Early in the new miniseries “Tip Toe,” two older gay men debate how worried they should be as homophobia surges in the U.K. Leo Struthers (Alan Cumming), the owner of a bar in Manchester’s storied queer quarter, asks his longtime friend Melba (Paul Rhys) whether the vintage intolerance of the nineteen-nineties seems to be coming around again. “It’s back, you fucking idiot,” Melba responds. “We’re in the middle of it right now.” Online hate for Leo’s business, his friend notes, is as “regular as the morning shit.” Melba’s the sort of scenester who’s hard to miss—statuesque, with a signature look of dark lipstick and Robert Smith-style eyeliner—but he confesses to toning himself down lately. In the current climate, he says, “Now I tiptoe, just in case.”

The social revanchism of the twenty-twenties has largely shown up in pop culture as triumphalism on the right and silence on the left; on television, the neo-Western TV mogul Taylor Sheridan blankets the proverbial airwaves with trucks, horses, and anti-California jabs, while programs centered on queer characters and protagonists of color continue to dwindle. “Tip Toe,” from the television auteur Russell T Davies, is a rare outcry from the side of the progressives, who are seeing their political and cultural gains rapidly erode. In 1999, Davies created the original “Queer as Folk,” a groundbreaking show about ordinary gay Mancunians who spend their nights at the club, where they find almost everything they want: sex, drugs, family, friendship, freedom. A quarter century later, Leo’s bar is less a temple to liberation than a fortress under sporadic siege, where drag performers have protocols for emergency exits and bartenders, between pours, watch the door for troublemakers.

What if such measures aren’t enough? What if the atavism under way isn’t just a miasma of unpleasantness but a buildup of gas waiting to combust? That panic fuels “Tip Toe,” a siren of a series that confirms Davies’s standing as one of the medium’s essential creators. The five-episode drama—which aired this summer in Britain, on Channel 4, and wraps up its American run this week, on Starz—is a minor work with ample speechifying and visible budget constraints, and yet it offers more thoughtfulness and ingenuity than most of the year’s prestige programming.

It’s also a bit of a tough watch, opening with a flash-forward in which Leo is found hanged from a lamppost outside his home. His presumed killer is his next-door neighbor, Clive Goss (David Morrissey), a fitfully employed electrician with an unshakable suspicion that Leo has designs on his sons, twenty-five-year-old Saul (Joseph Evans) and sixteen-year-old George (Jackson Connor). The time line then jumps back ten days, when, after more than a decade of wordless coexistence on opposite sides of a shared wall, Leo locks himself out of his house and asks to borrow Clive’s phone to call a friend with a spare key. Suddenly, the two men become enmeshed in each other’s lives, with Clive on the attack despite practically begging Leo for odd jobs, and Leo on a mission to soften Clive’s bigotry, tragically mistaken about his ability to win over a man who can no longer hear reason.

That naïveté is a surprising blind spot for the fifty-nine-year-old Leo, a man steeped in experience. “Tip Toe” is one of a vanishingly few series centered on gay men in late middle age, and Leo’s well-roundedness hints at all we miss out on in the absence of perspectives like his. An elfin force of nature with the natural showmanship of someone who takes hospitality seriously, Leo has the charisma to command the loyalty of his fresh-faced staff—and the pragmatism to resent the Labour Party’s business reforms. Having seen too many gay kids sink into hopelessness, he treats the bar like an unofficial employment-training center for L.G.B.T.Q. youth, though he’s not above grousing at a trans bartender (Iz Hesketh) about the transgender movement’s emphasis on pronouns—a carp he quickly takes back. But Cumming gets to show here the vulnerability so frequently lacking in his waspish supporting roles or in his hosting gig on the reality-competition series “The Traitors,” where he’s a master of self-aware camp. Leo is still smarting from his ex-husband’s decision two years prior to leave him for a woman. And he hates that, in his escalating spats with Clive, he’s the first to apologize or to compromise. Cumming has seldom laid himself so bare as he he does late in the show, when Leo gulps down the self-loathing that rises in his throat as he finally explodes at Clive, lamenting that he’s spent a lifetime making himself palatable, even pitiful, to shield himself from a hostile heterosexual world.

“Tip Toe” is at its best when it captures what it feels like to live through the present-day backlash. Davies has a keen eye for how societal tensions trickle down into interpersonal dynamics; the characters’ habit of lodging accusations against “you lot”—not only across tribal lines but between assumed allies, as with the questionable gripes from Leo’s social-worker best friend, Stephanie (Elizabeth Berrington), about how the practice of queer self-identification endangers her female charges—reflects the fractured nature of life today, where every systemic problem comes with an automatic scapegoat. Davies also effectively depicts technology’s destabilizing influence—a theme that animated his 2019 dystopian HBO drama, “Years and Years,” which followed the gradual dissolution of an English family in an age of online alienation and populist politics. At the Goss residence, no one seems aware that Clive has disappeared down some gnarly internet rabbit holes, spending his nights on the couch, estranged from his wife, Marie (Pooky Quesnel), watching bombings and car crashes. The serendipity of the internet means that Leo and George, a closeted high-schooler, can end up chatting on a hookup app; in classic teen-age form, George is sexually active (with a boy his age) but squeamish when Leo brings up protection. The speed and unpredictability of information online likewise mean that everything becomes easier: outings, misunderstandings, hate crimes.

“Tip Toe” also compellingly dramatizes the widespread, but not always convincing, axiom that bias is hardened by economic uncertainty. The show’s longitudinal view becomes an asset again; what appears to unsettle Clive and Marie, who came of age when queer Britons had been forced into the margins, isn’t so much that Leo is gay as that he’s thriving. When Clive asks Leo for work, he frames each request as a play for dominance. (Given Leo’s fate, I could feel my cortisol spike whenever Leo indulged a streak of impertinence by pausing to put Clive in his place.) Clive’s homophobia, which draws on the myth that gay men are prone to pedophilia, seems less rooted in concern for his sons than in a fear that Leo will take or alter something that Clive claims as his own.

But Davies is unable to make the humorless Clive—a man not of retrograde values but of no core principles—an engaging figure. It’s not difficult to believe that people like Clive exist: compulsive scrollers driven by reaction and disillusionment, who know and care so little of the lives of others they could believe H.I.V. and dyslexia to be mass hoaxes. When Clive tries to let Leo in on his world view, he raves incoherently about immigrants, Elon Musk, and outlet voltages. Even if there’s something infuriatingly familiar about Leo’s difficulties in making logical inroads with Clive—a task he mostly takes on to insure a safe coming-out for George—there’s no satisfaction to be had in arguing against a jumble. Morrissey is able to physically convey Clive’s existential discomfort; despite his conventional handsomeness, the character often looks like he’s dying to inhabit a completely new skin. Still, any empathy that the series looks to drum up for him is limited by the fact that the character takes equality as an affront—Clive can’t feel tall without someone to stand over.

The dread-filled lead-up to Leo’s murder, in which he and Clive quickly amass a ledger of mutual grievances, proves more gripping than the forced dénouement. Eventually, allegory overwhelms dramaturgy, with a group of soccer hooligans—emblems of the volatility of men under threat—playing a pivotal role in Leo’s end. More haunting are the reverberations of his death, told in an extensive coda, which allude to the role that gay elders have often played in maintaining safe spaces for the next generation—and how quickly those places can disappear without the old guard’s dedication and logistical know-how. The warning from Leo’s cohort that a “new Dark Age” is on the horizon may register as alarmist, but “Tip Toe” makes a persuasive case that it may be the only clear-eyed response. ♦