WORDS Meadhbh McGrath
Looking follows the lives of three gay friends in San Francisco: 29-year-old video game designer Patrick (Glee’s Jonathan Groff), his best friend Agustín, an artist who doesn’t actually make any art, and Dom, an impressively mustached waiter approaching his forties and anxious that his dreams of opening a restaurant are slipping away.
As the first mainstream series focusing exclusively on gay characters since The L Word finished in 2009, Looking has been left with the impossible demand of offering an all-encompassing representation of the LGBT community. The series has inevitably been met with criticism for disregarding queer women and transgender people, focusing mainly on the gay characters that audiences are used to seeing populating the sidelines on network sitcoms embodied in conventionally good-looking, middle-class white guys. However, over time, these characters are shown to have significant depths.
The pilot opens with Patrick fumbling through a hand job in a park (“Cold hands!” he cries), a moment that offers an amusing insight to a character trying to figure out who he is and what he wants. The series continues to explore the tension between commitment-free hook-ups and long-term relationships with Agustín, who, after moving in with his boyfriend, immediately rebels against everything that move towards domesticity stands for.
The series has been described as “the gay Girls”, yet Looking feels more like an indie film (like creator Andrew Haigh’s superb 2011 film Weekend) than a sitcom. Looking favours a subtle observational humour; in one scene, Patrick, browsing OKCupid, complains, “Instagram filters have ruined everything and I can’t tell if this guy is hot or not.”
Another aspect that sets Looking apart is the show’s rather pointed treatment of racial and class distinctions, as Patrick’s pursues a guy from a different socio-economic background, the Mexican-American Richie. Patrick judges him quite explicitly for being unable to pronounce “oncology”, and follows terrible advice from Agustín (an upper-class Cuban-American) about how he should prepare for a date with a “cholo”, resulting in one of the most excruciating sex scenes in recent television.
Looking also comes across as less self-conscious about being “transgressive” — while the show contains scenes of threesomes and visits to a bathhouse, such scenes are included as unremarkable aspects of everyday life. What is refreshing about Looking is that it doesn’t present itself as a series about what it means to be gay, but rather a series about a group of men who just happen to be gay.
Grade: I
Looking airs on Sky Atlantic on Mondays at 10.35 pm.
