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‘We’re Screwed’: TV’s Most Prophetic Creator Sounds the Alarm

Russell T. Davies tells us why his Alan Cumming-starring series, “Tip Toe,” is the warning siren we all need to hear.

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We’re screwed.

It might even be hopeless.

That’s the prophecy elicited from TV’s most prophetic creator, Russell T. Davies. Don’t let that discourage you from watching his searing, outraged, utterly brilliant, and compulsorily urgent new series Tip Toe. Often upsetting as it might be, it’s one of the most fascinating, fiery, and transfixing series I’ve watched this year.

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Currently airing on Starz after its debut in the U.K., where the controversial series stunned by scoring hit ratings, it’s the latest in Davies’ ranging accounts of the struggle for acceptance, dignity, political visibility, governmental accountability, and the right not just to happiness, but to a future. Particularly when it comes to the marginalized or disenfranchised: His series include Queer as Folk, Years and Years, It’s a Sin, and even Doctor Who.

As Davies told me over Zoom, Tip Toe is his unfiltered screed that every person should watch. And he thinks it’s a miracle anyone in the U.S. can watch it at all.

“When we were making the show, we imagined that no American company would ever buy it,” he said. “We thought this wouldn’t ever get any American funding because of what it says about Trump and because of what it says about the state of the world.”

Tip Toe is set in Manchester, centered on neighbors Leo (The Traitors host Alan Cumming), a 60-year-old firebrand gay man who owns a bar in the city’s gay district, and Clive (David Morrissey), a conservative blue-collar worker growing resentful of a society where it’s increasingly hard to make ends meet.

The seemingly mundane act of Leo giving Clive a spare key to his house portends an escalating feud. Technology’s radicalization of people, political polarization, homophobia, and the tension over whose rights matter more pack into a powder keg that explodes with dire consequences. Left behind in the rubble: the harsh realization that this thriller isn’t sensational; it is the reality most refuse to see.

“There is a lot of anger, fury, and righteousness written into this show,” Davies said. “And I had to be absolutely clear about that from the first moment.”

That first moment startles. The disturbing opening sequence pans across that Manchester neighborhood’s street, eventually revealing Cumming, as Leo, strung up and hung from a light pole, dead. Killed by a lynch mob. Made up of people he knew. Who he lived next to.

The horrifying scene returns at the top of each episode, revealing the events that led a throng, spearheaded by Morrissey’s Clive, to commit the act; the final reveal is as unflinching and, as such, as upsetting as you might imagine. But Davies insists it’s key not to imagine. It was imperative to watch.

“It’s a very clear statement of where we’re heading,” he said. “If we didn’t start with that image, the second scene is a man locked out of his house in his underpants, who has to go to the neighbor for a spare key. That looks like a domestic comedy, and that would’ve been a bit of a lie.”

Capturing the audience’s attention from the start wasn’t just a challenge, the way it is for most series. It was a mission statement for a series that has a lot to say.

“Television’s so busy these days,” Davies said. “You’re up against 500 other dramas with ghosts, vampires, detectives, crimes, and car chases. It’s like, here I am with a little gay drama set in the North of England that is complaining about telephones and technology. You have to make a statement. You have to be heard, and absolutely heard.”

Tip Toe is Russell T. Davies, at age 63, sounding a siren.

Having survived the various stages of the push for LGBT+ rights over his six decades, not to mention the pendulum swing of extremist cultural attitudes as political parties trade power, Davies noticed the alarming, violent nature of modern divisiveness simmering. This time, though, he estimates it’s worse. There have been inciting leaders before. But there hasn’t been a lawless digital age where they can do their bidding.

He encapsulates this in a remarkable exchange early in Tip Toe between Cumming’s Leo and Melba (Paul Rhys), an aging, effeminate friend who had been with him in the trenches all those years before.

“Do you think it’s coming back?” Leo asks. “The shit from the ’90s? We were despised. But you read that stuff online now, and it sounds just the same.”

“Do I think it’s coming back? It’s back, you fucking idiot,” Melba responds. “Right now, it’s here. It’s a storm. It’s a tide. It’s a great big tsunami, and we’re in the middle of it right now…They let us all come out. So now we’re standing in the open, ready for them to shoot us down.”

Wonder where the show’s title comes from?: “I used to walk into a room and just go ‘ta-da!’ Now I tiptoe, just in case.”

Then the kicker: “The president of America has given these men permission to attack us.”

Tip Toe exposes the incredible, confounding, one might say…hypocrisy of life as a queer person in 2026. It depicts the haven of Manchester’s gay bars and that community’s fierce embrace of its trans population. It shows the ambivalence, beyond acceptance, many people have towards their LGBT+ neighbors. It peeks at the lifeline that online outreach and social media can be.

And it shows how all of those things can and likely will be upended as hatred that may have been shadowed or silenced, but never actually gone, resurfaces with the permission of a spotlight and a microphone.

“I write a lot of gay material, and I live in a world of trans politics, queer politics, and gay rights,” Davies said. “That’s my platform. No, it’s my life. It’s not a platform, it’s my life. It’s who I am.”

He remembered putting a trans character on Doctor Who, a series considered “family viewing.” “That’s like lighting a touchpaper for every maniac out there,” he said.

He found himself in a situation of regularly, if not daily, being called a pedophile or a groomer online because of that creative decision.

“Now, I can take that. I’m old, I’m strong, I have money, I have security. I know my mind. I’m completely fine,” he said. “But it makes you start to imagine being a trans person. Imagine being 18 years old and trans and working in a bar and living in a flat without much money, and the outside world screaming at you and demanding your non-existence, daily, hourly.”

One day, he was signing books, and a trans couple came up to him. He asked them how they were. They leaned in and, very quietly, said, “We are terrified.”

“That was Britain in 2024,” Davies said. “Great Britain, the U.K., where members of society are saying we are terrified to exist.”

Fear and anger, Davies admitted, is a driving force behind Tip Toe. So, too, however, is his sheepishness over not realizing that we’d somehow arrive here.

“I never stopped to consider when you ask for equality and visibility and representation, what happens next? Which is amazingly stupid now that I think about it,” he said. “I think I thought that was just a high mountain to climb, and at the top, there was just a lovely view. I realize now, slapping my head with stupidity, that actually no society ever reaches that point.”

The biggest alarm ringing, he maintains, is how technology, digital culture, and the Elon Musks of the world—enabled by leaders like Trump—contribute to what he thinks is an unstoppable avalanche that will bury any societal progress anyone thought had been made.

“Had I been younger, I would’ve thought, ‘Oh, let me be fair. Let me be reasonable,’” he said. “But actually, at the age of 63, I think I’ve got the absolute right and the seniority to say, ‘This is a complete fuck-up.’”

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Kevin FallonEditor-at-Large, Obsessed

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