Review: Heartstopper, "Meet" | Season 1, Episode 1

Boy meets boy, and the audience meets a larger ensemble of characters than in Alice Oseman's first volume of their graphic novel series

[Netflix’s newest teen series, Heartstopper, released its entire first season today. This is the first of eight reviews that I’ve written and published today for you to have as a companion for your journey through Charlie and Nick’s story—you can find all of these reviews at my Episodic Archive page for the series.]

Heartstopper is at its heart a romantic story, but it begins in the aftermath of a tragic one.

It’s a significant conversation when considering queer media: in a society where homophobia is still a daily reality for gay teens like Charlie Spring, how do you tell a story about that without either dwelling on the harassment and bullying to the point of it become the sole focus, or erasing it entirely to try to “move past” that harsh reality? Both approaches don’t truly reflect the moment we’re in, where a new generation is increasingly open to LGBTQIA+ individuals but where those individuals must still navigate a society at its core built to marginalize them. 

Screenshot: Netflix

In her series of graphic novels, collecting her ongoing webcomic, Alice Oseman consciously splits the difference, beginning Charlie’s story in the calm after the storm after he was outed to his classmates at Truham Boys School. She doesn’t pretend that the homophobia that defined the bullying he experienced the previous year has disappeared. It’s simply that the dust has settled, and Charlie has been able to ease into the role of being “the gay kid” in the way he needed to in order to survive. When we first see him in “Meet,” he smiles as he returns from Christmas break, excited to be getting messages from a boy he’s hooking up with, and generally not outwardly carrying the baggage of the ordeal he went through.

But as the story progresses, you start to realize that Charlie has learned to accept a lesser version of the life he deserves. He’s flattered by Ben’s attention, but Ben has no interest in his life, and won’t even acknowledge he knows him in the hallway. He may not be subject to the same bullying he has been in the past, but he still has to grit his teeth as people talk about him behind his back, like the rugby boys as he prepares to enter the dressing room for the first time. He may not be having lunch in the art room every day to hide from the rest of the school, but he’s carrying the scars of that experience, and it’s taught him to see his “relationship” with Ben and the rest of his daily existence as the best he can expect.

Screenshot: Netflix

The first volume of Heartstopper is exclusively focused on how meeting Nick Nelson changes Charlie’s perspective, but in adapting her own work for television, Oseman pulls forward the introduction of Charlie’s friend Elle—a trans student—as a parallel. Like Charlie, she had been subject to intense bullying when she was still at Truham, including from a teacher who refused to call her by her new name. And like Charlie, she is choosing to see life at Higgs—the all girls school—as an upgrade, because she isn’t having things thrown at her, and her teachers are acknowledging her true self. But she’s also entirely alone, and lying to Tao about it because she knows how much worse the alternative was.

“Meet” doesn’t offer a solution for Elle’s sense of isolation, but it gives Charlie a glimpse of a different type of acceptance. As the animated leaves indicate, Charlie is crushing on Nick as soon as he spots him in his Form, but Nick is more or less oblivious to the impact he’s having because all he’s doing is…being a nice person? He says hello when he sees Charlie, apologizes when he bumps into him, and joshes around when their conversation turns light-hearted. Little moments like putting eyes on the pen mark on Charlie’s hand are swoon-worthy to Charlie, but to Nick they’re just a normal bit of homosocial bonding, no different than his roughhousing with the rugby lads at lunch. But not being treated like he’s different is exactly what Charlie has wanted, and Nick’s micro-affections coalesce into a full-blown crush even before he plays the knight in shining armor when a jilted Ben tries to overcome his own trauma by assaulting Charlie in the music block.

Screenshot: Netflix

By staying so tightly on Charlie’s perspective on Nick, the crush feels fairly one-sided: Nick spots Charlie’s speed during P.E., but he was just looking for a Rugby reserve, so he feels far removed from the fantasy Charlie imagines when Nick comes to his locker shortly afterward. After Nick pulls Ben off Charlie and tells him to piss off, Euros Lyn’s direction catches the intimacy of Nick’s touch of Charlie arm (above), the rest of the image moving out of focus as the touch—like the happy face moment earlier—reverberates in Charlie’s consciousness. But Nick didn’t even really think about it: it was just a way to comfort a friend.

But it’s also a handoff moment of sorts, because as they emerge to the sunset and go their separate ways, it’s the first time we’re really inside Nick’s head as we are Charlie’s. And as Charlie agonizes over the Instagram message to send to his crush after going through the emotional rollercoaster of telling off Ben, Nick is staring out the window, barely paying attention to his mother as she asks about his day. And when Charlie’s message arrives, Nick’s reaction is the first time he’s necessarily actually thought about his friendship with Charlie, and his smile says that this is no longer just Charlie’s story.

Presented as it is, “Meet” plays a bit like a short film, racing through the beginnings of their friendship through montage, with a clean resolution to Charlie’s relationship with Ben and a promising glimpse of whatever his connection with Nick could grow into. But it really is just a launching pad for the rest of the story, both in terms of expanding to focus more on Nick’s point-of-view, and to introduce Elle earlier than in the books to create a more fleshed out glimpse into queer community. It has the sweeping romantic moments to see this as a love story—like Charlie cleaning off the window as he discusses his ideal boy and finding Nick in the glass—but it’s also acknowledging the harsh realities in which that love will have to blossom, a balancing act that’s critical to setting the tone for the story to follow.

Stray (Adaptation) Observations

• Lots of scenes come directly from the novel, almost word-for-word, but the biggest change comes in Charlie and Nick’s interaction with Ben. Whereas in the book Nick wonders why Ben and Charlie are friends, and comments that Ben is sort of a dick, here Ben ignores Charlie, and Nick is the one who’s friendly with him. Combined with how Ben is more vulnerable and desperate in the scene in the music block, whereas he’s mostly smug in the book, and it feels like we’re meant to read Ben’s behavior—while not excused—as a legible result of the trauma of being closeted in a way the book doesn’t really articulate. I had the chance to ask Oseman about the adjustment to Ben’s character this week, so I’ll share more of her insight into this decision in my weekly newsletter on Monday.

• I was a little confused why they decided to ditch Aled for Isaac before reading Oseman’s explanation, but I suppose it’s not that critical: the character mainly serves to have someone for Tao to talk to (at) when Charlie’s busy with Nick, which the show definitely emphasizes a bit more here since Tao wasn’t really a primary character in the first volume.

• While you kind of need an Aled/Isaac character to play out the friend dynamic at school, I’m not shocked that we may have cut the third Spring sibling, although I suppose it’s possible he pops up in the future until they decide to outright say Tori and Charlie are part of a two-child household.

• A small change: in the book Charlie tells Nick that he’s meeting up with someone after rugby practice when he goes to see Ben, but here Nick just intuits something is wrong and follows him, which adds to his perceived investment in his safety.

• So I’ve been told expressly that teen-focused shows on Netflix are pretty much forced to aim for TV-14 lest parental controls block their potential audience, so I’m not shocked that we lost the f-bombs, but losing “He told you to stop, you fucking prick” is still a pity.

• So Netflix’s screener email had a warning that I wasn’t allowed to reveal who was cast as Nick’s mother before they announced it, and I said to myself “Who in the world could it possibly be in such a relatively small part that it would be such a big deal?” And then I heard Olivia Colman’s voice, and I was like “Oh, okay, fair.” Definitely made me move faster through screeners knowing that she’d be playing out scenes from later in the series. (And unfortunately, one outlet did ignore this note on the screeners, so many of you didn’t get to experience it as a surprise like I did).

• I somewhat jokingly suggested on Twitter when the trailer debuted that Kit Connor wasn’t gigantic enough to be playing Nick, and I do think the show is kind of delusional if they think that he is “tall” compared to Charlie given the fact they really do look like the same height in most scenes. But what I realized in watching it is that Nick’s demeanor is really his primary character trait even if it doesn’t have the same compositional factor that the size discrepancy gives in the books, and when my brain fully merged Nick with Connor’s work as Pan in His Dark Materials (which I’ll be covering when it returns for its third and final season) I came to appreciate the approach to the character that much more.