L ost Boys & Fairies is so determined to make you cry that if it were on a more commercial channel, each part would be bookended by a sponsored ad for big-brand tissues. It tells a sad, beautiful story about adoption and, crucially, about adopters, with an admirable devotion to the love and the pain involved in each aspect of the process. It has a huge heart and a clear eye on melodrama: no episode goes without a musical number.
It is a lot of things, all at once, and mostly, it holds it all together with panache. Gabriel (Sion Daniel Young) and Andy (Fra Fee) have been a couple for eight years, and we join them as they are being interviewed at home by social worker Jackie (a fabulous Elizabeth Berrington): “So, boys, tell me: why do you want to adopt?” The question underpins the entire series. There is the rote answer, about providing a child with love, about wanting to give back, and then there are the real answers, which are complex and nuanced and require an examination of each man’s past and present, and potentially their futures, too.
Gabe says that it feels more like therapy than an interview, and for him in particular, there is a lot of work to do. Gabe is a performance artist (“not a drag queen”), and Andy an accountant, so clearly they would get different results on the Myers-Briggs test. But their differences are what makes the relationship sing.
Andy is more gung-ho about the adoption, while Gabe is nervous, tightly wound and sticking to the strict param.