Arts
Queer Eye for Straight TV
They're gay. But these writers are producing some of today's most compelling, and popular, series about heterosexuals
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK
Monday, Mar. 14, 2005
This is a tale of two elections. In November, 11 states considered ballot measures banning gay marriage. All 11 passed. There was also an election, of sorts, in January: the Golden Globe Awards. The TV awards for Best Comedy and Best Drama went, respectively, to ABC's suburban mystery Desperate Housewives and FX's plastic-surgery saga Nip/Tuck. The former is the highest-rated new series of the TV season; the latter, one of the highest-rated dramas on basic cable. Both are water-cooler shows about love, sex, fidelity and lies, mainly among heterosexual men and women. And both were created by gay men.
A curious thing is going on in the U.S. Even as the nation is writing gays out of the definition of its most exalted relationship, gay writers--like Housewives creator Marc Cherry and Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy--are behind the TV shows that are most provocatively defining straight relationships. HBO's Six Feet Under, the multilayered story of the lives and loves of a family that runs a funeral home, sprang from the mind of gay screenwriter Alan Ball (American Beauty). Before it, HBO's Sex and the City, which set the standard for frank talk about women and love, was created by Darren Star and later run by Michael Patrick King, both gay. (Later this year, King debuts The Comeback, an HBO sitcom starring Lisa Kudrow as an actress trying to revive her career.) Is all this coincidence? Gay TV writers will tell you that relationships are universal. (If they talk at all. King, Murphy and Star declined to be interviewed for this article.) They have good reasons for saying so. Gay writers run the risk of being labeled as, well, gay writers, and the idea of a gay sensibility conjures a monolithic image of campy queens quoting from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In fact, these series represent a wide range of voices (as do more overtly gay-themed shows, from NBC's Will & Grace to Showtime's The L Word and Queer as Folk). Housewives is cartoony and parodic, Nip/Tuck slick and urbane, Six Feet Under moody and cerebral. "I don't think you could say they were all told from a specific perspective that comes from being gay," says ABC prime-time-entertainment president Stephen McPherson. "But if being gay makes you that talented, I'm going gay." In art, one could argue, sexual orientation shouldn't matter. In life, though, it does. (See those November results, above.) If these gay writers are inclined to think creatively about love and identity, maybe it's because they didn't have the option of accepting the standard assumptions. Growing up gay, says Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, "you have a pretty deeply ingrained sense of being an outsider. You don't swallow the mythology of pop culture hook, line and sinker because you know it's not true, for you, anyway."
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From the Mar. 14, 2005 issue of TIME magazine
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