Watchable the week of February 15, 2021

SHOW OF THE WEEK: It’s a Sin (Feb. 19, Amazon Prime Video)

As a character lies dying of AIDS in the final episode of “It’s a Sin,” he tries to explain to his mother that there was beauty in the behaviour that led to him becoming ill, that all the boys he had sex with were great. “That’s what people forget, that it was so much fun,” he says.

Russell T. Davies, who created this limited series about a group of friends in 1980s London buffeted by the AIDS crisis, has not forgotten about the fun.

There are moments in these five episodes that will tear your heart out, but there are also moments of infectious joy.

It begins when a couple of young, gay men, Ritchie (British musician and actor Olly Alexander) and Colin (impressive newcomer Callum Scott Howells), leave their homes on the Isle of Wight and in South Wales, respectively, to come to the big city. They fall in with drama students Jill (Lydia West) and Ash (Nathaniel Curtis), and their friend Roscoe (Omari Douglas), who flees his home after his parents threaten to send him to Nigeria to be turned straight.

Together, the five of them rent a flat they call the Pink Palace and form a happy chosen family.

But among all the partying and the hookups there are hints of danger: talk of a “gay flu” in San Francisco and of deaths in New York. A gay colleague at the Savile Row tailor shop where Colin works, played by Neil Patrick Harris, gets a mysterious cancer.

The series begins in 1981; by the time it ends in 1992, AIDS has cut a swath through the Pink Palace. We see the knowledge and treatment of AIDS evolve with the years: from patients being isolated and locked in rooms to being attended with sympathy and respect; and from a diagnosis being an automatic death sentence to the hope that life can be prolonged.

We also see the stigma associated with AIDS, even from other gay people; one character is fired when his closeted boss discovers that he’s merely reading about AIDS.

But there’s also abundant love, particularly among the five key characters, which makes it heartbreaking when the bitter, bigoted mother of one of the men (played by Keeley Hawes) takes him home to die and refuses to let the others see or speak to him.

The families aren’t all bad — one mother stands steadfastly by her sick son — but it’s clear the bonds between Ritchie and Jill and Ash and Colin and Roscoe are the ones that nourish them the most. This is what makes the drama resonate: it’s history on a human, relatable scale.  

And if you wonder why revisit this particular history, consider that from the start of the epidemic till the end of 2019, an estimated 32.7 million people died from AIDS-related illnesses, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.

Deaths and new infections have been greatly reduced, but people are still getting sick and still being shamed for it.

Note that I ran out of time before I could review Amazon’s other big new release, the movie “I Care a Lot” (Feb. 19), but with Rosamund Pike, Dianne Wiest and Peter Dinklage in the cast, how can you go wrong?

Honour and How to Catch a Serial Killer (Feb. 16, BritBox)

“Honour” is a TV movie and “How to Catch a Serial Killer” is a documentary, but they both concern themselves with police officers doing everything in their power to get justice for female murder victims.

In “Honour,” Keeley Hawes (“Bodyguard,” “Line of Duty”) plays real-life London Metropolitan Police detective Caroline Goode, who received a medal from the Queen for her dogged pursuit of the killers of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod, a Kurdish woman who immigrated to England when she was 10.

When Banaz was reported missing by her boyfriend, her own family insisted there was nothing wrong and that her disappearance wasn’t unusual. But Goode believed otherwise, given that Banaz had been to police on five previous occasions to report threats from her family and even turned over a list of relatives who wanted her dead.

But there were no witnesses willing to talk, most of the suspects had alibis and two of them fled the U.K. It took cross-referencing hundreds upon hundreds of cellphone records, and tapping and translating the calls of a jailed suspect for Goode and her team to piece together what happened to Banaz.

She died, by the way, for falling in love and wanting to marry a man her family didn’t approve of.

“How to Catch a Serial Killer” is a companion piece to “A Confession,” which debuted on BritBox last year and which I recommend. The latter is a dramatized version of the true story of how Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher (played by Martin Freeman) caught the killer of two young women but trashed his career in the process by not following the rules for interviewing suspects.

In “Serial Killer,” the real Fulcher maintains that he did the right thing, particularly since he believed at the time that one of the victims was still alive. As he explains it, had he not done what he did, the women might never have been found and Chris Halliwell might have gone free to potentially kill again.

The irony is that just a few years after Fulcher was found guilty of gross misconduct and resigned from the Wiltshire force, the confessions that Halliwell gave him were ruled admissible in court. 

Short Takes

Men in Kilts (Feb. 16, STACKTV, Global TV app)

We could all use a little fun these days, couldn’t we? Then strap in for this travelogue, subtitled “A Roadtrip With Sam and Graham.” That would be Sam Heughan, who stars as Highlander Jamie Fraser in “Outlander,” and Graham McTavish, who played his uncle, Dougal MacKenzie, in the popular time travel, romance, period drama. Scotsmen born and bred, the pair drive around their native land showing off its charms which, as someone with Scottish ancestry, I happen to believe are considerable. The episodes I saw focused on food and drink (no haggis was consumed, just FYI) and sports.  Sam and Graham, though two decades apart in age, seem to have a comfortable friendship and take the pish out of themselves and each other. Since it will be a good while before we see Season 6 of “Outlander” (production reportedly just started this month and, yes, the show is referenced in “Men in Kilts”) fans should enjoy this trip. But even non-fans will find something here to make them smile. 

Behind Her Eyes (Feb. 17, Netflix)

What keeps this miniseries from being a run-of-the-mill melodrama is the sense of foreboding beneath the surface. Divorced single mom Louise (Simona Brown, “The Little Drummer Girl,” “The Night Manager”) becomes intimately involved with both her psychiatrist boss David (Tom Bateman, “Jekyll & Hyde,” “Vanity Fair”) and his wife Adele (Eve Hewson, “The Knick”), having an affair with him and befriending her. But what seems at first like a simple case of a bored husband straying is clearly much darker. Hewson, in particular, does an excellent job as Adele, who seems vulnerable and menacing at the same time. Netflix also debuts “Animals on the Loose,” an interactive movie in which viewers help Bear Grylls track down escaped wild animals, and “The Crew,” a comedy series starring Kevin James as a NASCAR crew chief. Both drop on Feb. 15.

I don’t usually highlight single episodes of series that are already in progress, but I’m making an exception for “Frankie Drake Mysteries” because the talented Sharron Matthews, who co-stars as Flo, conceived and co-wrote the Feb. 15 instalment (9 p.m., CBC and CBC Gem). It takes the detectives to an underground Toronto gay club where, as a special treat, you’ll get to see Matthews and the fabulous Thom Allison (“Killjoys”) sing. Stratford Festival alum Sara Farb also co-stars and performs as a drag king. CBC also has a couple of its comedy series starting new seasons this week: “Workin’ Moms” for its fifth and “TallBoyz” for its second on Feb. 16 at 9 and 9:30 p.m., respectively.

The show that everyone is likely to be talking about this week is Allen v. Farrow (Feb. 21, 9 p.m., Crave), the docuseries by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (“The Invisible War,” “The Hunting Ground”) about Dylan Farrow’s sex abuse allegations against her adoptive father, filmmaker Woody Allen. Reviews, however, are embargoed until Feb. 16.

One last note, about “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,” the Netflix true crime series that I recommended on last week’s list. I was not familiar with the Elisa Lam case before I watched the show and had seen just enough before writing my post to know where Elisa ended up after she disappeared but not how she got there. Now that I’ve watched the whole thing, I find it distasteful that this series fools viewers into thinking they’re seeing a murder mystery unfold when it’s actually a very sad story about a mentally ill young women. I also find the weight given in the series to ridiculous and groundless conspiracy theories irresponsible, particularly the ones that ruined the life of a death metal musician named Morbid, who was accused of murdering Elisa even though he was in Mexico when she went missing. That is eventually made clear but not until after much lurid conjecture about the man, who was driven to a suicide attempt by the abuse he suffered online. I love true crime as much as the next person, but not when it’s sensationalistic nonsense about something that wasn’t even a crime.