LGBT

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(108,903 posts) Sun Jan 19, 2014, 09:48 AM Jan 2014

The quiet provocations of “Looking”; “Episodes.''

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2014/01/20/140120crte_television_nussbaum

“Looking” treats its highly specific circle of gay men with warmth and playfulness. Illustration by Edwin Fotheringham.

IIn the British director Andrew Haigh’s first movie, “Weekend,” from 2011, two strangers have a one-night stand that promises to last forever. They collide like pool balls, in bars and beds and kitchens, for days. In many ways, the film is a classical indie romance, with two opposites talking themselves into love. There’s even a kiss by train tracks. But, because they’re both men, a stranger wolf-whistles and yells out a slur, and the more guarded of the two finds himself nearly lunging toward the voice. It was a moment that felt at once discreet and defiantly political.

Now Haigh is directing a TV show called “Looking,” for HBO, written by Michael Lannan, and based on Lannan’s short film “Lorimer,” from 2011. Their collaboration is a real beauty, the standout among several smart series launching in January. (Remember when the big TV season started in September? Not anymore.) In contrast to “Weekend,” which was set in a grimy, depressing city in the Midlands, “Looking” takes place in that Emerald City modern San Francisco, where same-sex marriage is legal and older definitions of gay identity—rebel, outsider, artist—have begun to curl with age. With its unglamorous sex scenes, the show will inevitably be compared to “Girls,” but “Looking” has far more in common with Nicole Holofcener’s sweet-and-sour ensembles, or the eighties film “Parting Glances”—unhurried portraits of sprawling social worlds. Some critics will surely find the show insufficiently transgressive, or “slight,” that code word which is often applied to stories about love and dating. But “Looking” is a stealth breakthrough, if only because it treats its highly specific circle of gay men with warmth and playfulness, viewing their struggles as ordinary, not outrageous.

At the show’s center is a youngish man in flux: twenty-nine-year-old Patrick (the pretty-faced Jonathan Groff). A Colorado transplant, Paddy works as a video-game designer. He’s stinging from two bits of news: his ex-boyfriend has got engaged, and his best friend and roommate, Agustín—the excellent Frankie J. Alvarez—is moving in with his own boyfriend, Frank (O. T. Fagbenle). As Paddy tries to kick his life into gear, he stumbles into various humiliating traps: an OkCupid date peppers him with questions, then rejects him as a low-calibre prospect; at a work party, he hits on a man who turns out to be his new boss (Russell Tovey); and he gets truly terrible advice from Agustín, an upper-class Cuban-American, on how white-boy Paddy should prepare for a date with a “cholo.” The result is one of the most gruesome hookups in recent history, and that’s saying something, considering what’s on cable.