Heartstopper might be the kissiest show on TV. In the second season of the adolescent romance series, premiering on Netflix on August 3, just about every other scene includes some sort of smooch: a snog of affection, a peck of worry, a face-sucking that punctuates a grand milestone. Things never go past making out, as things might for real teenagers in the real world. But in the context of creator Alice Oseman’s swooning fantasy (adapted from Oseman’s own graphic novel), kissing is the defining act of life.
Heartstopper is, if nothing else, unrelentingly cute. That’s largely why the first season was such a runaway phenomenon. Sure, there had been Love, Simon (a movie) and Love, Victor (a TV show) before it, but Heartstopper was otherwise something of a pioneer in the filmed queer-YA genre, telling the sweet story of two boys—out gay Charlie (Joe Locke) and closeted bi Nick (Kit Connor)—falling head over lips for one another in lengthy detail. Though dark things sometimes interrupt the picture, Heartstopper is mostly a generous vision of what it might be to tumble into a kind of taboo love with safe abandon.
The second season picks up a month or so after the events of season one, with Charlie and Nick in the happy throes of the honeymoon phase but still keeping it all a secret. This run of episodes chiefly focuses on Nick’s struggle to come out to his family and to his rugby mates at the suburban England high school where he and Charlie matriculate. It’s a well-articulated process, sensitive and patient—even when it seems that Nick and Charlie really have nothing to hide.
These boys aren’t very subtle, you see. Each is constantly staring goony-eyed at the other. They hang out all the time, Nick essentially abandoning his jock friends for Joe’s burgeoning coterie of lovable queer besties. There’s lesbian couple Tara (Corinna Brown) and Darcy (Kizzy Edgell—one of the great names in all of television); there’s maybe gay, maybe something else bookworm Isaac (Tobie Donovan); and there’s Charlie’s true bffs, artsy straight boy Tao (William Gao) and Elle (Yasmin Finney), a trans girl who has a big ol’ crush on Tao. It’s a merry band of misfits who, in the show’s portraiture, aren’t really misfits at all. They are the ardent center of the show, supportive and open-minded and providing all the haven a kid like Nick might ever need.
But because a TV series needs conflict, Nick wrestles and wrestles, taking one nervous step forward and then jumping back two. The process could become repetitive had Hearstopper not introduced a genius interruption. Several episodes of this season take place during a post-exams school trip to Paris, providing an ideal stage for heightened feeling and bold action. Cracks emerge in the show’s extant relationships, but none that are fatal. Another couple finally gets together in the City of Light, during a charged interlude at the Louvre.
From the looks of it, the show actually filmed at that storied museum, because the series is a global juggernaut that has, I suppose, earned such special privilege. Heartstopper’s bigness is at times too keenly felt in season two. These kids know you’re watching now, and thus every significant moment is treated as a seismic event. Each main character is allowed a bit of messiness, but otherwise they are fashioned into righteous avatars for the fans who might most closely identify with them. Any ancillary antagonists are morally rebuked in a manner that I’m sure will satisfy viewers, but can also come across as smug. Heartstopper’s core crew have become neat encapsulations of contemporary YA’s most jealously held value: main characters can never be too bad, cannot transgress too much, lest they lose the sacred talisman of relatable superiority. If you’re looking for ethical complication and ambivalent shading, seek out a different show.
Charlie and Nick are so decent and humble and concerned with propriety that sex is barely mentioned on the series. When it is, both boys—who are, as a reminder, madly infatuated 16-year-olds—chastely decide that they just aren’t ready for such things. Sure, that’s how plenty of real kids approach these matters. But watching the show, one gets the sneaking suspicion that its aversion to sex is coming not from a place of calm understanding, but from a priggish insistence that its dreamy, kissy spell not be disrupted by the squishy, mechanical, decidedly un-cute fact of what often comes after making out.
Richard Lawson
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