Journal of Popular Television, The - It’s a Sin, Jul 2023

Belonging to the retrovision genre, It’s a Sin (2021) dramatizes the early years of the pandemic. Audiences are shown what reality was like before and immediately after the outbreak of HIV/AIDS. It narrates the transition from a sex-positive era where non-heterosexual people were standing up for their freedom to love, have sex and enjoy life to an era of fear, illness and death that followed the outbreak of HIV. The argument of this article is that contrary to earlier representations of the initial years of the pandemic, It’s a Sin, not unlike Pose (2018–21), succeeds in addressing HIV/AIDS in an empowering rather than stigmatizing manner. In particular, It’s a Sin challenges previous representations of the early years of the pandemic by not contributing to the association of HIV/AIDS with a discourse of illness and death. What is different in this series to earlier representations was the fact that there is no blame towards people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), nor do we see them as passive victims of an unknown virus. Rather, by applying Chouliaraki’s (2006) ‘analytics of mediation’, it is argued that the series presents the social suffering that emerged with HIV/AIDS and provides space for audiences to reflect on their contribution to the suffering of others.

Popular culture representations of the outbreak, impact of and responses to HIV/AIDS have tended to focus on America. British responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic have been scarce, and when they have been present, have only occurred fleetingly. It’s a Sin (2021) is an unusual portrayal of HIV/AIDS in popular culture in its quintessential Britishness. Using the concept of stiff upper lip, as a stereotype of British affect, this article explores the ways in which different social classes in the series deal with the fact of homosexuality, and the growing threat of HIV/AIDS in the ten years between 1981 and 1991. The higher the social class, the more repressed and colder the characters are. This is further expressed through affect, and through the mise en scène of the family’s homes. The 1980s is often represented in popular culture as a decade of economic decline and poverty. Yet, It’s a Sin is a unique portrayal of life in 1980s London, which begins with confidence and freedom, and ends with a new strata of people who go on to transcend the social class exigencies of their families.

HIV prevention services across the United Kingdom received unprecedented requests for home testing kits following the airing of Russell T. Davies’s television series It’s a Sin (IAS) in January and February 2021. Professionals suggested a link between IAS’s retelling of AIDS crisis histories and people’s fears of ongoing HIV transmission, thus leading to increased online searches about HIV/AIDS. Little has been written about this impact of IAS on HIV health promotion practices specifically. Thus, in this article, I analyse a series of interviews with HIV health promoters in Scotland to detail how IAS has influenced HIV intervention techniques and health promotion strategies. I demonstrate how IAS provoked local and national dialogues about the contemporary context of HIV/AIDS in Scotland. I argue that it enabled conversations about the need for new media resources that accurately represent the specific and localized histories of HIV/AIDS. More directly, IAS in small part illuminated differences in intervention strategies between England and Scotland. Hence, it foregrounded the need for re-distributed institutional and material resources to streamline a Scottish agenda for ‘ending HIV’ by 2030.

Alternate histories have been a part of the television landscape in the United States since a 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone (1959–64) explored the multiple worlds theory. As an interdisciplinary subgenre of science fiction, historical fiction and often even contemporary sitcoms and dramas, alternate histories have only grown more fiscally successful and generically mature as television, itself, has matured and grown as a medium. The development of the television alternate history genre in the past decade parallels the growth of the literary genre in the 1990s, which was accompanied by awards, the normalization of the genre, and a small yet robust canon of scholarship. As such, this article on alternate histories relies heavily on the literary theory that came before it in (1) defining the televisual alternate history genre, (2) outlining the genre’s unique purposes and (3) historicizing the four subgenres of televised alternate histories: time travel narratives, parallel world theories, pure alternate histories, and fantastical narratives. A long-overlooked genre, alternate histories have important implications for ideological awareness of the past and the present.