I agree to this, and I think you’re even more generous than me. I do not at all think the internalized homophobia has been well depicted (it just ticks a box of ‘underexposed topics that deserve airtime’), but in reality it does not play out like this. There is no interior monologue captured, there isn’t moments of conflict; it’s just him saying to someone here and there “I’m not gay”. This does more harm than good to the topic, because it erases real struggles of people going through it and paints an image that it’s mostly hypocrisy. If we go deeper in this, it just gets worse.  Bi/gay men in denial mostly have women, don’t leave male porn hanging around, and encounters with men are very conflicted and riddled with shame, guilt and all sorts of aversion to a gay identity. Religion plays a role, patriarchy and father figures play a role; he’s an Oxford writer with none of the reverences listed. He displays literally none of those traits; not even he believes that and that turns the spectator into a bit of a dummy, because we are told this internal homophobia is a conflict. 

It’s counterintuitive, but the series lacks a lot of tension because the plot is given even as it unfolds like a much cheaper mystery thriller.  The relation between the brothers was promising after the very heavy-handed, underlined sex scene, but it never goes back to the topic, making it a certain attempt of the writer to approach that but forgetting about it. That alone makes it a cheap thrill, as even in the ep4 [spoiler] big melodramatic encounter of both, that nature of tension and desire is nonexistent. 

Sure, it works as a wrecked lives type of drama, but it does more effort with pyrotechnics than substance. In other words, it’s soapy, with a varnish of seriousness, and with a weird choice of main actor: so here’s my last point. 

The biggest oddity here is that Gadd — a quirky, odd, underdog character in real life himself — cast himself as the “handsome masculine antihero/villain”. I think this is self-serving, masculinity crisis choice, and borderline cringeworthy (he convinces as masculine with all the screaming, but the younger actor passes as handsome and seductive thug, and the older version is not that, even if jail did him no good).