“Tip Toe” Is a Rare Outcry Against Social Revanchism
The New Yorker · Inkoo Kang ·
The gripping British show starring Alan Cumming is fuelled by panic over the erosion of progressive political and cultural gains, Inkoo Kang writes.
The social revanchism of the twenty-twenties has largely shown up in pop culture as triumphalism on the right and silence on the left; on television, the neo-Western TV mogul Taylor Sheridan blankets the proverbial airwaves with trucks, horses, and anti-California jabs, while programs centered on queer characters and protagonists of color continue to dwindle. “Tip Toe,” from the television auteur Russell T Davies, is a rare outcry from the side of the progressives, who are seeing their political and cultural gains rapidly erode. In 1999, Davies created the original “Queer as Folk,” a groundbreaking show about ordinary gay Mancunians who spend their nights at the club, where they find almost everything they want: sex, drugs, family, friendship, freedom. A quarter century later, Leo’s bar is less a temple to liberation than a fortress under sporadic siege, where drag performers have protocols for emergency exits and bartenders, between pours, watch the door for troublemakers.
What if such measures aren’t enough? What if the atavism under way isn’t just a miasma of unpleasantness but a buildup of gas waiting to combust? That panic fuels “Tip Toe,” a siren of a series that confirms Davies’s standing as one of the medium’s essential creators. The five-episode drama—which aired this summer in Britain, on Channel 4, and wraps up its American run this week, on Starz—is a minor work with ample speechifying and visible budget constraints, and yet it offers more thoughtfulness and ingenuity than most of the year’s prestige programming.
It’s also a bit of a tough watch, opening with a flash-forward in which Leo is found hanged from a lamppost outside his home. His presumed killer is his next-door neighbor, Clive Goss (David Morrissey), a fitfully employed electrician with an unshakable suspicion that Leo has designs on his sons, twenty-five-year-old Saul (Joseph Evans) and sixteen-year-old George (Jackson Connor). The time line then jumps back ten days, when, after more than a decade of wordless coexistence on opposite sides of a shared wall, Leo locks himself out of his house and asks to borrow Clive’s phone to call a friend with a spare key. Suddenly, the two men become enmeshed in each other’s lives, with Clive on the attack despite practically begging Leo for odd jobs, and Leo on a mission to soften Clive’s bigotry, tragically mistaken about his ability to win over a man who can no longer hear reason.
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