Russell T Davies’s Tip Toe, a fine new drama on Starz, begins at the end. Leo Struther, a gay Manchester bar owner played with phenomenal grace by Alan Cumming, is hanging dead from a streetlight outside his own house. A woman screams. His neighbor, Clive Goss, stands on his porch, breathing heavily. It is a cold, brutal image, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. Then, as so many series do nowadays, the story goes back in time—ten days, to be precise—to show us how Leo got there. The technique might feel familiar, but Davies is not interested in cheap mystery. By revealing the destination, he transforms the journey into an elegy. We watch Leo live his ordinary days, exchange pleasantries, fall into small adventures, and all the while we know that the light outside his house is waiting. The scream, the heavy breath, the body swaying—these details are not merely atmosphere; they are the emotional key to the whole story. And yet the series refuses to be simply grim. Some of what we see is sweet, even celebratory; there are laughs and warm moments that make you almost forget the opening, and for a moment you might even believe the ending will somehow change. This is the gift of Davies’s storytelling: he makes you love a world even as he walks it toward catastrophe. This is not a story about a single villain or a fatal mistake. It is about the slow, terrible collision of private fear and public hatred, and about a community that thought it had found safety only to realize it was standing in the open.
The story proper begins in a much lighter register. Leo, chasing a one-night stand who has stolen his laptop, finds himself locked out of his house in nothing but his underwear. He goes next door to ask if he can use the phone to call his friend Stephanie, who can bring him a spare key. It is a funny and vulnerable image, and it introduces the Goss family, with whom Leo has lived in amicable distance for fourteen years. Clive (David Morrissey) is an out-of-work electrician, wary and watchful, his face a map of disappointments. Marie (Pooky Quesnel), his wife, doesn’t like him, and the feeling seems mutual; their marriage is a cold, familiar arrangement. Their sixteen-year-old son George (Jackson Connor) is gay and deeply closeted, terrified of being discovered. Their twenty-five-year-old son Saul (Joseph Evans) is the opposite: an easygoing hunk who still lives at home, secretly earns money on OnlyFans, and accepts everyone without judgment. The Goss household is a study in suppressed feeling; every room seems to hold something unsaid. In this first meeting, the Gosses seem almost comically ordinary—a family of strangers sharing a house, bickering over small things, hiding their secrets in plain sight. Leo is gracious, a little amused, grateful for the help. There is no hint of the disaster ahead. But Davies is planting seeds. The locked door, the spare key, the borrowed phone, the neighborly obligation: these are the small threads that will pull together into a noose. For fourteen years, Leo and the Gosses have nodded hello and kept their distance. That distance, Davies suggests, is what makes tragedy possible. We do not harm the people we know; we harm the people we have decided not to know.
Clive’s next move is an act of willful, somewhat disturbing friendliness. In what seems like a desire to help—or perhaps to avoid dealing with Leo the next time he locks himself out—he copies Leo’s key and installs a lockbox by his own door. By the old rule of Chekhov’s gun, a key copied in Episode 1 is bound to turn in a lock later, and Davies knows it. But at the moment, it feels almost touching. Clive, unemployed and humiliated, wants to be needed. Leo, generous and perhaps too trusting, gives him work at his bar. The Spit and Polish sits in the middle of Manchester’s long-established gay village, a place that has been a safe space for its employees and regulars for years. There is Zee (Iz Hesketh), a young trans woman who has been sleeping in the bar because she is frightened of new flatmates since coming out; the bar is her shelter. There is Melba (Paul Rhys), a former drag performer, brilliant and bruised, who holds down the end of the bar and carries a quiet, hopeless torch for Leo. These are the people who make up Leo’s real family. Davies draws them with tenderness and wit, letting their conversations meander, argue, comfort, and joke. The bar is a stage for small dramas of connection—a compliment, a shared cigarette, a story told at two in the morning. But it is also a fortress, and the fortress has just let in a man who does not share its values. Clive carries with him the toxins of the internet, the half-digested conspiracy theories that promise to explain his own failures by blaming everyone else. He does not look like an enemy. He looks like a neighbor. And that, perhaps, is the deepest horror of Tip Toe: the threat to the gay village is not only a marauding outsider; it is the man next door, the one who copies your key, the one you invite into your home because you believe in kindness. The series understands that safety is never permanent, and that the most dangerous people are often the ones who smile at you from the porch.
The story that follows is not a conventional crime narrative. There is no single culprit, no neat motive, no moment of obvious villainy. Instead, Davies builds an escalating spiral of misunderstanding—not the innocent kind, not a simple case of crossed wires, but a contemporary habit of mind. It is a way of seeing the world that is blinkered, closed to facts and open to conspiracies. Clive is a consumer of social media disinformation. He believes that AIDS and COVID are fake, that hidden forces control the world, that he is constantly under threat. He lives in fear, and fear is contagious. Every innocuous interaction between Clive and Leo becomes, in Clive’s imagination, evidence of something sinister. A kind word is a trap. A gesture of friendship is a threat. The series traces how a man who sees himself as powerless can be led to commit an act of devastating violence, all the while believing he is the victim. It is a rough watch, deliberately uncomfortable, because the mechanisms it exposes are not foreign to us. We recognize the rhetoric, the algorithms, the paranoid thrill of certainty. But Davies balances the darkness with the stubborn persistence of love. Zee finds moments of joy. Melba’s loyalty never wavers. Saul, the young man who accepts everyone, offers a model of grace that feels almost utopian. The conversations in Tip Toe ebb and flow like compressed playlets, carrying enormous weight lightly; characters say more with what they do not say, and the silences between them are as eloquent as the dialogue. There is something schematic about the overall arc, a sense that Davies is guiding his characters toward a predetermined conclusion. Yet the performances make the schematic feel utterly alive. Cumming gives Leo a radiant vulnerability, while Morrissey makes Clive a tragic figure, closed-off and frightened, impossible to hate completely. Paul Rhys’s Melba is exquisite, a portrait of worn-out dignity and enduring hope. Clive and Leo are not simply representatives of opposing forces; they are individuals, trapped in a story larger than themselves, and their humanity is the thing that makes the tragedy unbearable. What lingers after each episode is not the plot but the ache of recognition: this could happen, this is happening, this has already happened somewhere to someone who never got a series to tell their story.
Tip Toe is the latest chapter in a long career of telling queer stories on television. Davies changed the landscape with Queer as Folk in 1999, which was also set in Manchester’s Canal Street and dared to show gay life as messy, exuberant, and ordinary. He brought gender fluidity to Doctor Who, the beloved family series he revived in 2005 and returned to in 2023. He explored the interior lives of LGBTQ+ people in Cucumber and Banana, both set in the same city he has called home since the late 1980s. Manchester is not just a backdrop for Davies; it is a character, a place with its own history of queer resilience and public life. The streets, the bars, the houses—they are all charged with memory. Tip Toe belongs to that tradition, but it is also a reckoning with it. The gay village was built on the promise that coming out would lead to safety, that visibility would lead to acceptance. Davies’s new series asks a painful question: what happens when that promise is broken? The title, spoken by a dark prophet within the story, gives the answer. “It’s a storm, it’s a tide, it’s a great big tsunami,” the character says. “We’re in the middle of it right now. … If you’d asked me in 1996 what do you think 2026 will be like, I’d have said ‘glory days.’ … But they tricked us didn’t they? They let us all come out, so now we’re standing in the open ready for them to shoot us down. I used to walk into a room and just go, ‘Ta-da!’ Now I tip toe, just in case.” This is the series’ thesis, stated with devastating clarity. The gains of the past decades are not permanent. The freedom to be visible is also a vulnerability. The celebration of difference can become a target. And the response of a frightened man is not to fight for freedom but to shrink, to tip toe, to make himself small in the hope of being overlooked. It is a warning, but it is also a confession—a reminder that hope and fear have always lived side by side in the queer experience.
For all its darkness, Tip Toe is not a despairing work. It is inspiring and depressing, hopeless and hopeful by turns. The series refuses to look away from the forces that can destroy a community, but it also refuses to reduce that community to its suffering. Leo’s bar is full of people who have chosen to be brave in small ways every day: a trans woman who dares to sleep instead of flee, a drag performer who lets herself love without expectation, a young man who accepts his brother without a flicker of judgment. These moments of grace are not decorations; they are the very substance of the story. Davies has always understood that queer life is not only about trauma and struggle, but about joy, desire, friendship, and the ordinary miracle of being oneself in a world that often demands otherwise. Tip Toe honors that joy even as it chronicles its destruction. The five episodes are beautifully wrought and delicately performed, carried by dialogue that feels both natural and carefully composed, like music played under a conversation. Alan Cumming gives the performance of a career, infusing Leo with warmth, wit, and a haunting awareness of his own fragility. David Morrissey makes Clive a tragic figure, a man whose fear is so deep that it overwhelms his humanity. The supporting cast, from Iz Hesketh’s vulnerable Zee to Paul Rhys’s magnificent Melba, creates a world that feels lived-in and achingly real. By the time the final episode returns to the image with which the series began—the streetlight, the body, the screaming woman—we understand that this is not a mystery to be solved but a loss to be mourned. We have spent ten days with Leo. We have watched him laugh, love, argue, and dream. And we have watched him tip toe, just in case, into a world that was not ready to let him stand tall. The series leaves us with a question: what do we do with a freedom that can be taken away? Davies’s answer, tender and furious, is that we keep making safe spaces, we keep telling stories, we keep walking into rooms and saying ta-da, even when we are afraid. Because the alternative—tiptoeing through life, trying not to be seen—is a kind of death in itself. And as Tip Toe makes devastatingly clear, we are worth more than that. It is a hard series to watch, but it is an essential one, because it reminds us that the lights in our windows can go out, and that the only way to keep them burning is to refuse, together, to tip toe.