Tip Toe (De puntillas) (Russell T. Davies)
Russell T. Davies (‘Queer as Folk’, ‘It’s a Sin’) isn’t very optimistic about what the future holds. He already demonstrated this in the dystopian Years & Years (2019), one of his greatest international successes, and he repeats the stance in Tip Toe (Tip Toe, HBO). The difference is that, with this latest work, you don’t feel like pulling a blanket over you to wait for the world to crumble around you, but rather you want to go out into the street to fight those who are turning this world into a worse place (and before it’s too late).
In that regard, ‘Tip Toe’ doesn’t hide its aims: it is a thesis-driven work against homophobia in which characters (the striking David Morrissey and Alan Cumming) and the dramaturgy are clearly at the service of the message. It doesn’t seek contemplation as much as mobilization. That said, Davies knows how to imbue that discourse with enough humanity, psychological depth, dramatic tension, and social analysis to prevent the series from turning into a mere didactic pamphlet. The series proposes a journey from what should be a humorous situation and a neighborly complicity — staying in your underwear with no keys in the middle of the street — to a criminal drama that, like Years & Years, anticipates a terrifying future. To wake people’s consciences, Davies seems to say, it’s more effective to tread firmly than to pass by on tiptoe. 8.
Half Man (Richard Gadd)
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that another of this year’s most anticipated series, the new work from the creator of ‘My Plush Reindeer’ (2024), also tackles the themes of homophobia and toxic masculinity. Violence is in the air. Like ‘Tip Toe’, ‘Half Man’ (HBO) is structured around the relationship between a gay character and a heterosexual one, only here the bond is not incidental but intimate.
The series, also told through flashbacks, traces the complicated dependency, control, attraction, and rivalry between two half-brothers from adolescence to adulthood. The segment depicting youth in late-80s Glasgow is fabulous. We see how the relationship between two “half-men” is built through a tug-of-war that will prove incredibly dysfunctional and unhealthy. Then ‘Half Man’ indicts the flaw that plagues many contemporary series: it stretches so long that it becomes repetitive. Still, Gadd manages to make even his excesses uncomfortably fascinating. 7.2.
A Better Man (Thomas Torjussen)
And yet another fiction about stubborn masculinities. This doesn’t feel like a passing trend anymore; it’s pure zeitgeist (one should also add the magnificent ‘DTF St. Louis’). As its creator, Thomas Torjussen, has explained, the germ of ‘A Better Man’ (Filmin) was born on July 22, 2011. That day, a racist and misogynist Norwegian troll decided to spread his hate beyond social networks: he killed 69 youngsters at a camp on Utøya island, after having killed eight people earlier with a bomb.
The protagonist of ‘A Better Man’ is that type of depressed and frustrated man who vents in the macho sphere. When hackers reveal who he is, he will be forced to hide behind a female identity. The dramatic conflict and irony are served: the misogynist will have to experience firsthand what he has spent years denying. Four episodes in which Torjussen blends black comedy, psychological drama, and social portrait to ask where that masculine resentment comes from and, above all, whether someone so entrenched in it can truly change. 7.4.
Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You (Tadato Suzuki, Aoi Mori)
The adaptation of Jinushi’s popular manga (published in Spain by Panini) is a marvel. ‘Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You’ (Crunchyroll) is led by a man who is very common in Japan, a country where there is even a ministry dedicated to fighting isolation and social disconnection: the stressed, frustrated, middle-aged office worker doomed to unwelcome loneliness.
The premise of this animated series is very simple: the protagonist meets a young supermarket cashier with whom he shares cigarettes and conversations in the back of the shop. From there, the story unfolds as a minimal, charming, and very funny romantic comedy about the relationship that forms between two loners who find in those furtive encounters a small refuge from routine. ‘Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You’ represents another kind of malaise: the unhappy worker who doesn’t convert his frustration into anger toward the “other,” but into a need for companionship. 8.5.
Raval-eering (Pol Rodríguez)
‘Raval-eering’ (HBO) is a series about gentrification and real estate speculation, but also about the different ways to confront economic violence. Created by Pol Rodríguez together with Isaki Lacuesta (they had previously worked together on ‘Second Prize’), the series starts from a very concrete threat, the predatory real-estate pressure from a vulture fund on a family-run restaurant in the Raval, to observe how its characters react to that pressure.
In that range of responses, the standout is the protagonist, Àlex (Enric Auquer), the eldest son. His way of acting — impulsive, individualistic, and self-destructive — is the most aligned with a traditional idea of masculinity. ‘Raval-eering’ works quite well as a social thriller, but is especially intriguing in its psychological analysis, when it contrasts the fantasy of a man who must fix everything by himself, like a Hollywood action hero, with another form of resistance that is less epic and more effective: recognizing vulnerability, asking for help, organizing, and turning individual weakness into shared strength. Collective anger to make it productive. 7.
