It’s a Sin is probably the most profound, real and emotionally charged television series I have seen in recent years. The mini-series, which consists of five episodes and originally aired on Channel 4 earlier this year, takes place over the course of a decade and centers on a group of young gay men during the outbreak of the AIDS pandemic in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Fair warning, I watched the entire series over the course of a Saturday night and cried for a solid two hours after the final episode. Nonetheless, it’s definitely the most thought-provoking and important series on television at the moment. Not only does It’s a Sin have a star-studded cast including Neil Patrick Harris and Stephen Fry, it also addresses some of the most important issues of the last 40 years.

While the series does not exclusively focus on the AIDS pandemic from the outset, it very much captures the nature in which this crisis crept up on not only the gay community at the time, but on Britain as a whole. The first episode starts off with barely a mention of AIDS, but by the final episode, the characters have lost several friends to the disease. It is quite harrowing throughout to see the lack of patient support, or even research, at the beginning of the outbreak across Britain and indeed the world. People who fell ill with AIDS were basically locked in hospital rooms and told not to emerge. 

The series revolves around a group of friends with quite different backgrounds, linked by their ability to express themselves in the city in a way that would have been difficult to achieve elsewhere. The main character, Ritchie Tozer (Olly Alexander) has come to London from the Isle of White for his first year of uni, with his family at home none the wiser about his sexuality. In contrast, our first introduction to Roscoe Babatunde (Omari Douglas) is his family finding out about his sexuality and threatening to send him to Nigeria with his uncle, to which he responds by putting on a skirt, telling his parents to shove it, and storming out of the house. Jill Baxter (Lydia West) is the only recurring female main character, and she often acts as the glue that holds the members of the flat together, introducing many of them to one another. The flat is then filled with other characters such as Colin (Callum Scott Howells) and Ash (Nathaniel Curtis) and the premise of young people living in London’s gay scene is clearly set. 

Characters such as Ritchie, Colin and Roscoe are repeatedly subjected to discrimination throughout the series from their own families, with another character’s family actually burning all his belongings and everything he touched after he died from the disease. In another episode, police put on rubber gloves before violently breaking up a peaceful protest begging the government to do something about the epidemic. Throughout the whole series, the crisis receives little to no response, and is often labeled as “the gay man’s disease”, which is not at all true by the end of the series. This is something I found really unsettling, from the lack of concern for the disease to outright violence towards members of the gay community. An awful lot of the program focuses on quite cruel and upsetting reactions by members of the public and family members to LGBT characters, so this is not something to watch for a relaxing evening. 

In spite of the trauma that goes hand in hand with watching this show, I think it is an extremely important program that absolutely everyone should watch. The lack of representation and mainstream coverage at the time proved deadly for the LGBT community, and this mini-series is a very stark and accurate portrayal of the crisis, highlighting these failures of both the general public and the government in all countries during the ‘80s and ‘90s to step up and address this issue. These men were neglected, and because the majority of the outbreak occurred in the United States, the common perception was that by avoiding sex with Americans you’d be safe; it was dismissed as an American disease. Then, with outbreaks in the UK, perception moved. The solution changed to avoiding sleeping with people from London, because it is then labelled a “city” disease. There was no accurate information available for these gay men because nobody would speak up and call for someone to address the very dire situation until it was too late. Consequently, many men and women died, and continue to die from this disease. 

It’s a Sin is the best depiction of what the lives of gay men looked like throughout the AIDS outbreak of the ‘80s, but also brings with it the harrowing realisation of how this was addressed far too late. It’s emotional and upsetting to sit through, but it’s important, because it represents the lives lost as actual lives, rather than a statistic or as a “consequence of being gay”. These were real people, and their health wasn’t taken seriously simply because they were LGBTQ+. As recent discourse on Twitter has pointed out, the same fights are still being fought by trans people across the globe. Trans men and women’s health is often neglected, with some trans people not being able to access healthcare at all, while others wait years for consultations until being given access to adequate resources. Trans people continue to be neglected because the systems have not been put in place by the government to help them, and public perception does not see it as “urgent enough”. Perhaps this is not currently to the same extent of the AIDS pandemic, but if not addressed, it will only get worse. It’s a Sin it tells the stories of the victims of the AIDS pandemic, whose government failed them. Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, and for that reason I cannot recommend it enough,

It’s a Sin is available to stream now on All 4.