A death opens the story

Tip Toe premieres October two on Starz. The British miniseries from Russell T Davies opens with Alan Cumming's character Leo Struthers dead, hanging from a lamppost outside his home. Flashbacks follow.

Ten days of escalating tension

The series shows the escalation of tensions between Leo Struthers and his next-door neighbor Clive Goss, played by David Morrissey, over the course of just ten days. Reminders of Leo's death open each episode.

Two men, two crises

Leo and Clive, both pushing sixty, have shared a wall in identical Manchester rowhouses for fourteen years. Leo's longtime partner Curtis has left him for a woman. Clive, an electrician, struggles with work and his wife Marie constantly berates him.

A locked-out neighbor

Leo chases an anonymous hookup who steals his laptop and finds himself locked out in his underwear. Clive reluctantly lets him in to call for help, making clear Leo's lifestyle disgusts him and he's uncomfortable with his neighbor around his sons.

Worlds collide at the bar

Leo hires Clive and his son Saul to fix wiring at Spit and Polish, his bar in Manchester's gay nightlife district. A bar employee recognizes Saul from OnlyFans. A montage shows each character alone with pornography, revealing secrets and shared loneliness.

Leo's imperfect protagonist

Leo is charming and fundamentally kind but also pugnacious and self-centered. His bar serves as a portal into the lives of less privileged queer and trans communities, including a trans bartender named Zee who dodges transphobic violence daily.

A trilogy of anxieties

Davies combines anxieties of LGBTQ people, intrafamilial alienation, economic strife, the social-media panopticon, and an overarching sense of doom. Clive represents straight masculinity in crisis, desperately vulnerable but too terrified of showing emotion to say so.

A question about visibility

The series haunts itself with a question: whether the visibility Leo's generation fought so hard to win has backfired, making them all easy targets. Stephanie confesses her worry that she'll die in thirty years without seeing the pendulum of progress swing society out of what she calls a new Dark Age.

“"new Dark Age"”

Melodrama as truth

Davies' anger and fear make Tip Toe powerful. Characters plainly state things like: History tells us one thing, that blood and fire and retribution always happen. In its unblinking earnestness, the melodrama accesses a truth that transcends any shortcomings of its plot.

“"History tells us one thing, that blood and fire and retribution always happen. And right now it's coming for us."”