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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 had anticipated after two seasons dedicated to watching the boys snog behind any school doorway/locker room/large enough pile of coats that offered a moments’ privacy. Heartstopper season 3 finds the joy again, delivering another welcome hit of catharsis, though it can feel slow, craving more structure, offering a series of vignettes that meander rather than soar.
Read more: Bradley Riches on Gen Z love, ‘going evil’ and Heartstopper season 3
Heartstopper season 3: plenty of naked Kit Connor
Rejoice, though: 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 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, how sex can be many different things and platonic friendship. Charlie’s eating disorder storyline is sensitively handled, but feels 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.
Heartstopper season 3 lands on Netflix on 3 October