At times, “Tip Toe” is about as nuanced as a slap to the face. When it gives its characters room to breathe, it can be remarkable drama, anchored by two of the year’s best performances. When Russell T. Davies turns those characters into mouthpieces for the screenwriter, it can feel contrived to shout a message instead of finding one organically through storytelling. And yet one can’t deny the power and the timeliness of what Davies is trying to say. If he feels the need to pick up a megaphone, one can hardly blame him.
For anyone who only knows Davies as the man who resurrected “Doctor Who,” he also has a long legacy of breakthrough LGBTQ television, including “Queer as Folk” and “It’s a Sin.” He adds to that resume with “Tip Toe,” an examination of the increasing violence against the queer community in England and around the world. It’s loud, preachy, and includes lines like “You’re queer in 2026—you’re a political act” and “The President of the United States has given these men permission to attack us.” While the inclusion of a gender-critical character has drawn criticism, no one would mistake this for a broad “both sides” vision of reality. If anything, Davies is aggressively blunt in his portrayal of how neighbors on other sides of the political, sexual, and empathetic spectrums collide in tragedy. Some characters can feel like mouthpieces, but what they say is urgent enough to make it work.
“Tip Toe” opens with a horrifying image: Leo (Alan Cumming) is hanging dead from a lamppost on an ordinary London street. We know this story will end in his murder, and it will be public, violent, and involve his neighbor. Opening each episode with a few moments after Leo’s death gives the show the feel of a slow-motion train wreck. We know it’s going to end horribly; we just don’t know how we’ll get there.
The show flashes back ten days to the first domino when Leo gets locked out of his house in his underwear. It forces him to the flat next door, home to the miserable Clive (David Morrissey), a man watching life slip away and whose unhappiness has been weaponized online. He knows almost nothing about his two sons—which will be the main reason for the tragedy, outside of his rampant, violent homophobia—and his wife appears to hate him. To truly capture Clive’s state of mind in bolded print, Davies ends one episode by showing four of the five main characters masturbating while Clive watches execution videos on his phone. They all release to the timing of a gunshot in a video that probably shouldn’t be online.
We also meet Clive’s sons: 16-year-old George (Jackson Connor) and 25-year-old Saul (Joseph Evans). The latter has a successful OnlyFans persona, popular among the workers at Leo’s Canal Street bar, The Spit & Polish. If his oldest being a softcore superstar wasn’t enough to eventually send conservative Clive reeling, the bigger secret in his house is that George is gay. When George reaches out to Leo for advice about a boy he loves, Leo sees some of the lost teenagers who have worked at his bar over the years, and he tries to help. Should Leo be advising a 16-year-old on his sex life? Davies and Cumming are smart enough to recognize this isn’t something even the most progressive parents would like, but Cumming captures how Leo’s concern and care override decorum. He has seen closeted teens end up dead, and he is merely trying to stop his neighbor from meeting the same fate.
As Clive does some electrical work at Leo’s bar, tension rises over five episodes, often through direct dialogue. Brexit, trans issues, anti-lockdown rhetoric, and even the crazy theory that AIDS wasn’t a big deal work their way into the scripts. The show works best when the talking points are woven into the storytelling instead of bedazzled on top of it.
And that’s most evident in the uniformly great performances, especially Connor, Evans, and Iz Hesketh in the supporting cast. But this show belongs to Morrissey and Cumming. The former understands how to make this ordinary bloke terrifying. How many Clives are out there right now? Men who blame their failures on everything but themselves? Morrissey plays Clive with a chilling ordinariness—he’s an awful human being, but he’s also so, so average.
Cumming is even better. Sure, he’s the character most likely to become a mouthpiece for Davies, but he also finds so many delicate, nuanced bits of backstory to make the messages feel genuine. Someone who has lived with HIV for decades, watched young gay men struggle through his bar, and even had his own recent breakup of a long-term relationship—Cumming and Davies embed this guy with so much history that we buy how scared he is of the pending future. “Tip Toe” should frighten you, too.
Whole series screened for review. Premieres on Starz on October 2, 2026.
