Heartstopper Forever is a near-perfect farewell to a series that changed TV forever

I’m not sure I’d ever experienced queer joy with such purity until Heartstopper arrived in 2022. I definitely didn’t know how much I needed it.

Since then, the landscape of LGBTQ+ media has been transformed. Queer joy is no longer a rarity; its importance is recognised both within and beyond the queer community.

I have several children in my life so dear to me who came out as LGBTQ+ before they’d even entered their teens, and being able to bond over the love story of Nick and Charlie as a gateway to conversations about their sexuality has been a gift from Alice Oseman that few of us who’ve received it could ever repay.

After three adorable series watching Nick, Charlie and their queer friendship circle grow over two years, Heartstopper is ambitiously bowing out with a movie, Heartstopper Forever, following its leading he’s, she’s, they’s and everything in between as they prepare to fly the nest.

Nick is tentatively hoping to go to Leeds, a five-hour train ride away from Charlie. Here lies the film’s central tension: can such a young love survive an extortionately priced and reliably unreliable national rail service?

Nick is crippled with anxiety. Dreams of Charlie succumbing to his eating disorder have caused him to spiral, and he loses himself in the pressure of transitioning from childhood to adulthood: an uncertain future, a crisis of identity, and the realisation that life moves on beyond the confines of the whimsical (fictional) town of Truham.

Charlie is kind, sensitive and possesses an emotional intelligence I’ve barely seen in adults twice his age, but even he is tested by Nick’s self-destructive behaviour.

Joe Locke and Kit Connor have quite rightly been two of the biggest breakout stars of this decade thanks to Heartstopper,

So as the curtain closes on Nick and Charlie, watching these two young stars channelling everything they’ve absorbed over the last four years – from working on huge box office blockbusters, Marvel series and Broadway shows and elevating as actors who were once finding their feet to being so much more powerful in their performances than they were just four years ago – is really quite moving.

The rest of the gang take much more of a back seat than they ever have before. There’s barely a scene that isn’t centred on Nick and Charlie, while the supporting cast quietly prepare to leave Truham via their own different paths.

For Heartstopper’s most ardent fans – a bracket which, at 38 years old, I’m somewhat shamefully placing myself in – that’s perhaps the only disappointment.

Darcy, Tara and Isaac, in particular, appear so infrequently, with so little exploration after being such pivotal parts of the series, that it feels like a wasted – and actually quite cruel – choice for their swansong, unless there’s a master plan to expand the Heartstopper universe, which seems entirely plausible.

But Heartstopper Forever captures everything that has always made the series so magical: the uncomplicated romance between two young boys falling in love at an age when so many gay men could barely say aloud who they really were.

As Nick and Charlie have grown, the show has matured alongside them. Its earlier series were criticised for being too PG; now their sex life is on full display, handled with remarkable care and poignancy. Somehow, the film creates space for two horny teenagers while remaining completely true to Heartstopper’s unrivalled wholesomeness.

The other major change is the recasting of Nick’s mum, the unenviable task handed to Anna Maxwell Martin, who has to fill the shoes of Olivia Colman.

Without giving anything away, the film’s standout moment is Maxwell Martin’s monologue about leaning into love, even when it’s the scariest thing in the world to do.

Replacing Colman sounds impossible, but Maxwell Martin delivers something so powerful I’m not convinced the scene would have landed with greater impact from anyone else.

What started as a graphic novel by Alice Oseman and was so thoughtfully adapted for television by Patrick Walters has become one of the defining television stories of the last decade.

It’s no exaggeration to say Heartstopper changed what LGBTQ+ television could be, proving queer audiences deserved hopeful, ordinary love stories told with the same tenderness long afforded to everyone else.

Heartstopper Forever closes the book on Nick and Charlie, two queer heroes who I have no doubt will be adored for decades to come. The film is almost unrecognisable from the first series, when, as Charlie himself says while looking at an old photo, “We were babies.”

It takes courage to let these teenagers become adults, and to trust that the audience is ready to grow up alongside them.

By refusing to preserve Heartstopper in amber, Heartstopper Forever becomes a fitting farewell to a series that has always believed queer lives deserve to keep moving forward.

I’ll miss it enormously. But I’m also incredibly grateful it arrived when it did – for the generations of queer young people who now get to see themselves reflected with such hope, and for adults like me who finally got to watch the teenage love story we always dreamed of play out as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

Heartstopper Forever is available to stream on Netflix today.