‘Heartstopper’ Season 2 Captures the Beauty of Queer Teen Love
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At one point in the new season of Netflix’s Heartstopper, a pair of adult chaperones on a school field trip observe the various romantic entanglements of their students. One is touched and a bit amused by it all, while the other feels wistful about it. “When you don’t figure out you’re gay until your late 20s,” he explains, “you tend to miss out on those beautiful gay teenage experiences.”
Heartstopper is excellent at a lot of things, but its greatest strength is in capturing the giddy highs of those beautiful gay teenage experiences. It is a show overflowing with emotions — both joyous and terrifying ones — in a way that’s palpable whether you’re close in age to its main characters or more in the teacher or parent demographic.
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Once again written by Alice Oseman (adapting her acclaimed series of graphic novels) and directed by Euros Lyn, Heartstopper Season Two picks up shortly after we left our central couple, Charlie (Joe Locke) and Nick (Kit Connor). Nick has come to embrace his bisexuality, while Charlie is convinced that he can help Nick come out to the world in a much happier and healthier way than when he was forcibly outed. “Everything’s going to be perfect,” he insists — the sort of sentiment a character utters shortly before things become imperfect.
The challenge of this season is that most of the tension in Charlie and Nick’s relationship is now external rather than internal. Nick knows that he’s queer, the boys know that they like each other, and they are together. They’re now dealing with how and when Nick should tell family and friends that he’s bi, and whether the passionate rush of this first stage of romance is causing them to neglect the other parts of their lives. This is interesting stuff, but not as fundamentally dramatic as Season One, where Charlie feared he had a crush on a straight boy, Nick sorted through his surprising feelings for Charlie, and both had to decide if they were brave enough to turn their thoughts into reality.
But Oseman does two smart things here. The first is that she turns the new season into more of an ensemble piece. Charlie and Nick’s romance is still the sun around which everything else orbits. But a lot of time is spent on Elle (Yasmin Finney) and Tao (William Gao) figuring out whether they are better off as platonic friends or something more, on revealing that Darcy (Kizzy Edgell) and Tara (Corinna Brown) aren’t quite the picture-perfect couple Elle takes them for, on Isaac (Tobie Donovan) expressing frustration over his friends taking him for granted because he’s not dealing with relationship drama, and on Imogen (Rhea Norwood) turning her attentions from Nick to Ben (Sebastian Croft), the closeted and cruel boy who used to make out with Charlie only when no one else was looking. While Locke and Connor’s chemistry is so strong that you wouldn’t blame the series for leaning on it even more heavily, the other actors are strong, too. And their various entanglements are interesting in their own right, and present a wide enough view of the LGBTQIA+ experience that it never feels like Heartstopper is hitting the same beats over and over again.
And the new season embraces the complications that come from even the heady early stage of romance that Charlie and Nick are enjoying. They can be happy together the great majority of the time while still finding things to worry about for both themselves and their partner, like Nick noticing that Charlie often goes long periods without eating. It’s a subtler type of conflict, but Oseman, Lyn, and the actors all dig deep enough to make it feel potent in its own right.
The highlight of the season is that class trip to Paris. By taking everyone away from their home turf and depositing them in the most romantic city on the planet, it heightens the stakes of every storyline, making each choice the characters make feel grander in the process.
Heartstopper remains an extremely sweet and ingratiating series, one that wants the best for all of its characters even as it recognizes that life is never as simple as they want it to be. Late in the season, Nick finally gets Charlie to talk about the bullying he endured after being outed. “I think it surprised me how homophobic people were,” Charlie admits. “I thought things were better nowadays.” Things are better in many ways, not least of which is that a show like this can exist for queer teens to enjoy, in the same way their straight counterparts have with so many comparable series over decades. But there’s also been a huge recent backlash against queerness, including attempts in various countries to litigate trans people out of existence. It’s an exciting world, but also a terrifying one, and both of those ideas can feel overwhelming when you’re the age of these characters. Heartstopper manages to put you inside the heads of its heroes, always hoping for the beautiful moments, but never ignoring the ugly ones.
Season Two of Heartstopper streams Aug. 3 on Netflix. I’ve seen all eight episodes.
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