Heartstopper season 3 review and star rating: ★★★
It’s getting to the point where Joe Locke and Kit Connor, the UK’s most recognisable Gen Z acting exports, look a bit silly playing 16-year-olds trying to lose their virginity. Both have led Broadway productions and high-profile US screen projects. But no one ever came to Heartstopper, the impossibly cute drama about two queer teenage boys in love, for a reality hit. Millions of all ages have craved this mainstream LGBTQ representation for so long that we’re willing to suspend our belief; the sickly-sweetness sinking like a tonic that not quite corrects our own queer traumas but reassures us that things can be different.
This third dispatch from Nick, Charlie and friends isn’t quite the hedonistic shag-fest fans may be hoping for after two seasons dedicated to watching the boys hornily snog behind any school doorway/locker room/large enough pile of coats that offered a moments’ privacy. Heartstopper season 3 can feel slow, craving more structure, and more excitement, offering a series of softly entertaining vignettes that meander rather than soar. In short, nothing of major significance happens, except a storyline about how Charlie’s in a rehabilitation centre because his eating disorder has worsened.
Read more: Bradley Riches on Gen Z love, ‘going evil’ and Heartstopper season 3
The trailer for Heartstopper season 3, on Netflix 3 October
Heartstopper season 3: plenty of naked Kit Connor
Rejoice, though, because who wanted anything to happen anyway? Even if Nick and Charlie haven’t graduated from high school, Connor and Locke certainly have, and have become absolute thirst traps. Connor spends most of the time half naked but smiling sweetly, as if the idea of carnal desire had never occurred to him. Their chemistry explodes, but that creates a problem: it’s difficult to navigate the hanky-panky on screen for a pre-watershed audience. Alice Oseman’s leads are partly presented as young men entering their sexual prime, part Ken dolls. Some of the intimacy feels awkward and flatly unrealistic; no one smiles like that when they’re getting down to it, do they, really? Sometimes during the grown-up stuff they look more like they’re telling each other ghost stories and raiding the midnight snack jar than exploring each others’ bodies.
Heartstopper season 3 eventually finds its zephyr in the final episode when jeopardy is introduced by way of Nick’s difficult decision about whether to go to university far away from Charlie. It could have been extrapolated across more episodes and you feel for them. Regardless, the show continues being absolutely adorable, platforming important conversations about transgender identities, the power of the press and platonic friendship, though you crave threads of tension to be heightened. Charlie’s eating disorder storyline for instance feels too lightly touched; we see more upset from his passive-aggressive mother rallying against her son having a sleepover than we do from a boy checked into a health clinic because of the severity of his condition.
The challenge perhaps is that a show aimed at young teens has ended up appealing to such wider audiences. Following the recommissioning of Red, White and Royal Blue, there is clearly a gap for more mainstream queer programming.
Heartstopper season 3 lands on Netflix on 3 October