Looking (HBO sitcom - Movie 'ending' out July 23)

[Shaun]

I1u1CkRFVRs



Dubbed as the gay ‘Girls’, HBO releases the first official trailer of highly-anticipated gay drama comedy ‘Looking’.

The 30-second trailer, which debuted yesterday evening, focuses on the main character Patrick is played by gay actor Jonathan Groff.

It introduces the premise of the show by chronicling Patrick’s search for a roommate on dating service OKCupid as well as the story of a group of gay friends living in San Francisco.

The trailer shows other plot-lines including a man going through a mid-life crisis at 40, open relationships and searching for “someone who understands you.”

Patrick says at the end: “That’s not easy to find.”

Jonathan Groff, known for his work in ‘Glee’, says he hopes the show delivers on its hype by depicting the “reality of gay sex.”

The 28-year-old recently spoke with Out magazine about the highly anticipated show. Groff, who is gay himself, admitted he has filmed some sex scenes.

“We’re not showing sex to be sexy, necessarily,” Groff noted. “When is the last time we’ve seen gay sex dealt with in a very frank and realistic way? Normally, it’s very salacious and sexy, which it is, but there are complicated things about having sex as gay men that I think hopefully we’ll address on our show.”

The first episode will be directed by “Weekend” director Andrew Haigh.

It will also feature openly gay British actor Russell Tovey.

Could be good I guess, depends if it's as funny as Girls (season 1, they went all crazy and melodramatic in season 2). I watched a couple of gay-focussed programs (Hunting Season, The Outs) but they were either really small-scale or really obsessed with sex and hot gays. Hopefully this is more realistic.

[Marc]

I hope this isn't seen as offensive to some members

[Benjamin]

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SLnsWU1l4GU/UB7fSUx6t7I/AAAAAAAACJ8/Bwl2MNaFTfk/s1600/guys-kissing.gif

[Black Dagger]

OMG Russell bumming people.

Best show ever.

It seems 2014 there will be an influx of gay shows, with Russell T Davis' two, and I saw another one advertised, but I forgot it.

[Jack.]

It actually looking :hugesmile: quite good.

[Braden]

I watched Russell talking about this on Chatty Man; I thought it sounded like a good show.

The trailer has me more excited now...btw, does anybody actually watch Girls? Is it worth watching?

[Shaun]

the first season of Girls was perfect. Really fun, really cute, loveable characters... and then in season 2 they just turned them into really repetitive, whiney bitches who had stupid crises and breakdowns... hopefully S3 is better.

[Black Dagger]

It is on Sky Atlantic tonight at 22:35

But unfortunately I don't have that on VM. So I am watching it now online and it's decent :dazzler:

[Braden]

The first two episodes have been really brilliant imo.

I can't wait for Russell.

[Shaun]

oh qt *downloads the first two eps*

[Jack.]

Can I watch the first two episodes on YouTube

[Mystic Mock]

Is Looking actually funny? Because the trailers don't really show off much humor.

[Firewire]

Is Looking actually funny? Because the trailers don't really show off much humor.

It isn't a comedy

[Shaun]

well it's billed as a dramedy...

[Shaun]

this show :lovedup: only seen the first 3 eps but still

Agustin :lovedup:

[Mystic Mock]

It isn't a comedy

I don't like shows to have too much focus on the romance though unless it has a large focus on humor, otherwise it's very dull for me.

[Shaun]

ok it turns out agustin is a dick :( (episode 6)

[Firewire]

well it's billed as a dramedy...

yeah but it isn't a comedy as such :tongue:

[Firewire]

i really like it, shame it only has two episodes left. ratings have been poor so probably won't be renewed.

[Mystic Mock]

Looking is on HBO so it can survive on DVD sales if it sells well enough, and other merchandise would probably help it as well.

[Braden]

Just seen on Facebook that this is getting renewed for a second series.

WOOOO!! :love:

[james130]

I thought it was pretty poor. :/
Episodes aren't long enough to really get into them

[Shaun]

:facepalm: (episode 7)

i hate gays

[Shaun]

I forgot that all good american telly starts about this time of year. Season 2 debuts tonight :flutter:

[Firewire]

very good start to the season, the soundtrack is incredible

[arista]

It is on Sky Atlantic tonight at 22:35

But unfortunately I don't have that on VM. So I am watching it now online and it's decent :dazzler:



Why does Sloppy Shaun Not say that?

[Braden]

Can't wait to watch this.

The first series was brilliant :flutter:

[Donovan.]

Really glad that Doris has been bumped up to main cast, cause she's amazing.

Not really spoilers, but I don't want to give anything away.
Patrick going to hug the tree and then quoting Walt Whitman, were two small moments that I found hilarious.

[Firewire]

episode 2 was really good

[Black Dagger]

Loving it, I wish it was an hour </3

[Fetch The Bolt Cutters]

going to start watching this now :amazed:

[Firewire]

going to start watching this now :amazed:

you will prob love

[Braden]

I still haven't watched last weeks episode D:

[Fetch The Bolt Cutters]

that was really boring lmao i wont watch again

[Firewire]

that was really boring lmao i wont watch again

oh it gets better

[Fetch The Bolt Cutters]

but i have the attention span of a flea i cba

[LemonJam]

I started watching yesterday and forgot I watched it until now lol but I like it I guess.

[Shaun]

just watched episode 1 (of the new season) now and am as a result downloading the greatest hits of sister sledge (also some other similar songs like Indeep and Chic)

[LemonJam]

I caught up in 2 days haha it's brilliant. Richie :love:

[Firewire]

just watched episode 1 (of the new season) now and am as a result downloading the greatest hits of sister sledge (also some other similar songs like Indeep and Chic)

the soundtrack is so good

[Braden]

I watched the first two episodes of s2 (thanks to Lucas :love:) last night.

Omg I love this show, so glad it's back.

[LemonJam]

Patrick is so ****ing messy now :joker: but honestly I think Jonathan Groff does the role, really, really well. I don't really want to see Patrick with either Kevin or Richie :laugh: Like Kevin's probably my least favourite character because he has no balls and Richie is WAY too good for Patrick lets be real and desperate Patrick is kind of hilarious.

I love that Doris is in it more now because Lauren Weedman is also fantastic. There's little to her storyline thus far but she's so hilariously charming that it doesn't matter, you still root for her and Malik (who is also a great addition). Agustin and Eddie are also great because they really bounce off each other and I'm curious to see where their relationship is going (I do miss Frank though)

Also: http://domsjuicychicken.tumblr.com/

[Shaun]

the funeral episode >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> all other episodes of any television show this year

[Chuck]

A Boring Show About Gay Men Finds Its Reason for Being in a Brilliant Female Performer
Lauren Weedman Redeems Everything That's Wrong with HBO's Looking

It's no secret that Looking—HBO's half-hour comedy/drama about a trio of gay male friends in San Francisco—is boring. The show's been widely identified as such since its 2014 premiere. "In Looking, gay men get to be boring on TV at last," wrote Gawker's Rich Juzwiak, giving a grudging nod to the progress that's allowed gay TV characters out of the colorful-sidekick ghetto. Slate's J. Bryan Lowder could find no such silver lining: "Looking is so boring, so utterly flat in terms of narrative or characterization, so in need of occasional pauses in which to perform a few jumping jacks to bring one's heart rate up to resting, that I would opt out entirely if we gay men—or at least gay male culture critics—weren't contractually obliged to watch."

So we all keep watching, in hopes of witnessing something (besides Russell Tovey's exemplary derriere) that justifies keeping our eyes open. In last week's show—the seventh episode of season two—we finally got it, thanks to the center-stage placement of a key supporting character, played by actor Lauren Weedman, whose intricately brilliant performance schooled the world in what this show could be. It was the opposite of boring. It was thrilling.

Before plunging into the redemptive brilliance of Weedman and what it means for Looking's reputation as a snoozefest, allow me to venture back to the time before the boringness of Looking was a cultural given, when the prospect of an HBO show about contemporary gay life sparkled promisingly on the horizon. The key source of these promising sparkles: Andrew Haigh, the British filmmaker whose beautifully low-key gay film Weekend—about two strangers who get to know each other physically and spiritually over the course of a you-know-what—won raves from audiences and critics in 2011. When Haigh signed on as one of Looking's executive producers, as well as the show's primary writer and director, expectations were high that the rich naturalism Haigh brought forth in Weekend would be within the reach of Looking, which expanded the perfect containment of Haigh's film (two guys, one weekend) to an open-ended series following three gay friends going about their lives in San Francisco.

When Looking arrived on HBO in 2014, the influence of Weekend was apparent, primarily in the visual style of the series, with its plain, everyday scenes shot in naturally occurring light, and its focus on those small, found moments that capture rich bits of life. Such moments are essential to films that hope to divine their plots from mundane human minutiae, and Weekend was flush with them, thanks in part to Haigh's rigging of his static setup with naturally combustible characters—one a lackadaisically closeted gay man, the other a political queer who's unafraid of his own anger. With rock and flint provided, sparks flew, but not on Looking, which swapped Weekend's sharp sexual duo for a sludgy group of friends seemingly bound only by their relatively harmonious boringness. If Weekend is a game of chess, where every move communicates something substantial, Looking is a game of checkers, where things move over here and over there and it doesn't really mean anything and eventually your cousins go home.

Making the vacuity at the center of Looking even more of a drag is the wealth of fascinating life crowding the margins of the show. There's Raúl Castillo's Richie, the Mexican American barber and on-again/off-again love interest, who's lit up several episodes with his sharp eye for the caginess of the central characters and his own complicated moral code. There's Scott Bakula's Lynn, an elder-statesman gay whose survival of the AIDS years made him a love-every-moment optimist capable of infuriating levels of detachment. Finally, there's Lauren Weedman's Doris, the lifelong best friend (and former girlfriend) of one of Looking's central gays, and the breakout star of the show.

Things didn't start out particularly promising for Weedman on Looking. She spent the first season fleshing out her central-casting "fag hag" character with a prickly brilliance, but most of her time on-screen involved making wryly inappropriate jokes and asking one of the boring gays, "Are you really okay?"

But everything changed in last week's episode, which was titled "Looking for a Plot." (Jokes, write thyselves.) The episode begins in the same dull universe in which we've always been inexplicably trapped, with the gays and Doris at brunch, where one of the central gays is lazily wallowing in some arbitrary something or other while the other gays nod or something. Then Doris's phone rings, and she reacts to her phone ringing, and the camera doesn't pull away like it normally does when supporting characters stumble into rich territory—it stays right there, with the rest of the episode following Doris's story. The result is not only the best episode of Looking by several hundred miles, but one of the best performances I've seen on TV in years.

That Weedman is a ridiculously gifted performer is old news in Seattle, where she spent the 1990s honing her masterful solo performance skills. Her specialty was the one-sided conversation, Bob Newhart–style, with Weedman locked in dialogue with an invisible other made real by Weedman's intricate engagement and eye for revelatory detail. After her breakout show Homecoming scored an off-Broadway run, Weedman found herself working as a correspondent on The Daily Show—an ill-fitting job that Weedman autopsies in her 2007 essay collection A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body, writing about watching herself actively repel Jon Stewart with her weird, twitchy, inappropriately jokey demeanor.

But one human's trash is another human's treasure, and Weedman's weird, twitchy, inappropriately jokey demeanor eventually found a happy home on Looking, where she routinely livened up proceedings as best she could until last week's episode gave her a chance to soar in full.

For example, that buzzing cell phone, which instigates the journey out of the boring old Looking world, throws Weedman's Doris into a small flurry of behaviors that pack more emotion and action into 30 seconds than seems to have existed in the rest of Looking's episodes combined. It's a flash of complicated human life of an entirely different grade than what's typically found on the show, and, in a rare turn for Looking, the plot later contextualizes this behavior. (Doris is the daughter of an alcoholic, and she goes somewhere very specific in her mind during times of crisis.)

"Looking for a Plot" isn't perfect, with many of the standard annoyances still in play. (Inexplicably, an unaffiliated central gay tags along on Doris's journey, filling the spaces between Weedman's dynamic scenes with arbitrary wallowing.) Still, the episode provides the richest glimpses yet of the deepest relationship on the show, that between Doris and her gay BFF Dom, which is captured in the type of tiny found moments in such short supply elsewhere in the show. (Just like the opener, her final scene is a killer.)

Will Looking's writers learn any lasting lessons from the Doris episode, which simultaneously threw the show's shortcomings into high relief while showcasing a functional solution? I can only hope. Whatever the case, three cheers for Lauren Weedman for working a television miracle. Give her a spin-off. If Rhoda can do it, so can Doris.

http://www.thestranger.com/features/feature/2015/03/04/21852759/a-boring-show-about-gay-men-finds-its-reason-for-being-in-a-brilliant-female-performer

Great review.

[Glenn.]

I've just started S1. I'm on Ep3 :flutter:

[Glenn.]

or Ep4 icr

[Chuck]

The last 2 episodes were really good.

Patrick's mum and Doris are my favourite characters. :love:

It's not looking like It's going to be renewed though, is it :worry:

[Glenn.]

Im obsessed :flutter:

I want riche to be my bf

[Braden]

So Jonathon Groff has basically confirmed cancellation :( but has promised a movie :flutter:

http://www.newnownext.com/jonathan-groff-confirms-looking-cancellation-promises-movie-to-wrap-things-up/03/2015/?xrs=synd_facebook_logo

[Glenn.]

I still need to start series 2.

[Shaun]

I had a feeling it'd be cancelled :( it's SO much better than Girls though which is frustrating as that's had four (5 soon) seasons of sod all story... just gratuitous sex scenes and a constant "what am I doing with my life x" shrug.

[Braden]

I watched the last two episodes last night :(

Was quite emotional :joker: i really hope they make a movie because I need more closure, lmao

After shipping Kevin & Patrick the entire time I was so dissapointed with how much of a dick he acted in the last episode :o I'm not sure whether Patrick's better suited to him or Richie?

The finale did not have enough Augustin, and the moments between Dom & Dorism were sad but realistic.

[Firewire]

I prefer Patrick and Richie

[Braden]

Part of me wanted Dom & Patrick to get together <3 but that would have been weird considering the characters are more brotherly

Oh, and it's sad that Dom's storyline with his older fling ended quite abruptly...or was that just me?

[LemonJam]

Not surprised considering so much of the season was based on one of the most unrootable relationships on TV, but gutted regardless.

[Braden]

743549550955212801

:amazed: :love:

[Shaun]

Relieved it's getting a finish to the story but still bitter it's ending so soon.

[Braden]

The film is airing tonight, so I will probably end up watching it tomorrow.

I'm looking forward to seeing the characters again and gaining some closure from the whole thing.

[Firewire]

Movie airs tonight

[Firewire]

omg Braden how scary

[Black Dagger]

lmao I was literally about to post myself, glad I didn't now.

I hope it has a fitting ending.

[Braden]

I've literally just finished watching the movie.

I'll do an in-depth write-up tomorrow, but I was very pleased by it all. I was anticipating its finish because I knew this would literally be the end, and the whole concept of this show has spoke to me more than any other TV series I've ever watched. The characters, the tone of the story-telling and the soundtrack, it's all just so perfect :love:

[Braden]

My thoughts and feelings on Looking: The Movie...

It was so good.

I was happy to see all of the characters again, and at one point in the film there was a scene where almost every important character was involved - it felt really nice seeing them all together. It really paid homage to how amazing the cast are and the characters they play. It would have been good to see Patrick's mum because I had a soft spot for her, but she wasn't really relevant to the overall plot of the movie so it made sense not to include her. The general tone of the movie was great, and it made me realise that the TV series itself was basically shot like mini-movies. There were no signifcant changes from the transition from TV to film like, say, Absolutely Fabulous had.

As I've already said - I related to the TV series a lot more than any other television programme I watch. I identified with most of the characters, and it's great that Looking have gone out of there way to create an accurate portrayal of gay men. There was obviously a sense of Americism attached to he show, and the San Francisco culture was apparent throughout. However, the storylines made the characters really relatable. The producers and cast did a good job of making the show come across as realistic as possible but still quite flashy and 'cool' at the same time.

I'm glad there was closure within the film. Throughout most the first and second seasons I wanted Kevin and Patrick to be together. I found Ritchie to be quite overrated as a character and thought that Kevin and Patrick were much better suited. That was before Kevin turned into a prick the last episode of season 2. It was interesting to watch their final scene (K & P) together because they did do a really good job in making it seem that they just weren't meant to be together, though it was sad to see Kevin still have blatant feelings for Patrick. I loved their final 'hug' together.

I did say after the S2 finale that I kinda shipped Dom and Patrick together despite their brotherly bond, so the scene where the made out was quite amusing to watch. I loved the outcome of it all, quite funny. Doris was still legendary, she proivded the sharp-wit she ormal would. I'm glad her story ended with her in a lovely relationship and wanting to start a family. Agustín's moment with Patrick on the rocks was a really nice one, and I understood exactly what he meant about becoming someone that you never thought you would be. His wedding was so cute and I'm glad he also got a happy ending (The moment with the Ordained Minister and Patrick was a good touch). It was happy endings all round, really :love: Brady turned out to be a funny, drunken bitch. Though I do think that it was alluded that his character may have a alcohol issues - a terrible issue in the LGBT+ community.

I was quite happy to se Patrick and Richie end up together. Itwas what everyone wanted and I wasnt mad to see it. The ending was really lovely. t's bittersweet that it'sall come to a finish but I won't forget it. I'll probably re-watch it soon enough. And one of the best things that's come out of this whole thing is that it's made me realise that I really need to go out and find a good circle of gay friends :laugh: I'm jealous of their friendships and how much they love each other. Growing up in a small town I never really got that :(

[Braden]

The film needs to be appreciated, my fellow gays :love:

[Shaun]

i'll try to torrent ha :worry: