Québec actor, writer and producer Florence Longpré created "Empathie," and also stars in the series. (CANAL+ Original Creation/Youtube)This story contains spoilers about the show “Empathie.”Empathy is under attack. In a familiar move, conservatives have recast it as “woke,” and therefore, as something suspect. Excessive. Dangerous, even.But empathy isn’t dead. And, inconveniently, it is still needed — not only to understand one another, but to reach across differences, to feel our way toward people we are not supposed to recognize as ourselves. Read more: MAGA’s ‘war on empathy’ might not be original, but it is dangerous The television series Empathie, created by Québec actor, writer and producer Florence Longpré — who also stars in the series — has met with an enthusiastic global reception. Canadian streamer Crave reports Empathie is the platform’s most-watched original French-language drama. Not insignificantly, 23 per cent of its viewings were with English subtitles, and the show has attracted rave reviews in both English- and French-language media.There are many reasons for this success and why viewers have responded so strongly to the show. It centres around Suzanne, a psychiatrist, and her work with mentally ill patients in a high-security psychiatric hospital. Not only does it portray day-to-day life in such a facility, it also provides insights into how someone might end up there. By giving context to often desperate actions, it triggers empathy towards people who first and foremost need help. But I would wager that its force lies, above all, in the feeling of empathy around which it is organized. I’m interested in how that intersects with queerness in the show.Queer sensibilities and empathyIn my essay Télévision Queer, introducing a collection of analyses about representations of queerness on TV, I argued that emotions are the engine of social and cultural engagement: what matters is not simply who we see, but how we are invited to feel with and attach ourselves to what and whom we see.Queer sensibilities, in this way, are not just about identity. Queer often feels messy, and it is hard to encompass and represent. It reminds me of something sticky, almost like goo: strange, slightly uncomfortable, but also playful, even pleasurable. How else to describe Longpré’s Empathie? Sticky, awkward, off-kilter and unexpectedly funny. A show that can make you cry and laugh in the same breath, sometimes in the same minute.And yet, despite the presence of Claude, a non-binary nurse seen as a progressive representation, some queer viewers’ frustration, as anecdotally shared on social mediaand Reddit, focused on Suzanne, Longpré’s character. This is due to what was perceived as her “lesbian becoming straight” storyline — something frustratingly familiar.I want to resist that reading. What if, instead of policing identity, we allowed for something less fixed, less obedient to representational expectations? If we shift from identity as category to identity as movement, something quieter begins to take shape. How else to describe Longpré’s Empathie? Sticky, awkward, off-kilter and unexpectedly funny. (CANAL+ Original Creation/Youtube) Re-entry into relational lifeThe series opens with a painfully awkward morning-after scene. Steve cooks eggs. Suzanne asks him with remarkable tact to leave. The moment slips, unsurprisingly, into sex and into a conversation about consent under the influence. Five minutes into the show, these scenes lend themselves to reading Suzanne as an almost archetypal straight, cisgender woman in her late 30s.The first episode does nothing to disrupt that interpretation. Viewers may also notice Suzanne is distant, sharp, clumsy with others, armed with a biting, almost defensive sense of humour. She drinks too much. She connects with no one.And then, in Episode 5 (half way through the first season), everything shifts within a flashback.Suzanne’s wife, nearly nine months pregnant, died in a preventable accident that Suzanne feels responsible for. Two years later, she is still suspended in grief, unable to to fully inhabit her present or plan for the future in any meaningful way. The series centres on her character’s fracture into two: Suzanne the doctor is capable of profound empathy, able to reach patients, whose stories we are gradually exposed to, at their most vulnerable; Suzanne the person is shattered, isolated, almost unreachable. The series follows her return to work, her tentative re-entry into relational life. There, she meets Mortimer (Thomas Ngijol), an intervention worker whose dark humour resonates with her own, and whose past carries its own weight of damage.Charged point of connectionThis is where queer disappointment might return. Why must this become a love story? Why can’t they simply be friends? Why is deep intimacy so often folded back into heterosexual coupling?But perhaps this is the wrong question.We live in a world where the “couple” remains the basic infrastructure of social life. Everything points toward it, organizes itself around it, reproduces it. At this stage, sexual orientation becomes secondary to the reality that we must negotiate social norms simply to be recognized, understood and rendered intelligible.The storyline is about the complexity of human relations. I argue that Empathie stages something else within Suzanne’s narrative arc: catastrophic loss, radical isolation and a near-total collapse of relational capacity. In that context, it’s hardly surprising that the first point of connection becomes charged. Not because it must become “heterosexual,” but because it tries to become survivable.Healing and desireWhat the series gestures toward, I think, is not a betrayal of queerness, but the emergence of another form of love: not romantic in the conventional sense, but healing. A love that appears not out of coherence, but out of fracture. And then, in the final minutes of the season, something shifts again.Suzanne meets Laure (Charlotte Aubin), who is about to begin working as a psychologist at her hospital. Faced with her, Suzanne cannot even form a sentence and only manages an awkward “bonjour.” The scene unfolds in tight, alternating close-ups between Suzanne, Laure and Mortimer. A love triangle, yes. But more than that: a reorientation of desire.For me, this moment is the series’ true turning point. Once Suzanne begins to heal, her desire for women does not disappear, but returns, forcefully, almost overwhelmingly. Not as an identity correction, but as an affective resurgence.My own queer sensibilities did not find their way into Empathie through the reassurance of representation. Not through Claude’s non-binary presence nor through a stable reading of Suzanne’s sexuality, but through something else: the show’s refusal to stabilize desire, its absence of moral policing, its insistence that love can take multiple, unstable, even contradictory forms. How can that be disappointing?Joëlle Rouleau's research was partly funded by the SSHRC from 2019 to 2022.