Is it the gay Girls or the gay Sex and the City?
HBO’s new show Looking, about three gay friends in San Francisco appropriately enough looking for love, has been compared to both shows, and it’s fair to say it probably has a little bit of each of those zeitgeist-dominating shows in its DNA somewhere.
But given the pedigree of its creator and executive producer Michael Lannan (Interior. Leather Bar, Lorimer), director Andrew Haigh (Weekend) who also executive produced the pilot along with Sarah Condon (Bored to Death) and David Marshall Grant (Smash), it is highly unlikely it will be mindlessly derivative of any show that has gone before it.
Starring Jonathan Groff, Frankie J. Alvarez and Murray Bartlett as the three close knit friends, who are searching for love in a emotional minefield of one night stands and dates, it is in fact being promoted by both its creators and cast as like nothing that has gone before.
Jonathan Groff, the Tony-nominated actor who plays Patrick, a successful video game developer (who works with Kevin, played by British actor Russell Tovey, in his first gay role) has this to say about the show on playbill.com:
“Looking takes place in modern day [and concerns] a bunch of gay guys … It’s sort of a slice-of-life kind of TV show that hopefully will be breaking some ground potentially in that there hasn’t been a show like this on TV in a long while, about gay men just living their lives in today’s world. I think the goal of the show and the purpose of this show is to illustrate the complexities and realities of the modern-day gay experience, which is a lot of things.”
With talented actors like Frankie J Alvarez as Patrick’s best friend Agustin, and Murray Bartlett as Dom, and Scott Bakula as pillar of the gay community and entrepreneur Lynn, you have a cast who will be able to bring pretty much any situation to life with gravitas and the required emotional authenticity which bodes well for the show fulfilling Groff’s bold prediction.
Looking premieres on HBO in early 2014 and will be shown on an express delivery basis in Australia during the southern summer.