In spite of the somewhat grudging heading, I did enjoy this; it slipped down/in very easily (unlike one of the central character’s post-break-up pick-up’s!) and Harris is an engaging protagonist – it would be easy to have made him either a self-pitying martyr or just one ‘much more sinned against than sinning’ but this was not the case. He was drawn, effectively as a pretty decently rounded character who did have elements of both of these clichéd characteristics but he was much more than this –and is certainly not without faults – sometimes quite glaring ones.
His friends are an entertaining, if somewhat predictable (rich/majority white) bunch – the older single guy still looking for love, the slutty older permanently single guy still chasing the twinks, the sharp-tongued uninhibited BFF – but they are largely entertaining.
The central ‘issue’ - why did Neil Harris’s 17-year-long boyfriend leave him on his unwanted surprise 50th birthday party – is a constant theme running through and by the end of this series some nice nuances had developed as to the reason(s) (still unexplained) as to why this might be the case.
I enjoy the effectively controlled brevity of each episode but the soundtrack music is too often rather drearily predictable. And in the last episode the (overly?) dramatic cliffhangers were a little heavy handed; presumably they must know there will be at least one more series, given its producer and star pedigree so they6 could afford to do this.