Good comedies, as much as they stretch their plots to infinity and keep their characters unchanged for entire seasons, are always about Something.
Something in all caps, even multiple Algos at once.
Roseanne
was about the United States that would end up voting for Trump,
Friends
about (not wanting to) grow up, and
Girls
… well,
Girls
wasn't that much of a comedy anyway.
What the Lena Dunham series was was the rebellious daughter of
Sex and the City
.
Both fictions shared many things
: four single protagonists, the city of skyscrapers...
But today we can already say without subterfuge that, if made today,
Sex and the City
would openly be what was always said of it:
a series about gay men
written by gay men.
That is why it is necessary to start talking about
Uncoupled
by comparing it with
Sex
.
Because, for starters, they are from the same creator: Darren Star.
The problem is that
Unpaired
is not that
Sex and the City
that in 1998 Star couldn't do and now he can.
Perhaps because it's from Netflix and not HBO,
Mismatched
could be about a lot of things but it really isn't about any.
At least not of any importance.
And it won't be because his starting point isn't appealing
: in his late forties, Michael (Neil Patrick Harris), a well-to-do, neurotic gay New Yorker, is dumped by his long-term boyfriend and is left to face a life of single who neither understands nor wants.
Curling the curl (curling it a lot), the premise is close to that of precisely
And just like that
, sequel to
Sex and the City
in which those girls (
those gays?
) of the late 90s are ladies of 2022 who don't quite fit into a world that leaves them behind.
The Michael of
Uncoupled
does not choose to ask himself the real reason for his abandonment or, like a
Woody Allen
character (hopefully), undertake a pathetic investigation into his ex's new life.
The Michael of
Unpaired
is adrift in life and in the series, as it jumps from tontuna to tontuna with the sole purpose of consuming a season that, surprisingly enough, has only been relevant for a couple of weeks.
It's time, if only for the sake of representation, to connect
Uncoupled
with other series starring gay men.
And he loses out.
On the one hand, the fake intensity of
Looking
(2014) will be gloomy, but it still has personality.
On the other hand, the cynical portraits of
Cucumber
(2015) and the first
Queer as Folk
(1999!) prove that Russell T. Davies is indeed
a brave screenwriter
.
I would like to think that
Uncoupled
is not the television derivative of that so stinking
normalization of non-heterosexual men
, understood as conformity to a harmless and tolerable bourgeois standard.
Nor do I expect too much daring in a Netflix comedy created to showcase Harris, a champion of those good gays who neither ask uncomfortable questions nor offer complex answers.
They are there, but without disturbing too much.
Like his series.
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