
The hardest part of watching It's A Sin is knowing it's real.
There are no story beats that allow respite from this dark section of history, or moments of wild imagination you can sink into. Feeling safe in the knowledge that what's unfolding on screen will never touch the edges of your life.
Instead, this new Stan drama shines an uncomfortable but necessary light on a time in history that has somehow been pushed into the shadows.
Yet, somehow, a series chronicling Britain's HIV and AIDS epidemic, the thousands of people who lost their lives to it, and the world that turned away from them, manages to also burst with hope and love. Along with the expected sorrow.
And that's all down to the true stories and people It's A Sin creator and writer Russell T Davies has woven throughout his show.
Beginning in the early 1980s, It’s A Sin centres on a group of young adults who are swept up in their new lives in London, relishing their first tastes of adulthood, career, love and sex.
Take a look at the trailer for It's A Sin, only on Stan. Post continues below.
There's Ritchie (Olly Alexander) who has slipped away from a homophobic home in the Isle of Wight to attend drama school and become a star.
Roscoe (Omari Douglas) who flees his deeply religious household in flamboyant fashion, after learning his parents are planning to ship him away to their native Nigeria due to his sexuality.
And Colin (Callum Scott Howells) a sweet, quiet young man from the Welsh valleys. He has arrived in London to start an apprenticeship as a tailor and is soon absorbed into this new family of young gay men which also includes dreamy drama student Ash (Nathaniel Curtis).
Rounding out it It's A Sin's team of central characters is Jill Baxter, portrayed by actress Lydia West, a fellow drama student who lives with the boys in a rambling London apartment they dub The Pink Palace.
A young woman who acts as both an unshakeable ally and a friend to the boys as the AIDS epidemic consumes the lives of these young characters.
Lydia West as Jill Baxter in It's A Sin. Image: Stan.
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