PRIDE

There’s plenty here for straight viewers to learn, certainly. More important, though, is Pride‘s fidelity to all of the many letters, colors and identities that make up the LGBTQ rainbow.

“Pride” is not perfect, and does not aim to be: What it is, to its credit, is the beginning of the story, told with certain key specifics. It leaves the viewer hungry to continue their own research.

The anecdotal aside (or digression) is a stratagem employed by plenty of documentaries, as well as political speeches. But here it provides warmth and a pulse to what might have in other hands been deadly dull historiography. “Pride” is very much alive, partly because it goes deep rather than wide in wrangling the unwieldy, unmanageable stories that make up an equally untidy movemen

There’s certainly information in the first episode that we either didn’t know or forgot, and Having historians like Stryker and Jules Gill-Peterson give their perspectives of that history helps contextualize things. We hope that as the episodes move towards more modern times, the reliance on recreations will subside.

Stretches of it are a bit too facile, but at least it understands that knowing and respecting history can never be a passive spectator sport.

It has been made with a scholar’s eye toward intersectionality and marginalized figures within already marginalized communities. I find that to be remarkable and entirely admirable, even if the series itself is very much, almost by design, hit-and-miss.

This FX production has its heart in the right place but its eyes twitchily on the clock. It’s a brisk enough proposition, and undemanding enough.