Live, Laugh, Secret Love

The incisive BBC drama ‘Mr. Loverman’ examines life inside the glass closet

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In the opening minutes of the BBC drama Mr. Loverman, Barrington Walker (Lennie James), a 74-year-old Londoner with a pressed collar and a crisply ironed gait, stands in his own kitchen like a guest in someone else's home. His voice arrives before he does, sliding in through narration: warm and charming, but also weary. Barry, as he’s known to nearly everyone, has just come home from seeing his boyfriend. He’s also just come home to his wife.

Adapted by Nathaniel Price from Bernardine Evaristo’s 2013 novel, Mr. Loverman is an eight-episode meditation on concealment: of identity, of desire, of damage. It follows Barry, an Antiguan-British patriarch with adult daughters, rental property, and a marriage that’s lasted half a century, largely because it’s never been fully lived in. For almost as long, he’s carried on a relationship with Morris (Ariyon Bakare), his childhood best friend turned secret partner. The show doesn’t center this revelation so much as float it—like a bruise that keeps deepening every time you look at it.

The structure of Mr. Loverman owes more to theatre than to television. Characters break the fourth wall and internal monologues frame flashbacks. The action shuttles between the warm, saturated colors of Barry’s upbringing in 1960s Antigua and the dulled palette of the modern-day East London he tries to blend into. These visual choices, stylized but unfussy, reflect Barry’s own sense of performance. He’s a man who learned early that appearance is both protection and weapon. The suits are sharp, the voice clipped and sweetened, but the truth he withholds has eaten away at every surface.

The Weight of Time and Defying the Coming-Out Narrative

James, who won a BAFTA for his performance, plays Barry with an aching precision. Known best to U.S. audiences for his work in The Walking Dead and Save Me, James turns the volume all the way down here. Every smile is preloaded with hesitation; every line of narration is shaded by regret. There’s something theatrical about his delivery — Barry is a man who talks more to the mirror than to the people he loves — but James ensures the performance is never hollow. You believe him as someone who has spent decades practicing his lines.

Opposite him, Bakare (who also won a BAFTA) is luminous. Morris is the heart of the show, not because he demands sympathy, but because he insists on clarity. He is out, mostly. He is patient…mostly. More than anything, he is tired. Bakare’s portrayal leans into this exhaustion without making it bitter. He’s the only character who seems to fully occupy his own body.

“Most queer coming-out narratives are built around youth: urgency, revelation, a triumphant break with repression. This is something else entirely. Barry’s confession doesn’t open up the future—it renders the past uninhabitable.”

And then there’s Carmel. Sharon D. Clarke’s performance as Barry’s wife is one of the show’s quiet triumphs and it upends the trope of the long-suffering wife trapped in a delusion. Carmel is no fool, nor is she cruel. She’s simply trying to survive the narrowing world of her marriage, nursing suspicions she can't quite prove. The show gives her space — whole episodes, in fact — to process her interiority. When the breakdown comes, it’s not operatic. It’s cellular.

What’s most striking about Mr. Loverman is its sense of time. Most queer coming-out narratives are built around youth: urgency, revelation, a triumphant break with repression. This is something else entirely. Barry’s confession doesn’t open up the future—it renders the past uninhabitable. Each episode feels like a page in a long, unspoken apology. The show’s pacing is deliberate, sometimes daringly slow. But the stillness is meaningful. It reflects the rhythm of someone who has spent a lifetime making sure nothing leaks out.

The Lingering Scripts of Shame and Survival

For American viewers, especially Black gay men, Barry’s story may feel less foreign than expected. Though his upbringing in Antigua is steeped in Caribbean codes of masculinity and anti-gay stigma — what the characters call being "against-man" — those scripts traveled easily across the Atlantic. The vocabulary changes, but the shame doesn’t. In the Black American church, in southern households, in barbershops and ballfields, silence was often the inheritance.

Barry, like many, learns to perform toughness as a way of surviving sensitivity. In one of the show’s most telling moments, he stands in a suit he’s picked carefully, waiting outside a bar he’s too afraid to enter, pretending not to see the man he loves. The tragedy isn’t just that he’s hiding. It’s that after so long, he no longer knows how not to.

It would be easy to reduce Mr. Loverman to a story of repression, but the show resists moralizing. Barry isn’t punished for his secrecy, nor is he rewarded for honesty. Instead, the series makes room for ambiguity—for the possibility that some people simply missed their moment. This isn’t a tragedy, exactly. It’s a recognition.

“Mr. Loverman isn’t radical for its representation, though it’s rare to see two older Black men at the center of a love story on television. It’s radical because it refuses to explain itself.”

Visually, the show is lush but restrained. Cinematographer Remi Adefarasin manages to make Barry’s flashbacks feel distant but not too dreamy. The lighting in Barry’s present-day home is dim but never dour. Cambodian director Hong Khaou, who helms all eight episodes, makes clear visual arguments without pressing them too hard. From the framing of Barry alone at the edge of a room, to Morris seated but always at an angle, to Carmel looking away at the precise moment she should be confronting — Khaou’s micro-choices gradually stack up. They let the viewer feel the geometry of isolation.

Some may find the pacing too gentle, the conflicts too muted. This isn’t a show of big speeches or explosive reckonings. It is a show about inertia. And that may be its quiet brilliance. In an era where queer media often performs visibility as spectacle — think of the triumphalism of Heartstopper or the drag theatricality of Pose — Mr. Loverman lingers instead in the aftermath. It asks what’s left of the man who’s spent his life performing when the curtain closes and the audience is gone.

When Liberation Isn’t the Point

The finale offers resolution, but not catharsis. Barry makes a choice, but the show doesn’t celebrate it. It simply observes him, as it always has: alone, dressed well, saying less than he means. If there is a victory here, it’s private.

Mr. Loverman isn’t radical for its representation, though it’s rare to see two older Black men at the center of a love story on television. It’s radical because it refuses to explain itself. It trusts the viewer to understand that some stories don’t bend toward liberation. They just are. They sit, they wait, they bruise.

In that sense, the show is not a confession but a document. A record of time passed, love delayed, and selves compartmentalized. And finally, a release, or at least the hint of one.

[Mr. Loverman is available to stream in the U.S. on BritBox.]