Focusing the lens on life before death
Despite being about AIDS crisis, new series ‘It’s a Sin’ full of joy, fun
Russell T Davies is glad he waited decades to debut a TV show about the AIDS crisis, even though it’s a subject he says he’s been “soaked” in for most of his life.
“I was 18 in 1981, just like this bunch of characters,” the Welsh TV writer and producer says, referring to the young gay men at the heart of “It’s a Sin,” which debuted on Amazon Prime Video on Friday. And in the 1980s and ’90s, “young men around me, and older men as well, would fairly regularly die, and some would disappear and never be seen, and some deaths were called cancer and some deaths were called what they were, which was AIDS.”
Yet, when “Queer as Folk,” his groundbreaking British series about gay men living and loving in Manchester, came out in 1999 — the year the World Health Organization announced AIDS was the fourth largest cause of death worldwide — the word AIDS was never mentioned in it (unlike its Toronto-shot, CanadianAmerican spinoff, which had several HIV-positive characters).
That was very much by design: “It’s not about HIV and AIDS because I actually vigorously and powerfully did not want to be defined by a virus,” Davies says during a Zoom interview.
Yet, AIDS was a “constant presence” and one that kept “rising up” through his work, whether it was the HIV-positive teenager he wrote into the British drama “Children’s Ward” in 1994 or the middleaged man he created for the 2015 series “Cucumber,” still grappling with the shame many gay men felt as AIDS ravaged their community.
“I’m kind of glad I waited because it’s given me a long time to think about it,” says Davies, who’s 57. “Maybe it took this long to write about it so that I could own it, so that actually it wasn’t in charge of me: I could be in charge of it. And that meant including all the joy, all the fun, which actually makes the heartbreaking bits sadder.”
There is indeed much joy and fun in “It’s a Sin.” Its main characters — young gay men Ritchie, Colin, Ash and Roscoe, and their straight female friend Jill — live together in a London flat they dub the Pink Palace, and take full advantage of the partying and clubbing and sex that goes along with it, ignoring at first the whispers of a “gay plague” that’s killing men in faraway New York and San Francisco.
But then, just as Davies experienced, men they know get sick and disappear and die, with the virus eventually cutting a swath through the close-knit group.
“It’s a Sin” covers 10 years in the lives of its characters and in the evolution of the virus. The first diagnoses are greeted with fear and ignorance — a young man locked in a hospital room, not allowed out even to use the bathroom (which really happened in Britain in 1985); a family burning every possession of a son who died of AIDS, even his photographs. It also shows the indiscriminate nature of the virus: a man dies after having sex with a single partner; a more promiscuous friend is left unscathed. Another continues to have unprotected sex although he knows he’s HIV-positive.
The key character, Ritchie, is played by English singer and actor Olly Alexander. He’s joined by newcomer Callum Scott Howells, who was still in drama school when he was cast as Colin. (Colin is Welsh, but he’s not meant to represent Davies. “I wish I could say I was that modest and nice,” says the writer, who likes to put Welsh characters into his shows since they’re “comparatively invisible” on British TV.) Omari Douglas and Nathaniel Curtis play Roscoe and Ash. And it’s worth noting that all the gay roles in the drama are played by gay actors. Despite the fact “It’s a Sin” is predominantly about its male characters, Davies has two women to thank for the show’s development.
The first is Jill Nalder, a friend of Davies’ since they were teens who — like the character Jill, played by Lydia West, whose mother Nalder portrays — moved to London to become an actor and lived in a flat called the Pink Palace surrounded by gay friends, supporting those men when they became ill and becoming an activist.
Davies says he was working at Granada Television in 1995 when he mentioned Jill and her AIDS advocacy to the people there. One executive, Catriona McKenzie — the same woman who had urged him to write “Queer as Folk” — told him it sounded like a good idea for a drama.
“So that’s when the first germ of it came along and then I had to write ‘Queer as Folk,’ obviously. And then ‘Doctor Who’ interrupted my life for about 10 years,” says Davies, who revived the “Doctor Who” franchise in 2005. (In “It’s a Sin,” aspiring actor Ritchie is cast in a “Doctor Who” episode as a tribute to real-life actor Dursley McLinden, who appeared in “Doctor Who” in 1988 and died of AIDS in 1995.)
What finally flipped the switch for “It’s a Sin” was the character of Henry in “Cucumber,” who was “looking back at the ’80s and realizing the damage that had been caused … I said, ‘Right, now I’m going to write about AIDS.’ ”
Davies — who’s a patron of the HIV-AIDS charity George House Trust in Manchester — says he’s aware that some people, gay men in particular, might question why he’s dragging a painful part of the past back into the light.
“I can understand if you roll your eyes and think, ‘Oh, this is about HIV again? Do we have to be defined by this?’ I felt that, so I can’t blame anyone for feeling that. I would say come along and have a look … this is not a morbid drama. I’ve put more energy into it, more life into it, a wider range of experience, and tried to remember the joy of those lives rather than just the way that they ended.”
“I’ve put more energy into it, more life into it, a wider range of experience, and tried to remember the joy of those lives rather than just the way that they ended.” RUSSELL T DAVIES WRITER/PRODUCER