Heartstopper - Netflix

[MrsBooks]

Binged it, loved it, binged it again to Shazam all the music!!

Anyone else watched it?

Gay, geeky teen falls in love with supposedly straight, popular, rugby playing lad. Just very sweet high school drama.

Have just binge watched the first 4 episodes of Season 2 with the DCs.

Cannot wait to chat about it on the thread!

I’ve binge watched all 8 episodes this morning 😂😂

Finished and loved it ❤️

Bloody hell, you guys must have got up early. We’re going to watch an episode when my husband gets home from work

We started watching as soon as it dropped! DS1 was counting down and woke me up in the middle of the night to remind me it was due!!

(yay for annual leave!)

I am LOVING it!

I was wondering how people had watched it in a morning but I just started it and episodes are only just over 30 minutes so I should get it done today.

Just after 8!

Can we all discuss Mr Farouk and how much we love him?

Right- on episode 7 so not sure how the Mr Farouk storyline will play out, but this one and the Isaac one is my fave so far.

I am also ComeTheSpringLobelia (just to say as I seasonally namechange). Posted with both names on the thread.

Ao as not to give any spoilers away I will keep this vague, but the end of Episode 8 was soooo disappointing. It was a total anticlimax.

I hope he doesn’t send that text and they do it face to face instead like they very almost did.

I was nearly on the verge of tears when Nick was giving his speech and I was just waiting for him to say it!

He shouldn’t have let the interruption stop him.

I was just so disappointed 😢

I think S3 will be darker, actually if they follow the books it will be.
Tori is so amazing, I particularly loved her standing up to David.

We’ve only watched the first episode, the end was a bit sad when you consider what happened to Kit who plays Nick. Good so far.

So, does this series cover the Paris trip and Nick's family holiday for the content that is in the comics?

Just finished it. No Nick hasn’t been yet on holiday with his mum but they did Paris and then some new events for the series that aren’t in the books.

He won’t send the text if the books are anything to go by - much more build up and drama to come for that.

I always feel sorry for the baddie - I hope Ben finds some happiness somehow but I don’t think they will show that.

No they won't show Ben in future - he's been written out (fair enough at this stage tbh)

https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/ben-heartstopper-exit-scene-interview

A lot of the teen fans did have some very starkly black and white views about Ben - I always like to think that a 16yo can become a better person.

Even though it was a short timeline, I felt like they tried to cover too many stories and none of them well enough for me to be totally invested.
I enjoyed watching but it didn't give the same joy as season 1.

We’ve watched the first four now, we’re both enjoying it so far, and that the majority is following the books. I like the tackling of bi erasure.

It doesn’t even come close to Season 1 in my eyes.

I’ve watched Season 1 about fifty times, but I have no desire to watch Season 2 again.

And this isn’t meant to be a criticism but the magic of Charlie and Nick was kind of lost because it felt like every character was suddenly gay/bi/trans. The Rugby coach turned out to me married to a woman, the new teacher was gay, Elle’s new friends were gay / transgender and at one point in the last episode I thought they were on the verge of making Isobel gay/bi too with how she was staring at the female band player who surprise, surprise, was bisexual. And if that wasn’t enough Isaac was then written as a pansexual character.

It was all just a bit too try hard in my opinion. It came across as the writers wanting to be as PC and as Inclusive as they could possibly be to the point where it all just got a bit predictable and boring.

And I always though Charlie’s dad came across as really lovely and supportive in Season 1, but he seemed like a different character in Season 2.

I even got sick of seeing Charlie’s sister sucking on a straw in every scene she was in. I thought she could have developed into a really interesting character but it seems like they have just turned her into a one trick pony which is to loudly suck on a straw whilst looking annoyed.

I was also kind of hoping for some more passion between Nick and Charlie…there still wasn’t anything more than lip to lip kisses as far as I could see. I liked the fact that they showed Nick saying he wasn’t ready to do anything sexual, I think that was an important aspect to cover, but they’re still 15-16 years old and we all know how much we proper snogged the face off our boyfriends / girlfriends at that age whenever we were alone with them 😂

I don’t know - it just really, really disappointed me.

I haven't watched s2 yet but @PaddlingLikeADuck I do wonder if life is just more like that for younger generations? When my daughter was at college just over a year ago she said she was the only straight one in her friendship group. People are more likely to be honest about who they are and I think there's a lot of truth in the saying birds of a feather flock together.

All of those things are pretty faithful to the book, though. The rugby coach was really important in helping Nick come out, Mr Farouk's story was about how much things have changed since section 28 and how he could be the sort of role model he wished he'd had as a teenager, Tori's lemonade drinking is frequently mentioned in both the Heartstopper comics and in Solitaire (Tori's book) and it's really not unusual in the slightest for the LGBTQ+ kids at school to hang out together.

And if you follow the comics, you'll know that (a) sex won't happen for a good while yet and (b) there are things going on which mean they REALLY aren't ready for sex yet.

I have watched all of season 2. I absolutely loved it. Fantastic acting.

Plus on top of that the actors were still actual children when series 2 was filmed, surely children can’t act out sex scenes? Then if course most of the characters are under the age of consent, Charlie for example is only 15.

I didn’t say anything about them having sex in my post. I had said in my post that I was glad Nick had said he wasn’t ready for anything sexual as it’s important for that to be covered, all I had talked about in my post them kissing.

Also, the actors aren’t kids…. I thought they were about 20??

I didn't mind all the kids coming out, felt like the current state of kids being bi/pan/trans rather than goth/emo/indie.
But I hated that each coming out was covered in one or two scenes. Nothing was fleshed out.
There was no time to process each event because something else was being thrown in the pot. Season one gave such a lovely build up to Charlie and Nick. The change of pace for everything felt jarring.

Agree about the sudden change in Charlie's dad, he was so lovely and understanding in season 1.
But then again not doing coursework is a totally groundable offence.

Well I haven’t read the books and I don’t think a TV series should only be considered good if you’ve already read the books and so you already know the reasons why storylines are happening etc.

A series should leave you wanting more, or it should leave you feeling like you want to understand the complexity of the characters etc, and this series just didn’t.

For example, I hadn’t read any of the Bridgerton books before the series came to Netflix, but the episodes left me gripped and I actually downloaded the books after the series had finished (as well as re-watched them God knows how many times). 😂

But Series 2 of HS hasn’t left me feeling like that at all - I don’t feel any urge to watch it again and it hasn’t left me feeling like I want to downloads the comics either.

The Nick and Charlie characters were amazing (as were the actors playing them) but all the others characters / storylines were just a little bit ‘blah’ in my opinion.

As I said, I don’t think the enjoyment or understanding of a series should be based on whether you’ve already read the books / comics or not.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the series, I wouldn’t have binge watched it otherwise, it’s just my opinion that it wasn’t a patch on series one in terms of how it made me feel or how invested I was in the storyline.

A previous poster said she felt that so many storylines were trying to be covered in the series that there was no depth to any of them because none of them could be slowly uncovered and unpicked. I agree with that opinion and I think that may be a big part of why the series felt a bit flat for me too.