The Outs, a web series based in New York City, has a backdrop that is entirely recognisable not merely for its sights and sounds butalso for a certain character type: articulate, sometimes cheeky, never dull. We have met the kind in other places, beginning from Seinfeld and Sex and the City but more recently in Girls and Master of None.
Like members of its cohort, The Outs zooms in on a set of people in NYC (here Brooklyn) whose lives revolve around finding love and sex as they pass their days in the sometimes-agreeable, sometimes-debilitating emotional haze brought on by this search. The difference: The Outs is about gay men.
Produced and directed by Adam Goldman, the series was born as a couple of bite-sized YouTube episodes in 2012. It returned for a second season this year under the stewardship of the video service Vimeo, enabling the episodes to be longer and the production to have greater scope. We see much more of a city that is forever bathed in what singer Patti Smith called “the colour of the fading day”. We head to more bars and enter more dainty roadside parks than in the first season, whose production values were decent too, even though it was boot-strapped.
The series charts the aftermath of the breakup of Jack (Hunter Canning) and Mitchell (Goldman). In the current season, Mitchell is seeing Rob (Mark Junek), a British chef who is trying to make a career in NYC, while Jack is with Paul (Tommy Heleringer) whom we know from Season 1, and who is currently enrolled in the Graduate Writing Program at the University of Iowa. And there is Oona, sassily portrayed by Sasha Winters, the straight friend and author who has a now-on-now-off relationship with her manager Kevin (William DeMeritt).
The series ticks all the requirements of a modern urban comedy. If the viewer is not careful, he might mistake these characters, given to the apt turn of phrase, for possessing dangerously callow inner lives. But dig deeper, and one notices that what The Outs is really doing is paying homage to aesthetic pretensions so beloved of gay men and women.
In the first episode, Oona and Mitchell are at a restaurant right after Oona’s book signing. Mitchell is telling her about his new job, which entails being a “relationship manager” at a tech startup that matches people based, not on an algorithm, but on the people its in-house relationship experts think should hook up. Oona cracks up, and not just because the new-age economy can sometimes go bonkers. She can’t imagine Mitchell –her clumsy, forever-looking Mitchell – as a relationship expert.
The scene is an utterly Outs conceit, poking fun both at the larger zeitgeist and at its characters while keeping the tone breezy. Yet, below the surface, more complicated currents run. Jack and Paul are trying to make things work despite the pressures of a long-distance relationship. Mitchell and Rob have their own issues, which may or may not be related to Rob’s HIV-positive status.
The series is thoroughly contemporary. This is post-same-sex-marriage NYC, and gayness is as much a given as, say, the presence of restaurants serving international cuisine around the corner. Things that would have shocked an earlier generation are presented routinely, even blithely. When Paul comes over to see Jack for a short vacation, he tells him, “I hear about these other people, these other humans who get all the neck-kissing, and hand-holding, and cum that is, you know, mine.” Rarely has an onscreen character so delicately described an open relationship.
In another episode, Mitchell makes a phone call to Dan Savage, the real-life LGBT rights activist playing a radio jockey here and dishing relationship advice. This is when we learn about Rob’s HIV status (the story comes from the night Mitchell and Rob first met). But the jolt of the conversation emerges in Mitchell’s plain telling not of that fact, but of his fear of potentially losing Rob – as a boyfriend, that is. Rob is healthy.
The Outs works because unlike a lot of LGBT TV, it plumbs for neither cutesiness nor heaviness. It departs significantly from outright comedies like Modern Family, but that’s not all. Its themes, from the anomie born of anonymous sex to the joys of timeless friendships, resonate strongly with gay men. Yet, the show betrays no eagerness to dispatch lessons on behalf of its characters.
In that respect, it is similar to Looking, the HBO show about gay San Franciscans that is wrapping with a movie this month. Or, Amazon’s Transparent, about a woman who spent 60 years living as a man before deciding to make the transition. Or, from across the pond, Banana and Cucumber. Like these shows, The Outs recognises that lives are beautiful not just when they fight the oppression of bigotry or disease. Lives are beautiful simply for being lived, one messy day to the next.
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