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5 Things Gay Men Did on ‘Looking’ That I’d Never Do
Revisiting the unthinkable on the HBO series’ fifth anniversary.
You can’t create an HBO series about a small circle of friends in a big city and expect people not to mention Girls and Sex and the City. Make the gang gay, and get ready for references to Queer As Folk, which aired on Showtime, not HBO, from 2000 to 2005.
When Looking debuted on HBO five years ago today (January 19), all the expected comparisons were made. Though the series, which ran for two seasons and spawned one movie, was grittier and more Sundance-y than its glossy predecessors, the QAF comparison was the only one I didn’t cosign. QAF episodes ran at least 15 minutes longer, and the Pittsburgh-set (and Toronto-filmed) serial felt almost defiantly white, middle-class, and middle-American.
QAF also was more of a traditional nighttime soap, featuring a larger principal cast and overlapping stories, while the core characters of Looking, Girls, and SATC (the series, unlike the two feature films) mostly inhabited their own storylines, coming together mainly to catch each other up.
On a purely aesthetic level, Looking had the more naturalistic feel of a talky big-screen indie, particularly Weekend, the 2011 gay romance directed by Looking co-executive producer Andrew Haigh…
