Critic Reviews

It’s a Sin looks set not just to be to Queer as Folk’s companion piece but its companion masterpiece.

It’s testament to the show's quality that I felt the deaths of minor characters as deeply as the fates of the leads.

Davies’s skill with structure is on full display here; the first installment is an immaculate introduction that builds and builds and ends with a wallop. His consistent cleverness, rather than coming off glib, charges the work with immediacy and verve. The storytelling is urgent, with few wasted moments. ... This is a stirring requiem for the dead, shot through with defiant life.

The series demonstrates once again Davies’ masterful control of tone, shifting in five episodes from joy to the harder-won pleasures of solidarity in the face of crisis to — finally — tragedy. ... Davies has once again made great and painful art about time’s passage, and has earned the attention of anyone who wants to learn more about what the 1980s were like for gay people — or wants to connect, deeply, with a raw and rounded humanity in all its beauty, complexity, and fleeting joy.

Perfectly-paced, devastatingly written, and played to perfection by an ensemble cast that doesn’t miss a beat, It’s a Sin is a near-flawless piece of television, and an unmissable portrait of both queer youth and the tragedy of the AIDS crisis that will leave you gutted in the best way possible.

As a vital television document about AIDS and the hard-earned freedoms that were crushed on human and systemic terms — and as purely just a piece of masterful writing and acting — “It’s a Sin” is right up there with Tony Kushner’s epic “Angels in America” as must-see queer viewing. It’s capable at once of breaking your heart, putting it back, then breaking it all over again.

It’s a Sin—which is easily the best season of TV I’ve watched so far this year—gets the big, emotional moments and moral arguments right.

It is a series intimately in conversation with life and death, with the possibility of youth and the injustice of quashed potential. It is celebratory of the LGBTQ community, unabashedly sexy and fun, but moving and somber when it needs to be. And it's certainly not a sin.

Alexander and West, especially, are gifted climactic arias brimming with heart-rending poignance and righteous clarity. Still, there’s something about It’s a Sin that feels summative, as if this is the work that Davies has been building to since he broke out of his own creative closet over two decades ago. And we’re all the richer for his effort.

The show is about people, not positions, but it’s about people who learn the price of taking a position, a stand, as well as people who pay the higher price of not doing so. All this without cant and speechifying. Plus it’s really funny and truly moving. Bravo.