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It’s Officially the End of an Era for Netflix’s Best Teen Romance

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There are plenty of romantic stories coming out this year that you can’t afford to miss. After breaking box office records with the rom-com Anyone But You, director Will Gluck is back in the genre with One Night Only, starring Top Gun: Maverick‘s Monica Barbaro opposite Masters of the Air star Callum Turner. Focus Features will later bring the fifth adaptation of the Jane Austen classic Sense and Sensibility to the screen, featuring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Esmé Creed-Miles, Fiona Shaw, and more.

But the most exciting romantic tale to come in the second half of 2026 is the conclusion of a beloved Netflix series, which has been praised endlessly for bringing representation and breaking down barriers for young people across the world. Of course, we’re talking about Alice Oseman‘s young-adult series Heartstopper, which first aired in 2022 and earned 53.46 million hours viewed in its first three weeks. Two years later, Season 2 drew 55.5 million hours viewed in the same amount of time, with Season 3 achieving similar success.

On July 17, the young love story between Nick (Kit Connor) and Charlie (Joe Locke) will come to an end, as they face a pivotal crossroads on the cusp of adulthood. Directed by Wash Westmoreland, Heartstopper Forever promises one final touching chapter in this endearing story, sure to bring its audience to both tears and laughter. Joining Connor and Locke in the feature-length finale are William Gao, Yasmin Finney, Corinna Brown, Kizzy Edgell, Tobie Donovan, Jenny Walser, Rhea Norwood, and Leila Khan. A synopsis for the third season reads:

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“Nick is soon leaving for university — which will push him and Charlie into a long-distance relationship. As Charlie says in the first few seconds of the trailer, above, they’re haunted by the idea that ‘everyone thinks teenage relationships don’t last.’ Will Nick and Charlie beat the odds?”



















































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Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz
Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In?
The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs

Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.

🚨The Pitt

🏥ER

💉Grey’s

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🔬House

🩺Scrubs

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01

A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct?
Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.





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02

Why did you go into medicine in the first place?
The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.





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03

What do you actually want from the people you work with?
Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.





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04

You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it?
Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.





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05

How would your colleagues describe the way you work?
Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.





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06

How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure?
Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.





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07

What does this job cost you personally?
Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?





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08

At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back?
The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.





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Your Assignment Has Been Made
You Belong In…

Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.

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Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center

The Pitt

You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.

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  • You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
  • You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
  • You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
  • Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.


County General Hospital, Chicago

ER

You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.

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  • You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
  • You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
  • You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
  • ER is television about endurance. You have it.


Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle

Grey’s Anatomy

You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.

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  • You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
  • Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
  • You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
  • It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.


Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ

House

You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.

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  • You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
  • You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
  • Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
  • The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.


Sacred Heart Hospital, California

Scrubs

You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.

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  • You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
  • You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
  • You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
  • Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.

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‘Heartstopper’ Is Growing Up

Oseman and co have been keen to increase the maturity of each season of Heartstopper, to reflect the in-world aging of their characters and the real-world aging of their fans. In the feature film, which sees Charlie and Nick about to blossom into adults, the maturity dial has been turned up once again, with more nuanced themes related to relationships ready to be discussed. “Heartstopper starts like a fairy tale and a bit idealistic, in a beautiful way that we all love,” said Oseman in an interview. “But in the film, we’re taking a slightly grittier look at romance and what it is to be in a long-term relationship. I find that fascinating and exciting.”

Heartstopper Forever debuts on July 17. Stay tuned to Collider for more streaming stories.


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Release Date

2022 – 2024-00-00

Showrunner
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Alice Oseman

Directors

euros lyn, Andy Newbery

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Writers

Alice Oseman

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