Filip Raczyński (Ignacy Liss) is really enjoying his late 20s. We meet him on a modelling assignment, this vocation having been handed to him by his sparkling eyes and soft jawline, good looks he accentuates with a biker jacket and bleached hair. He has vodka and Diet Coke for breakfast and a bump of powder in an Uber on the way to his next job. At night we follow him through the backrooms of a club, until he finds one where the naked men are almost as beautiful as he is. He loses himself in them and worries about nothing.
It’s less fun to be in Filip’s immediate social orbit. His agent’s nervy assistant, Olek (Kamil Studnicki), has to cover for Filip’s perpetual lateness and, on the night after the club odyssey, is obliged to look after his badly behaved dog, because Filip has only just rescued it from a drug dealer who resorted to dognapping to force him to pay moneys owed. Filip’s decision to bring four of the guys from the club home with him, meanwhile, goes down poorly with his sister Anka (Sylwia Boroń), the single mum of a one-year-old girl, Tosia. Filip is crashing at their flat, and he’s not keeping to his promise to help with the bins and laundry.
A compelling premise
The topline premise of Proud is that Anka dies and Filip ends up caring for and then looks to adopt little Tosia, but it takes all of the first episode to get there. By the time calamity descends, we know Filip well and are in the same position as his friends and family – not nearly as angry or disappointed as we feel we should be, because he’s just too energetically roguish. Make him straight and spin him back 20 years to London, and he could be the protagonist of a racy romcom starring Hugh, or possibly Richard E, Grant. The child is to be the manchild’s salvation.
Cultural context and dark humour
Proud – conceived and directed by Karol Klementewicz and co-written by him and Monika Pęcikiewicz – is a fair bit grittier than its potentially cheesy setup. That said, it loses something upon being shown outside its native Poland. In Britain – even the backsliding, eve-of-fascism Britain of 2026 – viewers will mostly shrug their shoulders at the concept of a gay man adopting a child, although they might raise their eyebrows at this particular one doing it. In Poland, the whole idea is culturally controversial and legally difficult, as we see when a solicitor advises Filip that if he wants to avoid Tosia being taken away from him – which Filip fears deeply, since he and Anka grew up unhappy in foster care after their mother died and their father drifted away – he needs “to stop being gay for some time”.
The show likes to throw in sly black humour like that, along with some fully hilarious slapstick. Filip turns up to a modelling audition and is asked to strip to his underwear, but isn’t wearing any so he stands there nude, leading to a terrific visual gag when the funniest possible thing happens; an appearance modelling swimwear on Poland’s answer to This Morning ends messily when Filip’s drugs kick in.
Emotional depth and ensemble cast
Mainly, though, Proud deals in pain, shame and a yearning for connection. The chosen family Filip is left with when all his biological family have gone are tenderly sketched, from poor faithful Olek, who tries to be a sassy man-eater but is really, as revealed when he belts out a piano-cabaret cover of Creep by Radiohead, a sweet soul broken by unrequited love; to makeup artist Kiki (Maria Sobocińska), who evidently had her teenage daughter far too young and has never quite got the hang of any life skill that isn’t parenting. They are not perfect but they love Filip, and their love language is putting up with him.
It’s a convincing ensemble, and the scenes with Tosia are so gorgeous and believable, you almost start crediting tiny Alicja Lewczuk with being an accomplished actor, despite her not yet having acquired the power of speech. As well as knowing how to marshal his cast, Klementewicz elevates Proud’s audiovisual palette to the cinematic with his use of closeups, moments of ringing silence, and the odd unforgettable image: Filip, who was on the dancefloor when the hospital rang with bad news, leaves a smear of glitter on his sister when he kisses her cold cheek in the morgue and gets ready to leave his flashy lifestyle behind.
By the end of episode three – which closes with a montage of Filip and Tosia, soundtracked to stunning effect by Kae Tempest’s Hold Your Own – we are on board, prepared to fight for Filip as he makes a ton more mistakes we will happily forgive. Proud is on HBO Max now.
