The hardest thing about any show focusing on an underrepresented group is the scrutiny it has to endure. There are more gay characters on television each season, but Looking, HBO’s dramedy about a group of gay friends living in San Francisco, is TV’s only gay show. And it’s the only show that is going to be entirely by gays and about gays for probably a long time. How can it possibly succeed with all the hopes and dreams of a whole community foisted upon it? Well, it’s doing better in its second season.
For the show’s first season it was hailed as the “gay Girls”, but what show creator Michael Lannan and director Andrew Haigh delivered was something a lot slower and more low key. These weren’t the quippy gays of Will and Grace or the sex-every-minute men of Queer as Folk. Looking was seeking to be something more realistic, something about the small moments between a group of men and their romantic entanglement as they slowly (oh ever so slowly) evolved over time. Many called it boring, some called it sexless, no one called it a masterpiece.
After the first episode of season two, it seems to be getting a little bit closer to something resembling great. In this episode our hero Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and his friends Dom (Murray Bartlett) and Agustín (Frankie J Alvarez) head off to Russian River, a gay enclave outside of San Francisco, for a weekend of bonding. It seems to pick up shortly after season one ended with Agustín still getting over his recent breakup and Dom settling into a relationship with an older, wealthier man (who lends the trio his cabin in the woods).
While Patrick initially tries to keep everyone sober and playing board games (why does it always seem like Patrick is almost pathologically allergic to fun?) the arrival of Dom’s roommate Doris (Lauren Weedman) sends the foursome heading into the woods to take molly and frolic with a bunch of radical fairies. The three men all ended up hooking up with new beaux, with Patrick calling his boss Kevin (Russell Tovey) for a romp in the woods while leaning against a tree.
This episode, written and directed by Haigh, wasn’t boring, it wasn’t sexless, but was it a masterpiece? Not quite, but it’s getting better. Now that Looking knows who these characters are and what they’re capable of doing, it’s much easier to gain focus. This season Patrick seems destined to resolve the pull between his attraction to the already-taken Kevin and his love with Richie (Raúl Castillo). Agustín is setting out on a new relationship with an HIV-positive social worker and sex-crazed Dom, always the Samantha of the bunch, will finally find out what it’s like to be in a real relationship (however long that lasts). These are all interesting directions for a show that so often seemed like it was lacking any direction at all. This episode seems to be walking the fine balance between being slow, well-observed and intimate, while having just enough forward momentum to keep things interesting.
Also, it seems the closest to my experience of being a modern gay man. Do I go off and take drugs in the middle of the woods? No, not really. But I have been to an exceptionally well DJ-ed dance party with a bunch of boys wearing nothing but glittery eye makeup and an outfit that looks purloined out of a 70s thrift store. The milieu has a looseness that is typical of the modern gay world, where sex is no big deal, an adventure is never very far away, and bonding with your friends often happens right alongside these other two. Even if it’s not getting the specifics of every gay man’s life just right (and there are so many different types of gay men, how could one show ever do them all justice?), it seems to be reaching for some deeper truth about what it’s like to be gay and alive today, whether that includes drugs in the woods or not.
Granted, this is just one episode and it’s one removed from the reality of the show. After these 30 minutes, our boys return to the city and to live as normal. Once they’re not on vacation any more will the show be able to maintain the delicate balance that it struck here? I’m not sure, but I can tell you that I’m a whole lot more excited about finding out what this season has in store than I was at the end of season one. And no pressure to be genius … Looking is the only gay show around, after all.
