This year's best TV show is already here
Wrap up all the awards and hand them over because It's a Sin deserves them all...
When it comes to TV shows, it takes a lot to move me. But this show left me a quivering mess after every single episode. I was so wrecked I needed to take a week between each to recover, and even then it wasn’t enough. You won’t see a better TV show this year, and the final episode is among the most compelling pieces of television ever made. It’s time to discuss It’s A Sin, because it is incredible. Let’s go…
I know, I know. It’s only March. It’s way too early to call something the best of the year. We’re only a quarter of the way through 2021. Almost anything can happen. Just 12 months ago, we were all comfortably ambling along before seven kinds of hell came and knocked us sideways, and I started writing depressing pieces like this one to cope.
But I’m quietly confident that this time my prediction is correct. Come December, It’s a Sin, a beautifully bruising, delightfully depressing drama about the Aids epidemic set in 1980s London, will be named the best TV show of the year. It’s a Sin isn’t just good, it’s incredible, a new high water mark for peak TV. It won’t be beaten for a good long time to come.
I know this because it took me months to watch It’s a Sin. That might sound odd. After all, there are only five one-hour episodes to it. But every single one of them hit me like a wrecking ball. So much happens in them that they took me weeks to recover from. It took time and patience to build up the courage to watch the next. It’s just that kind of series.
For a show about death, It’s a Sin is full of life. Every episode is rammed full of bodies mashing together in nightclubs and London apartment parties at a time that freedom and sexual awakening was starting to be explored. Sometimes, montages set to Pet Shop Boys and Duran Duran that would have taken weeks to shoot fly by in seconds. The production budget blows my mind. It’s a Sin looks, feels and sounds amazing. It’s one of the most beautiful shows on television.
Which makes what the show’s really about all the more horrific. All of those scenes of living it up and having it large are juxtaposed with characters - people who you’re invested in and have fallen in love with - getting sick from HIV and dying. They’re isolated in hospital wards painfully passing away as family members and friends freak out and the medical establishment try not to touch them.
When characters die in It’s a Sin, it’s brutal. You get attached to them. That’s because they’re real people. Go listen to the show’s creator Alan T Davies explain who they all are and why it took him so long to put them in a TV show in the latest podcast from The Watch. All of the characters in It’s a Sin are based on people he knew who died just like this. That it’s based on real life makes it hurt even more.
Like they did for him, Davis pulls you into their lives, makes you care deeply for them, then leaves you devastated. You will shed tears. It’s absolutely heartwrenching. But that’s what good television should do. It should move you, make you feel something. Yep, It’s a Sin will give you all the feels - even ones you didn’t know you had.
It’s a Sin is streaming via TVNZ OnDemand.
Five other things you should be watching right now…
If you’ve finished Wandavision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has just debuted on Disney+ and reviews range between solid to surprisingly good.
Louis Theroux’s career retrospective Life on the Edge is on Neon and is ridiculously fun viewing, worth watching even just to laugh at his fashion crimes as a young reporter.
Operation Varsity Blues is a recent Netflix documentary that covers the college admissions bribery scandal from 2019 and has very good reviews.
Riz Ahmed has secured a best actor Oscar nomination for Sound of Metal, a drama streaming via Amazon Prime Video about a drummer who loses his hearing.
Ever since I stumbled upon a YouTube trailer for Stath Let’s Flats, the Brit-com about a flailing rental agency that’s equal parts The Office and Ali G, I’ve been absolutely riveted. Thoroughly recommended viewing … if you can find it.
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