Follow us. Following its debut last year, Heartstopper was widely heralded for its pure-hearted, saccharine celebration of queer teenhood. It resonated far and wide, both with kids discovering their sexualities for the first time and using the show as a blueprint for their own emergence from the closet, and gay adults who saw in it the fairytale high school romance stolen from them by homophobic prejudice.
Heartstopper 's pointedly unreal approach has left it open, nevertheless, to some criticisms. One such question oft arose on Twitter last year: where's all the sex?
However taboo it might be to acknowledge, this is a show about the relationship of two year-old boys, the horniest horndog demographic to ever have horned, on the evidence of a millennia of crispy tube socks and superglued-shut jazz mags. Get past the initial cringe, and there's a point here: the first season completely skirted physicality, beyond a smooch or two, which seemed rather at odds with the reality of what teens get up to see: Snapchat.
The equally popular counterpoint contends that there's a place and time for opening the door on the private fumblings of teenagers. If Euphoria and Elite are your little brother's hot uni pals, Heartstopper is actually your little brother. And who wants to know what he's getting up to?
You have to give the show credit, then, for handling the question of Charlie and Nick's nascent, tricky sexual desires with grace. With their roomies away on the final night, after a couple first-time shots of supermarket spirits at a big end-of-hols party, they decide to sleep together β as in, literally snoozing.
