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‘Heartstopper’: Inside the Gay Teen Rom-Com Everyone Is Swooning Over

A totally chill and not-at-all overenthusiastic guide to everything in “Heartstopper” that has fans losing their minds. (Surprise, it’s Olivia Colman!) Warning: Some spoilers.

As sunny days and summer flings approach, Netflix is heating things up with a new romance series—but one that’s almost too sticky sweet. Scratch that, actually—Heartstopper is so adorable. It’s perfect! I love it! It can do no wrong!

With a dedicated fan base singing its praises all over social media, a twee soundtrack ripped straight from a 2010’s Tumblr account, and the sweetest two youngsters playing the leads, Heartstopper will, well, stop your heart. (And no, I will not apologize for that corny pun.)

More realistically, it will: make your heart skip a beat, flip around and flutter with joy, shatter into a million pieces, etc.—all the swoony Hallmark things—as little Charlie (Joe Locke) experiences the epic highs and lows of high-school football (in England it’s called “rugby,” I guess). Charlie is gay, so dating at his all-boys school isn’t easy. His first fling seems really into him, dashing around the school to make out in corners and expressing their feelings for each other over Instagram DMs. But he won’t go public.

That sadness only lasts a little while, which is one of Heartstopper’s charms: even though Charlie faces plenty of wallflower issues, he’s still pretty confident about being gay and gets a real, thriving romance of his own with another bloke. Enter Nick (Kit Connor), a sports bro who recruits Charlie for the rugby team. Nick doesn’t just strut in all handsome and charming to take Charlie’s breath away, there’s a fun twist with his character—but more on that later.

Their chemistry is JAW-DROPPING. Seriously: if you love rom-coms, coming-of-age, or really, anything that falls under the “feel good” category of TV, Heartstopper is a jam. Speaking of jams, here’s another round of applause for the music—featuring, for example, “Don’t Delete the Kisses” by Wolf Alice, Frankie Cosmos, Maggie Rogers, etc.—which manages to fit the vibe of the project and sound like it was ripped straight from Charlie’s Spotify.

Alice Oseman’s original webcomic, Heartstopper has a rabid built-in fan base. They arrived in droves as soon as the batch of eight episodes landed on Netflix. Their fawning over the Heartstopper lovers made the series immediately soar to the trending page of Twitter with an outpouring of support for the adaptation.

Fans are especially struck by the amount of parallels the series has to the webcomic, grateful that there was so much respect for its source material. Remember that pen explosion in Episode 1? That’s straight from the comic.

We’re not even at the best part of the show yet, though. That comes in Episode 1, right around the end of the first chapter of the show: Academy Award-winner Olivia Colman makes a surprise appearance as Nick’s supportive mother. When I first saw her face—talk about heart-stopping! (Again, I will not apologize!)

Oseman had the same reaction after Colman joined the cast. “I literally thought this was the stupidest idea ever,” Oseman recalled when Colman’s name was first mentioned. “I thought there was no way she would want to be a part of this or anyone famous would want to be a part of this. I was proven wrong!”

The Heartstopper fans have immediately welcomed Colman into their universe, celebrating her touching scene later in the season—spoiler alert!—when she lovingly accepts her son after he comes out to her.

“thank you #heartstopper for giving us nick nelson,” one user shared, “to see him figure himself out, understand he is bi and tell his mum on his own terms in his own time and for her to just hug him.”

Oh, and Joe Locke, who plays Nick, can now call Colman his “unofficial mother-in-law” in his Instagram bio. Just one more addition to the sea of many reasons to love Heartstopper!

Fletcher PetersEntertainment Reporter

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