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There are shows you enjoy, but they kinda follow you around like a shadow after you’ve finished them, and pop into your head like a jumpscare while you’re making dinner or scrolling mindlessly on your phone. Tip Toe falls squarely into that category for me.

Russell T Davies has spent decades writing queer television that understands something many people outside our community still don’t quite grasp: progress isn’t a straight line. Rights can be won and then chipped away at ’til they shatter again, and acceptance can feel solid until suddenly it doesn’t, and the vibes of our society can change far more quickly than we’d like to believe.

This is a theme that runs through much of his work, from Queer as Folk to It’s A Sin,Ìý²ú³Ü³Ù Tip Toe might be the bleakest expression of it yet.

Set around Manchester’s Canal Street, the series follows Leo, played with enormous warmth and complexity by Alan Cumming, and his increasingly hostile neighbour Clive, played with terrifying authenticity by David Morrissey. There’s a host of 17cÆð²ÝÉçÇøIA+ people, like Leo’s ex and all the staff at the Canal Street queer bar (who are all played with true heart), as well as Clive’s unhappy and ignored wife, and his two sons, who are the catalyst for this neighbourhood dispute turning ugly.

On paper, it sounds almost deceptively simple: A neighbourhood dispute, personality clashes, families and communities misunderstanding each other and not communicating out of fear and ignorance. They’re all kinds of conflicts that could sit comfortably inside any contemporary British drama, really.

But Davies isn’t actually interested in neighbourly disputes, which you understand from the very first scene – be warned, it’s a deeply horrifying one. What he’s interested in is the process by which run-of-the-mil grievances become something uglier, the way resentment gets fed and shaped into something hard and fucked up.

Watching Clive’s worldview, which is already narrow and conservative, narrow even more over the course of the series is unsettling because he feels familiar. The vast majority of us all know a Clive; I know I sure as hell do. Maybe it’s a relative who has disappeared down a Facebook rabbit hole, or mate disppearing into the online manosphere. Or one of the growing number of public figures whose entire career now seems to revolve around (and be financially reliant on) convincing themselves that queer and trans people are personally responsible for every problem in modern society.

That’s where Tip Toe becomes difficult to shake off. For all its thriller elements, and for all the media coverage describing it as a political drama, what the show captures most effectively is a feeling — that low-level anxiety many 17cÆð²ÝÉçÇøIA+ people have been carrying around for years now, often without fully acknowledging it.

The show’s defining line, “I used to walk into a room and go ta-dahhhh! Now I tip toe,” landed hard for me. It articulates a feeling that has become surprisingly common, and one that I’ve discussed with countless fellow queers in recent years. Not necessarily fear in the most dramatic sense of the word, but like… an overabundance of caution, is the only wsy I can think to word it? Never quite knowing what the room will be like before walking in anymore, and so feeling ready and prepared to shrink ourselves and shut up, just in case.

It’s the sort of thing that would have sounded absurdly pessimistic to many queer people ten years ago, and yet here we are.

What makes the series work so well is that Davies understands these feelings rarely arrive right off the bat with  grand acts of discrimination or violence. More often they creep in through headlines, political talking points, social media pile-ons, off-hand discriminatory comments, or endless debates in which queer people are discussed as concepts rather than actual human beings. None of those things seem particularly significant on their own, but together though, they create an atmosphere that grows. And Tip Toe is fundamentally a show about atmosphere — atmosphere of a neighbourhood, of a street, but also of a country, of a world, and how quickly they can shift from tolerant and accepting to aggressive and violent.

Not every element of this lands perfectly, in my opinion. There’s moments where Davies appears determined to wrestle every social issue of the 2020s into the same story, and occasionally you can feel the show’s machinery straining under the weight of trying to cram it in. But I think moments feel kinda forgivable because the series is operating from such a place of genuine urgency. Tip Toe isn’t interested in being tidy, it’s a bit all over the shop and chaotic because society being all over the shop and chaotic is the reason for sounding this alarm.

And maybe that’s why the show has divided audiences.

Some viewers will undoubtedly find it heavy-handed, and there’s no doubt in my mind that some people – a lot of straights, but even some of those in more privileged positions from our community too – will think it’s catastrophising.

But many – dare I say most – 17cÆð²ÝÉçÇøIA+ people may find themselves having a very different reaction altogether. There were multiple points while watching Tip Toe, where the endless stream of headlines we’ve all been living through over the past few years – stories I’ve written myself even – would pop into my head; exact real-world scenarios of the horrifying drama I was watching. Like the attacks on trans youth and healthcare, and the vast amount of moral panics – like the framing of trans people as pedophiles or groomers, just like conservatives used to say about gay people a few decades ago. Like Anita Bryant reincarnated, who thought the easier target was further down our acronym.

By the time the brutal finale arrives, Davies doesn’t really seem to be asking audiences whether they agree with him, he’s asking whether they’ve properly been paying attention or not.

And that’s what I found made Tip Toe so effective, and phenomenally fucking unsettling. Underneath the drama, the dark humour, the entertaining and well-cooked performances, and the thriller mechanics sits a question that feels uncomfortably relevant in 2026: if this is where the rhetoric is now, what do we expect the end game will look like?

Yes, Tip Toe is heavy-handed and direct, but that doesn’t mean it’s being overdramatic. I doubt anyone’s immediate assumption is that the end result of the garden variety bigotry they are experiencing would be their own murder – but I daresay historically it sure as shit has.