How to explain what it feels like to watch Netflix’s Heartstopper? To me, it feels like when I was 11 and finished reading the first Harry Potter book. I was so enchanted my immediate reaction was to demand my parents buy me Chamber of Secrets and I refused to read another book until I had book two in my hands. I vowed to read Philosopher’s Stone over and over until I got HP2. (It worked.)
There have been plenty of shows and movies I have liked, and liked a lot. But there is a shortlist of “obsessions” those pieces that hit so perfectly, at just the moment in my life that I fell hard into a lifestyle of repeat viewings. Let me take you through a brief timeline of my pop culture obsessions. The media that has hooked into me so deeply that I wanted to dive into the world again, and again, and again.
A digression
When I turned 12, Titanic tore through my friend group. We watched that two-disc VHS probably 20 times that year, at every birthday and sleepover, reenacted scenes, and used it as a basis for our games.
In high school it was Gilmore Girls. I taped episodes to VHS tapes so I could watch them again and again, and over the next 5-10 years slowly collected the DVDs so that I could better binge them again and again, without interruption. This (unsurprisingly) is also when I fell in love with Teen Drama as a genre, soaking in the realistic and the hyper-dramatic with equal pleasure.
In CÉGEP, I discovered the absolute perfection of My-So-Called Life. This teen drama, which came out a decade before I watched it at age 18, was the absolute epitome of verisimilitude, in a genre that had trended towards the prime-time soap for years. To me, it was my heart on screen. The awkwardness, the ambiguity, the unfulfilled longing. Those tiny moments that get blown up to a thousand in that microcosm that is High School.
In university, a friend introduced me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and once again, I binged it, and re-binged it, the emotions resonating with me more than the monsters. The metaphors and relationships hitting home again and again.
And then I went to grad school, and picked up several of those threads, and wove them together into a thesis about teens, and representation, and authenticity, and empowerment, and identity. And maybe I got oversaturated, and my teen television obsession waned, and I moved on into new stages of my life where teens have been admired at a distance, but not the focus, now, for years. Or maybe teen TV just got a little boring, a little repetative.
Back to the point…
Until Heartstopper came and threw me back to my 12-year-old self. Completely and utterly enchanted. Enthralled. Obsessed. I don’t want to watch anything else, so I will watch it over and over until season 2 comes out. (I’m on re-watch number 3 in 6 days.) I feel like a kid, incapable of being reasoned with, and overly invested in the lives of these fictional characters. I am annoyed with my regular life because it forces me to take a break from my true love, watching Heartstopper.
(I binge-read Alice Oseman’s delightful comic after watching it as well, but stopped after vol. 3, where the show wraps up season 1.) I’m kind of attached to this gorgeous, perfect version of the story, and don’t want to be spoiled for how it’s going to be portrayed by the excruciatingly charming Kit Connor and adorably relatable Joe Locke. And I’m invested in the cast of characters that has been so well fleshed out in the series, beyond the central love story, which is the focus of the comic. I want to see how Tao, and Elle, and Isaac, and Tara, and Darcy will get on as well, when given more space for their stories to come alive.
This show has its hooks in me the way nothing quite has since I was a teenager. It makes me feel like a 14 year old, absolutely, hopelessly in love with someone I haven’t even talked to. I want to kiss Nick Nelson. I want to be Charlie Spring. I feel like my 14 year old self kind of was Charlie Spring, (except less cool looking, and less successful at actually making out with boys), I was a borderline-outcast, artistic nerd too. And my 14-year-old crush basically was my school’s Nick Nelson.
This show is perfection, and reminds me of why I fell in love with the genre in the first place. At its best, it’s so emotionally resonant, it makes you feel like you understand whole-heartedly what the characters are going through. You can feel it in your chest, and in your bones. And when Nick Nelson smiles at Charlie, boy do I wish he was smiling at me.
Heartstopper is a teenage fantasy – one I would have fallen head over heels for when I was young, just as I am falling for it now. What would have happened if Heartstopper came out when I was 14? It’s hard to imagine, because that was 2002, and shows like this just didn’t exist, but for one thing, maybe I would have realized I was bisexual years earlier than I finally did. Maybe I would have taken more chances socially, instead of burying my head in books like Rory Gilmore. Maybe I would have learned to express my feelings, and gained some of the self-confidence that Charlie learns by seeing himself through the eyes of someone who is so unabashedly into him. I definitely still would have fallen in love with Nick and Charlie.
My heart is fuller for having watched this agonizingly wholesome, gorgeously made show.
I demand more, and refuse to engage with other Netflix shows on my to-watch list until you make me more!!
