I’m going to avoid spoilers for anyone who hasn’t yet watched Tip Toe. That means this review has to remain a little vague, but I think there’s a wider, more important conversation to be had.

I wanted to love Tip Toe. I wanted it to throttle me. I wanted it to make me interrogate my own place in the world as a gay man living with bipolar disorder and leave me wondering what more I could do. I wanted to come away motivated, inspired and challenged.

Instead, I left feeling lectured and, if I’m honest, a little more hopeless than I did before I pressed play.

This one misses the mark, and that genuinely breaks my heart because, had it gone where it was demanding to go, this could have been a groundbreaking, trailblazing and deeply affecting series.

Whatever the reason, the series buckles under the weight of trying to tell a horrific story in a way that remains palatable.

The result is suspense-killing pauses for Russell T Davies’ thoughts and feelings to spill out through the characters. Moments that could have become unflinching sequences, devastating turns and gut-wrenching revelations instead become speeches. Rather than trusting the audience to arrive at its own conclusions, the series repeatedly explains itself.

That is where Tip Toe loses me.

Great drama asks difficult questions. It doesn’t answer them before the audience has had chance to ask them themselves.

The casting, however, is exceptional. Every character feels grounded, believable and fully realised. They aren’t archetypes. They’re people trying to exist in a world that constantly suggests they are somehow lesser simply for being themselves.

The performances capture an emotional truth the script doesn’t always trust. These characters aren’t simply performing personalities. They’re performing normality while carrying deep, internal suffering, constantly looking to the world around them for instructions on how to survive. It may sound like the same thing, but it isn’t. One is an outward performance; the other is an internal negotiation with fear, shame and acceptance. As a result, the performances carry far more emotional weight than the script often allows them to.

With that said, there are some wonderful exchanges between Leo and Clive as they edge towards a relationship that feels both tangible and entirely believable, yet never quite arrives. That hesitation feels deeply human.

There’s something equally compelling about Melba. She carries herself with the warmth and vocal energy of a community matriarch, someone who instinctively gathers people around her. It’s in these quieter moments, where the series simply allows its characters to exist, that Tip Toe comes closest to becoming the drama I desperately wanted it to be.

I also loved the way the series hints at a community divided. For a brief moment, we glimpse rivalries and tensions unfolding only a stone’s throw from the world inhabited by the main characters. It makes the setting feel lived in, as though countless other stories are unfolding just beyond the frame. There’s enough richness in those glimpses alone to make me think there’s an entirely different series waiting to be told.

The escalation of the drama is also oddly uneven. Rather than building genuine suspense, it often feels like padding before a finale that isn’t especially shocking because the destination is revealed almost immediately. It’s a strange structural decision that undercuts much of what follows.

There are also moments where realism gives way to convenience. Certain events would almost certainly have escalated beyond anyone’s control. Authorities would have become involved, bystanders would have intervened and situations would have spiralled in ways the series never allows. I understand why. Those outcomes would complicate the story it wants to tell. They may also have made it a more compelling one.

The world is changing, but it isn’t broken yet.

There’s also very little relief from the relentless bleakness. Life, even at its darkest, isn’t a constant descent. Communities rally. People laugh. People find each other. Moments of kindness emerge when they’re needed most. Here, too many characters simply absorb everything because the plot requires them to, making the world feel less authentic than it should.

The greatest tragedy isn’t what happens on screen. It’s that the series leaves so little room to imagine a future beyond it.

Which brings me to a broader frustration. Why are stories like this still treated as event television? Why does LGBTQ+ drama, or any story that isn’t centred on heterosexual white British experiences, continue to be framed as something exceptional rather than simply part of our cultural landscape?

You see it in soaps all the time. The storylines carrying the greatest weight are often centred around characters who come from different backgrounds or approach life in a substantially different way to the majority. Of course, those stories deserve to be told. But let the story happen to the people, not the people become the story. That’s not how life works.

The most compelling drama doesn’t ask us to see a gay character, a trans character or an immigrant. It asks us to see a person. Their identity shapes their experience, but it shouldn’t consume it. The strongest stories trust the audience to recognise the humanity first and understand everything else through that lens.

Tip Toe will undoubtedly leave many viewers in tears and inspire countless heartfelt social media posts. It is ambitious, well acted and clearly made with conviction. But ambition alone doesn’t make something a masterpiece.

For me, Tip Toe ultimately underestimates its audience. It mistakes explanation for storytelling, speeches for drama and inevitability for emotional impact. Had it trusted its characters as much as it trusted its message, I genuinely believe it could have been one of the defining British dramas of the decade.