PRIDE

As with the lives it seeks to represent, Pride is a profoundly disparate series. But its sincere commitment to exploring the full spectrum of LGBTQ+ life is sewn through it like a rainbow thread.

“Pride” is not perfect, and does not aim to be: What it is, to its credit, is the beginning of the story, told with certain key specifics. It leaves the viewer hungry to continue their own research.

The anecdotal aside (or digression) is a stratagem employed by plenty of documentaries, as well as political speeches. But here it provides warmth and a pulse to what might have in other hands been deadly dull historiography. “Pride” is very much alive, partly because it goes deep rather than wide in wrangling the unwieldy, unmanageable stories that make up an equally untidy movemen

There’s certainly information in the first episode that we either didn’t know or forgot, and Having historians like Stryker and Jules Gill-Peterson give their perspectives of that history helps contextualize things. We hope that as the episodes move towards more modern times, the reliance on recreations will subside.

Stretches of it are a bit too facile, but at least it understands that knowing and respecting history can never be a passive spectator sport.

This FX production has its heart in the right place but its eyes twitchily on the clock. It’s a brisk enough proposition, and undemanding enough.

With a different director tackling a decade from the 1950s to 2000s in each episode, the approach is idiosyncratic and personal, if sometimes a awfully preachy. [10 - 23 May 2021, p.9]