We're Here...We're Queer...We'll (Apparently) Watch Anything!

gay tv sucks.

i give alot of credit to Showtime, Queer as Folk and the L Word were/are very well written, even at their worst. you never watched the show, rolled your eyes and thought "this is so ridiculous", even when Ted was being fucked in a sling by crystal queens or Alice wouldn't give up the life-sized Dana Fairbanks cutout. the dialogue was always real and the plots were always realistic, which really makes one care about the characters. that's the way to build a fan base. it feels like networks are relying on the fact that a show is "gay" to build it's fan base, regardless of how crappy it is.

thanks to the good folks at Netflix, the hubby and i have been indulging in one of our favorite passtimes: watching TV shows on DVD andthis past weekend, 2 new series arrived in the mail: Logo's Noah's Ark (Season 2, Disc 1) and Next's Dante's Cove (Season 1, Disc 1). Let's talk turkey...


thanks to john, we watched Season 1 of Noah's Arc a couple of months ago. it started off really bad (bad acting, bad writing, boring story) following the lives of four black gay men in LA, but (to be perfectly honest) got alot better by the season's end. by the end of the season, i almost cared what happened to the unbelievably irritating and terribly unattractive femme Noah, his incredibly hot and thuggish boyfriend and their small group of friends who seemed to be the love children of Queer as Folk and Soul Food. the addition of Wilson Cruz (a favorite of mine since his days of My So Called Life) to the cast made it worth watching, too. he's a terriffic actor who made the most of his character and helped you forget how silly the dialogue sounded. somehow, the writing seemed to get better. It was still brain candy, but it was endearing and better written brain candy. Sadly, Season 2 started off just like Season 1 and by the end of the disc, i stopped caring again. we sent the disc back and are now wating for disc 2 to come. i hope it gets better...


i'd seen ads for Dante's Cove in Chelsea, on phone booths and in the subway, but i wasn't too sure what it was about. the ads looked like all the other ads for gay movies or tv shows or cologne: pretty men in beautiful (yet forboding) locales. unbeknownst to me, the Here! Network released it on DVD, Netflix started carrying it, and Stephen added disc 1 of season 1 to our queue (that's alot of stuff to happen without one knowing it). i'd heard very little about the series, but when Stephen briefly described the plot, i knew what to expect: more bad gay TV. i wasn't quite prepared for the hot mess that is Dante's Cove, though. think Buffy crossed with Passions crossed with (what else) Queer As Folk. it's all about dark magic, hottish men, the occult and some lesbians. everyone looks about 10 years older than they're pretending to be; all the men where the latest from International Male and the girls seem to go around bare-chested alot. as for the writing, they've overcome the hurdles of bad dialogue and poor plot development which hold back shows like Noah's Arc, by keeping both to a bare minimum. there's about 5 minutes of plot/dialogue/discourse sandwiched between 15 minute porno-style sex scenes (most of which take place on the beach). i'm not sure where "the Cove" is, but it must be hot as Satan's balls, 'cuz when they're not sexing, they're sweating. hell, even when they are sexing, they're sweating. not "getting you off is a fun aerobic workout" kinda sweat, mind you; we're talking full on dripping like the town whore at the Methodist Family Picnic kinda sweat, Paris Hilton at the SAT's kinda sweat, y'know? everyone is very shiny...all the time. having watched only the 90 minute pilot, i can't imagine what the rest of the series is like.

i'll admit, i don't subscribe to either Logo or Next, and if either of these shows are any indication of their original programing, i'm kind glad though. i guess i've fallen into the trap the networks have set for me however, 'cuz i'm going to continue watching both shows on DVD and turn a blind eye to the gag-factor. why? because they're gay. i feel like a puppy, picking at whatever crumbs i'm thrown. maybe that's what gay people are, starved for entertainment and grabbing at whatever scraps are tossed out. we don't worry about quality, we're just happy we're getting anything at all 'cuz it shows that someone cares about us...

i just wish we could up our standards, y'know?