Queer As Folk finds ever more delicious and delirious ways of offering prickly story beats and character arcs that refuse to flatten or homogenize the LGBTQ+ community.

Despite the heavy premise, the series as a whole is surprisingly light on its feet. Sure, here and there are painful excavations of trauma or equally tear-jerking moments of defiant joy. But for the most part, the series allows its characters to be every bit as messy or silly or sexy or serious after the shooting as they were before.

“Queer as Folk” rises to the occasion when it explores the bigger contemporary themes in the LGBTQ community, even when the show is tethered to some of the baggage of previous versions of the series.

The programme remains essentially joyful, which can mean there are some jarring tonal shifts, but generally they just about get away with it. Perhaps that is because the bedrock is firm. Messy lives are rendered with truth and confidence.

While there’s a lot of messiness in this new version of Queer As Folk, it also introduces an interesting new set of characters and examines how much things have changed and stayed the same for the LGBTQIA community.

You’ll never feel bored watching the new “Queer as Folk.” But, for long, antic, tonally uncertain stretches, you might crave feeling something.

A ripped-from-the-headlines premise may locate the new series in the white-hot center of modernity, but Dunn and company extract little insight from that aggressive timeliness. ... It gets there toward the end, when the writers finally start developing real characters beyond mere identity descriptors. But so much of the series is an aimless wander haunted by an annihilating tragedy, a survey of queer existence that locates itself in struggle, interrupted only by bouts of defiant hedonism.