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| /EW |
In what has become a new trend for HBO, their latest series to be cancelled -- HBO’s Looking -- has been provided the opportunity to wrap up its story with a conclusive film. Even if it does represent a nice P.R. move for the pay cable network, it’s still an unprecedented gesture for fans of a show logging around 200,000 viewers per episode. HBO could have renewed Looking, sure, but it wouldn’t have made much sense to: their half-hour department has been ridiculously effective in the quality department of late, and this isn’t even a show that generated the kind of “Save this show!” campaign that the similarly-fated Enlightened did. Outlets including The AV Club, Vulture and Indiewire (wait, was that me?) stuck their neck out for the show last week, but ultimately, the conversation was too quiet to make enough of a difference.
I didn’t review the season of Looking in its entirety as I do for most shows, mainly because my mid-season thoughts didn’t change much and, as noted above, I wrote a healthy amount on its value and importance for Indiewire just before the series finale aired. But with this cancellation, I feel compelled to write a few more words...
The series finale of Looking included not only the best scene of its 18-episode run, but also one of the very best of the young year. Progressing with the same tense atmosphere and sense of the inevitable as a Michael Mann thriller, it essentially unravels the Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and Kevin (Russell Tovey) romance with a master’s touch. After nine episodes of digging deeper into the illusive nature of their love, an isolated detail -- far less shocking to the audience than to Patrick -- wrapped up four-and-a-half hours of build-up in about 10 minutes. What was the revelation? Kevin still had Grindr on his profile, and had logged onto it fairly recently to “scout out” the residents in the new building, to which they’d just jointly moved in.
What follows is a brilliantly realized, perfectly pitched and flat-out fascinating discussion about commitment, monogamy and our conflated (or not) relationship to love and sex. Kevin doesn’t quite see what’s wrong with keeping his Grindr account active, even if he’s in a committed relationship; what’s the harm, he seems to be asking, with not closing yourself off? He then calls for a half-baked open relationship, in which he’ll try not to stray but, if he does, that “it doesn’t have to be the end of the world.” The thing about Looking that has always been made clear is that Kevin’s love for Patrick outweighs Patrick’s for Kevin. He threw away his long-term relationship for him, and as he’s confessing his wishes for the relationship, he’s completely, almost unsettlingly, genuine. Patrick, conversely, is battling issues of self-acceptance, and rushing from one relationship to another was, for him, an unfortunate, subconscious gambit to prove that he could be monogamous: be “like everybody else.” The bond between them was always tenuous, the evocation of their love always twinged with a slight distance, and so the horrifyingly quick end to their pairing felt as sad as it did inevitable.
But the scene also reflects Looking’s impressive commitment to taking each character’s feelings seriously. The deep sadness of the scene is rooted in the fact that both simultaneously realize that it’s ending while also not wanting it to end. The conversation gets at the way we think about love and sex, especially in a contemporary context, with sensitivity and principal attention on character. When Patrick calls Agustin to tell him that Kevin’s Grindr profile is still active, he tells him it’s not a big deal. But once he hangs up, Agustin turns to his boyfriend Eddie (Daniel Franzese) and says, “Looks like I don’t need a new roommate… Kevin still has a Grindr profile.” He knows his best friend; he knows that Patrick’s idea of love and commitment is directly related to a monogamous, sexual relationship. Kevin has never felt that way, even if his straying destroyed his first “serious” relationship. You wouldn’t be wrong to interpret the way this is written as Looking telling those “forward-thinkers” that, no, open relationships aren’t really that simple -- that monogamy is still something worth striving for. But it’s okay if you had a different takeaway as well. Kevin’s past unfortunately taints his argument, but he’s affectionate and loving enough where he believes what he’s saying, and Patrick understanding enough where he can leave without condemning his soon-to-be-former boyfriend.
It’s that level of nuance and authenticity that keeps Looking distinct and a cut-above. The show has never been popular, and that fact used to surprise me: a show like Queer as Folk could run year after year as a sleeper hit, and Looking’s healthy sexual content should make it more commercial than, say, Togetherness, right? Well, no. Looking is homonormative, which Queer most definitely was not: if the latter tried to normalize the problems gay men face as equivalent to those straight men faced, the former normalized them as distinct but no less valued. That’s an important distinction. Shows about the LGBT community are so rare that when they go even more specific, as Looking does, the already relatively-small audience that would turn out shrinks once more.
Looking is also not perfect, and that is an important point to consider in light of the show’s commercial failure. In the first season, Patrick remained an interesting, unique character to TV and fiction in general, but: as far as the show’s other leading characters were concerned, Dom (Murray Bartlett) spent most of his time opening a restaurant (who cares?) and Agustin self-destructing before we had a reason to hope for otherwise. The actors also lacked the chemistry of other young-ensemble-driven series. No doubt, this hurt a show that would always need to work to gather viewers. But in season two, the series made major strides. A greater focus was put on the dependent and love-filled -- but ultimately limiting and somewhat harmful -- friendship between Dom and Doris (the great Lauren Weedman), his “fag hag.” Weedman is such a fantastic actress, and the relationship between the two so well-drawn, that it was literally night-and-day from Dom’s season one arc. And Agustin, going to work at a homeless shelter for trans* teens, re-engaged with his community in a way that felt deservedly redemptive.
Looking will rest, cumulatively, as the first show of quality and (relative) awareness to depict a community that was near-entirely not straight, and made no qualifications for that fact. That’s a big deal. It also confronted contemporary discourse around the flexibility of sexuality and intimacy in a way that was not intrusive, but was incredibly smart and riddled with perspective. I’m not sure I would have felt this at the end of season one, but I’m sad to see Looking go. And I’m happy I was able to experience this nuanced and authentic story of transition, aging and, most centrally, self-acceptance. At the very least, it deserved more attention than it got.