YMMV / Tales of the City (2019)

• Tear Jerker:
  • Michael telling Ben about how devastating it was for the gay community - which had been so vibrant, passionate, and beautiful, spurred on by the promise of a better future that seemed almost within their reach - to be decimated by HIV/AIDS.
  Michael:Honestly, I try not to think about it, all that...you know, all the friends I lost. People I loved. But more than that, the...the sense of freedom. Of fun. The feeling that the future was ours, you know, because that's, that's what really got taken from us. And I think that's where the rage comes from. Because we were so young. And we felt invincible. But we weren't.
  • Jake coming back to Barbary Lane and finding Anna dead in the courtyard.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Clearly we are supposed to take Ben's side in Episode 4 when he confronts the older dinner party guests. Except, as more than one person has noted, the older folks' comments aren't entirely wrong. People found it in rather poor taste that Ben claimed to know how they felt when they told him straight up what being there to witness your friends dying from a sexually transmitted disease that was treated like the plague that, by extension, saw LGBT people on a witch hunt, was like. Not that it excuses their liberal use of the word "tranny", of course, nor did it cancel out his calling the old folk out for using said word, but they're still absolutely right when they mention that back in the eighties, society straight up did not want gay people to exist. People especially thought it crossed a line that Ben would throw his HIV positive boyfriend, who survived this era, under the bus and tell him that he has "no right to talk to (him)" as a result of this.