The Hierarchy of Tragedy
In this British series about the AIDS crisis, doom confers importance.
black characters and others of color should have the right to die tragically in sweet, poignant stories about nightmarish moments in history. That’s a slightly off-center place to begin a review of Russell T. Davies’s often beautifully moving limited series It’s a Sin, about the aids epidemic in London. But one of the foundational ideas of the show, which follows several young people through the 1980s and early ’90s as they experience the horrific toll of HIV and aids on the gay community, is that marginalization is key to what made the aids epidemic so devastating.
The series’s five episodes, which aired in the U.K. before hitting HBO Max in February, build toward a big closing thesis-statement-type monologue from Jill (Lydia West), the best friend of the show’s protagonist, Ritchie (Olly Alexander). “It’s your fault,” Jill tells Ritchie’s mother, Valerie (Keeley Hawes). Valerie made her son feel shame for who he was, Jill tells her, and that shame, the sense that gay life was embarrassing and less than fully human, is what fueled the spread of the disease. “The wards are full of men who think they deserve it. They are dying,” Jill tells Valerie, “and a little bit of them thinks, Yes, this is right. I brought this on myself; it’s my fault.” The mainstream refusal to see queer lives as valuable and joyful was crucial to aids’s terrible impact.
For many of the main characters, It’s a Sin is a wrenching, beautiful exploration of that idea, and the series begins with a kaleidoscopic ensemble approach to its story. There’s closeted
Ritchie, who moves to London from his small town on an island off the coast of England; there’s bashful Colin (Callum Scott Howells), who gets his first job in a fancy menswear store; and there’s Roscoe
(Omari Douglas), who leaves home after his family tries to convert him with prayer and commu
nity shaming. They all eventually become friends with Jill, and especially in the first episode, there’s a sense that these stories will become three interwoven threads of relatively equal weight. Ritchie and Colin are white; Roscoe and Jill are Black.
To fully explain the show’s preferences, which characters it makes into heroic martyrs and which characters must only look on sadly, I’d have to spoil it, lay out exactly who dies and when and how. I’m not going to do that. Despite my frustrations with the series, It’s a Sin is very much worth watching. Douglas, Howells, Alexander, and West are all fantastic. So many parts are fun and funny and charming, and particularly for American audiences, a focus on the aids crisis in London may bring a new facet to a story that’s often centered on New York and San Francisco. But it’s a show about young gay people and the aids epidemic; some of them are going to die. And It’s a Sin has a pretty noticeable pattern when it comes to who dies and who doesn’t, a pattern as old as the seminal aids work Angels in America and one that It’s a Sin has not managed to escape many decades later.
It’s a knotty issue, given the long and thorough history of Black characters who get chucked to the edges of fiction as easy death fodder. It’s not hard to see the problem of a science-fiction show or a horror movie in which characters of color are eaten by the aliens in sad but ultimately meaningless ways while all the white protagonists survive. For the most part, though, the genre of It’s a Sin is tragedy, and in tragedies, the characters who die are the ones whose lives are most valued, whose sacrifices are considered most meaningful and most sad. It’s a Sin does a disservice to its Black characters and others of color (including Ash, an Indian man played by Nathaniel Curtis) in two directions. On one side, shielding the characters of color from the worst ramifications of aids comes off like treating them with kid gloves, handling their stories as if they can’t shoulder the brunt of the tragic weight. On the other side, the inevitable arc of a narrative like It’s a Sin’s gives more attention to the characters who die. It has to in order to fully emphasize how sad and cruel everything is. The characters who survive become corollary players, necessary background voices of mourning for those who have been lost. It’s not hard to see the show’s decision to shift most of its harshest outcomes onto white characters as an attempt to be kind toward the characters of color. But it’s a choice that mistakes wellintentioned sidelining for grace.
I’m picking at this one frustrating element of It’s a Sin because it suggests that something is not fully realized in the series’s thesis about shame, marginalization, and humanity. But it’s also worth highlighting the things in It’s a Sin that succeed. The show is painfully great at depicting the terror and willful blindness of gay British life in the early ’80s. Ritchie and his friends start to hear rumors but want so badly to ignore them, and the physical symptoms of
aids-related illness start to loom over their lives like swords of Damocles. The idea that
aids is a New York crisis becomes both a shield and a huge problem in London. It seems like a sickness that’s too far away to worry about. The distance also means that when Jill does want to learn more, she has neither resources nor any way to access new research. It’s a Sin is a heartrending picture of the way gay men started to simply disappear,
whisked away into locked hospital wards or taken home by their families to die totally cut off from their friends and many of their loved ones.
The show’s best quality, and the thing that saves it from being an unrelenting dirge, is that it refuses to slide into regret or underplay its characters’ joy. Early parts of the series, as Ritchie, Roscoe, and Colin all move to London, are incredibly fun. There’s a deliberate decision to make the beginning of this story about how glorious and freeing it is for these characters to have a community, to love sex, to feel loved and seen for the first time. Yes, there’s a cloud over it all. aids is coming. The viewers know it, but the characters do not, and it’s hard to watch a happy sex montage and not wonder if It’s a Sin is showing us the moment one of these characters gets infected. But it’s easy to imagine a version of this show that cuts this early part short, a version in which one sex scene is all we get or the background music is something more doom-filled than a disco remix of the “Hallelujah” chorus and the “William Tell” Overture. It’s a Sin doesn’t want to skip over how joyful these characters’ lives are. Even later, when things start to get really bad, the series insists on returning to that idea. aids is not a moral judgment, and its horror doesn’t make their joy something evil.
Happily, although It’s a Sin hoards its tragedy for certain kinds of characters, it’s more generous with its delights. Characters like Roscoe and Jill are so frustrating—the series doesn’t care enough about exploring their inner lives or letting them share the spotlight. But it does let them share in the joyful parts. It’s not enough, but it’s not nothing. ■