels like real teens interacting with each other. (Also, we see Charlie keysmash when he’s texting his friends, which is maybe the most relatable thing in the entire show.) Thirdly, the soundtrack absolutely slaps, which is filled with pop and pop-adjacent bangers from Wolf Alice, girl in red, CHVRCHES, Rina Sawayama, Chairlift, Maggie Rogers, Noah and the Whale, and plenty of others.
At times, the series does deploy some cliched romcom tropes, such as the romantic kiss in the rain or the hand touch in a movie theater, but I would argue that’s a strength of the show, not a weakness. That this all happens between two boys instead of a boy and a girl makes it feel fresh, exciting, and, in its own way, quietly revolutionary. The butterflies I got in my stomach watching Charlie and Nick prepare to kiss for the first time must be how straight people feel watching literally any romcom ever. (After watching Love, Simon for the first time in 2018, I think I told all my friends that I finally understand why people like romantic movies.)
As charming as the series is, I’ve seen a large number of queer people on Twitter and TikTok say that watching it made them depressed, because they never got to have this kind of grand romance in high school, and that’s a feeling I can definitely sympathize with. There were definitely moments while I was watching the show that made me feel both happy about what I was seeing and sad that I didn’t get to have that myself. Most queer people didn’t get to have a childhood where we were our true selves, due to being in the closet or any number of other things, which is why a lot of us feel the need to make up for lost time in our 20s or whenever we’re able to come out. Many of us didn’t get to experiment with dating the way our straight peers were able to. But times are changing, and it’s exciting to me to see shows like this, or even to see teens in real life who are out and able to bring their partners to school dances, something that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago when I was in high school and there were maybe two or three out gay kids in my school of 1500 students.
So yeah, I fully get the instinct when presented with a piece of media like this to wallow in self-pity because you didn’t get to have this kind of experience growing up, but I do truly think that that grief for a childhood you never got to have can and should coexist with the delight that this show even exists in the first place, and it’s beyond exciting that teens can now grow up with this kind of representation, instead of the only gay characters on TV being Kurt and Blaine from Glee. Things in the world still aren’t great right now, what with the rise in anti-LGBTQ sentiments both here in America and in the UK (along with many other parts of the world). And that’s not to say that “important” queer stories, like Brokeback Mountain or Moonlight or even last year’s heartbreaking but beautiful HBO Max limited series It’s a Sin, don’t have a place in the queer canon. But I genuinely believe that a cute, fluffy gay romcom can be just as important as a serious, heartbreaking drama.
The part that really got me was in the finale. In a flashback, Charlie is having one of his secret make-out sessions with Ben, and he asks if they’re officially dating. Scornfully, Ben says no, and this interaction has clearly scarred Charlie to this day, making him feel unworthy of being loved, which is definitely some Relatable Content™ (if I had a nickel for every time a guy rejected me like that, I could have bought Twitter instead of El*n). On the beach with Nick, on their first real date in public, Charlie, a little nervous, asks if they’re officially boyfriends. Nick responds that of course they are, and then he picks Charlie up, carries him into the ocean, and shouts to the world that they’re boyfriends. It’s a scene straight from a romcom, and the unreserved joy in the moment brought more than a couple tears to my eyes.
Right before they go into the ocean, Charlie says, “I never thought this would happen to me,” and that’s why this show is so important. Queer teenagers, but also queer people of all ages, need to know that they’re worthy of love, that they’re worthy of having a grand sweeping romance, despite what the world tells us. We all deserve our Nick carrying us into the ocean moment.
