Neil Patrick Harris’ Gay C risis Is Very Entertaining

with Kevin Fallon

Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.

This week:

Our very own gay Carrie Bradshaw.

The new Beyoncé song that everyone should listen to.

Can’t get over this one news item from the week.

A first-hand account on why Marvel sucks.

Ben Affleck, always nailing it.

Uncoupled Is a Modern “Gay Sex and the City”

In the first scene of the Netflix series Uncoupled, Neil Patrick Harris and Tuc Watkins, playing partners of 17 years, are in bed and breathless, post-coital after Harris’ Michael had just performed some sort of sexual act for Watkins’ Colin’s birthday. They’re naked. They’re giggling. They make a few jokes about it being satisfying. And I blushed.

I’m a gay man—I don’t want to brag, but a gay man who has been naked in a bed with another gay man before. And yet, I was a little scandalized. Gays! Talking about sex! On my TV screen! I’d clutch my pearls, but that would only be fodder for a cruder joke, considering the topic.

It is the year of our Oprah 2022, and it still feels like something provocative, polarizing, and maybe even political to make the very first image of a TV series on the world’s most popular streaming service pitched to be a mainstream hit be two men cuddling, kissing, and talking about orgasms. Straights are going to see this! My word!

Of course, there’s nothing particularly scandalous or scandalizing about the scene. It’s actually rather chaste, and would be cliché—how many versions of this scenario with heterosexual couples have we seen before, even in “family-friendly” content—were it not instead so jarring.

Maybe this says something more about me and how I’ve consumed TV over the years, that I’ve been conditioned to, still, at a time when queer content and LGBTQ+ representation on screen is more dynamic than ever, think that the insinuation that dudes have sex with each other is a Big Deal. Uncoupled isn’t the most realistic, the most graphic, or the cleverest depiction of gay sex, but even with just that first scene it still, to me, felt—I’m rolling my eyes as hard as you are for saying this—important.

But you know what? Yes. Neil Patrick Harris looking hot-as-ever getting dicked down on Netflix is what I consider important. This matters to me.

At the start of Uncoupled, Michael Lawson and Colin McKenna are the epitome of gay perfection. They are pushing 50, clearly wealthy, have a gorgeous apartment on Gramercy Park, and, more imperative than all of that, have abs. I hate them because I want to be them, and I drown my sorrows in Chinese takeout I paid for with a nearly-maxed-out credit card because I am not.

Michael goes about his day as a real-estate broker who could seemingly be a composite of every character on Million Dollar Listing New York, while simultaneously making sure that everything is in order for Colin’s massive surprise 50th birthday party he’s been planning for later that night. But it’s Colin who has the bigger surprise.

When he shows up, he tells Michael that he’s leaving him, completely blindsiding him after their 17 years together; Michael had absolutely no idea and, because Colin has no interest in wading through messy feelings, has no answers as to why this is happening. He’s essentially been pushed out of a plane, without the courtesy of being given a parachute.

The season follows Michael as he figures out what it means to be single again for the first time in so many years, and at an age when he never expected to have to navigate the dating scene—let alone reckon with the idea of who he is if he’s alone. There’s learning how to use Grindr and being comfortable having sex again. There is dealing with the hurt, the resentment, the anger, and the confusion over what Colin did. Posters for Uncoupled use the tagline, “He’s single. He forgot how to mingle.” That’s cute!

This is a series that is very appealing to me, a person who rewatches Sex and the City once a quarter and who thought, for all its faults, the way And Just Like That… lent dignity to the experience of aging while still daring to live a thriving life was incredibly profound. “What if we did that, but made it gay?” approaches the level of pandering, in terms of pop culture, that I like.

It is co-created by Darren Star, who, in addition to his work on the Sex and the City franchise, also created the series Youngerand Emily in Paris, the former of which I was an unapologetic, diehard fan of, and the latter I apologize for kind-of-loving very much. But those credits lend crucial information to the type of show that Uncoupled is.

It’s a very comforting world, this shared rom-com-series universe. Everyone has money, and the ones who don’t are still inexplicably fabulous. The most romantic cities in the world both look exactly like themselves, yet also more glamorous, as if life had an Instagram filter while you were walking through Manhattan. Apartments are chicer. Parties are more incredible. Crushes are swoonier, sex is hotter, and the tortured concept of “love” becomes something even grander, more complicated, and, yet, more wonderful.

It’s a way of depicting life in a city that makes people want to move there. The romanticization of it all is so enchanting and so imprinting that, when you arrive and life is actually avoiding stepping on a rat while leaving your 375-square-foot apartment that costs 85 percent of your income in order to commute in 97-degree heat to your job where you work 14 hours a day, you’ve already been so seduced that you ignore it all.

Who cares that you haven’t slept in seven months because they’re doing construction outside your building? You’re Carrie Bradshaw now.

Uncoupled hits the tonal sweet spot for this kind of show. There are puns and zippy cultural references and one-liners that work really hard, and you should be grateful for the effort because they are often funny. It also, much like those aforementioned series, recklessly moves from these comic moments to intense emotion. I live for this brand of TV whiplash.

In this case, yes, it’s hilarious to make dick-pic jokes as Michael joins Grindr, but he is also a person who is aching and wounded. When his heartbreak washes over him, it is devastating. The best thing about Uncoupled—again, like those other series—is that, for all the envy-inducing style, showiness, and humor, it is grounded in universal, wrenchingly human emotion.

A show like this is fun because it is so escapist, but it works because of how relatable the Big Feelings can be—and the embrace of them that is as unapologetic as the sexiness of everything else. What Michael is going through is hard, even if we get some hot hook-up scenes and best-of-the-year comedy performances from Tisha Campbell and Brooks Ashmanskas as his closest confidantes—his Charlotte and Miranda, if you will. It’s a fascinating pop-culture experiment to be whisked off into a fantasy world, but have our difficulties and heartbreaks carried along as baggage.

Whenever a series about gay men—and especially about gay love, dating, and sex—premieres, it’s divisive. It’s never reflective of the exact experience of each individual person and, especially when it’s a show like Uncoupled that’s being pitched to the masses, the way it depicts gay life matters deeply to people—to the point that they almost can’t enjoy the content at face value.

There are people I’ve talked to who’ve seen the series and were annoyed by how obsessed the characters are with having casual sex, as if that’s all gay men care about. And there are people I’ve talked to who’ve seen the series and were annoyed that it wasn’t explicit, frank, or raunchy enough about the sex lives of gay men.

A rich white gay with Harris’ body whose friends operate art galleries and who can afford to take cabs everywhere isn’t accessible to some people, and that’s fair. But, as a person who has lived in New York for [redacted] years, I can say that those people do exist. If I already envy them, I don’t mind watching TV about them, too.

And as far as what is or isn’t relatable about what Michael is going through and how he’s dealing with it? Without revealing too much of my own business, I can say that the series rings true to the point that my friend who came to a screening with me clasped my arm so often in disbelief at its uncanniness that I now have a bruise.

I both love and hate that when a series like Uncoupled comes out, my instinct is still to think of it as important. It’s a really fun TV series, with a great lead performance from Neil Patrick Harris. But there is something important about it. I’ve spent so long empathizing with—and trying to be—a gay Carrie Bradshaw. Now I don’t need qualifiers. I can be Michael Lawson.

The Best Song on Beyoncé’s New Album

I cannot wait to listen to Beyoncé’s new album as it was intended to be experienced—on a dance floor at a club, surrounded by revelers.

Let’s be real about it: I will not be at any club this weekend. I will be playing Renaissance at a respectable volume from my Spotify-with-ads account, while doing some shoulder-dancing in the kitchen as I wash some dishes.

But the glory of Renaissance, which Allegra Frank correctly praised in her Daily Beast review as an ode to queer dance-floor anthems and the Ballroom scene of the ’80s, is that it’s the first piece of music in a long time to make me at least consider doing something wild like “leaving my apartment”—and that is huge. Beyoncé really said, “Don’t worry about monkeypox, my children. I got you.” Perhaps Renaissance has musical inoculation powers.

I would like to personally thank Beyoncé for giving us a reason to feel alive this summer with this album. I would like to thank her for keeping said album to a tight hour-long running time, because nobody has time for anything longer than that in this climate. And I would like to especially thank her for “Alien Superstar,” the standout track from the album, and the song that, if we had any taste at all, should skyrocket into a massive hit and be our collective obsession for the year.

Like most of Renaissance, the remarkable thing about “Alien Superstar” is how it manages to sound both unshakably familiar, like it had already been the soundtrack of some formative moment of joy you’ve experienced in your life, and completely fresh and game-changing. It’s the kind of song that can make you feel like you’re a different person when you’re listening to it—someone who might even be a little more fun and fabulous.

The moment it launches with its pulsing clanks and thumps, your body starts to reflexively convulse. Whatever the musical equivalent is of a vocal strut, Beyoncé works her spoken-word verse like a runway, spitting through lines about how she’s the baddest bitch in the room, and no one else compares. Your spirit starts to catch fire until something new and unfamiliar starts to waft off of you like smoke. Is it—could it be—self-confidence? Dare you feel a little bit of arrogance, some deserved ego? Might you even be tempted to demand attention on a dance floor? Could you even be feeling yourself?

“Alien Superstar” is tailor-made for a Ballroom battle, and I can only imagine how poignant and invigorating it would be to watch. But it’s also a fantastic blend of unabashedly queer and irresistibly accessible.

Yes, I want to hear this at a gay club. I also want to hear it while I’m walking down the aisle at CVS. It’s the kind of song that deserves to be an event, a celebration anthem. But it’s a lifestyle. I think that’s what the ethos of this song is. We’re all “U-N-I-Q-U-E,” but we’re no longer looking at that as a reason to be exclusionary. Bring on the alien superstar invasion. We’ve been here all along. We just needed Beyoncé to beam the spirit out of us.

This Is Total Bullshit

In times like these, I’m reminded of the night I put my decorative Golden Girls party plate in the microwave and it caught on fire. It was stressful. I thought my life was on the line. It was, literally, flamingly gay. There was intense, unmooring trauma, and then life moved on.

I’m worried that this is how I, and perhaps a collective “we,” have resigned to feel as we weather certain other, flamingly gay traumas that are in the news—we whip up a righteous frenzy on social media, but then kind of move on. I thought about this following the news this week that Republican congressman Glenn Thompson voted against codifying same-sex marriage into law, and then three days later attended his gay son’s wedding.

It was an attention-grabbing example of the hypocrisy and complacency that surrounds what increasingly resembles an inevitable threat: the stripping back of rights, and our willingness to be OK with that.

No one wants a person whose job is to write 1,200-word pieces about a funny scene from The Real Housewives to start preaching about politics, and I won’t—except for the fact that my existence and desire to be open about it is still political. That there are debates and concerns about rolling back legal protections for the LGBT community is horseshit. We shouldn’t assume that everything’s going to be fine. What have these last years taught us, if not that things unequivocally are not going to be fine?

Another Reason to Think Marvel Sucks

When critics complain about the Marvel takeover of pop culture, the fact that, overwhelmingly, this is the only content people watch and care about, they’re called elitist, pretentious, or out of touch. Mostly, they’re considered spoilsports. These are things that people love and give them joy. Why try to ruin the fun?

That’s why I’m such a fan of the article that ran on Vulture this week: “I’m a VFX Artist, and I’m Tired of Getting ‘Pixel-F–ked’ by Marvel.”

The piece gives incredible insight into what’s always been one of the most frustrating things about Marvel: These are projects that rely on special effects to an exhausting degree, especially since, so often, the effects are just plain ugly. It turns out that’s because, as the person in the article alleges, the studio treats its special-effects team like garbage, with ridiculous expectations and little resources. Again, a weird position to take when your movies are 99.9-percent special effects!

It’s a fascinating read.

This Is the Summer Vibe

Ben Affleck, forever serving the exact right vibe. Look at him napping in that chair. He is the moment.

Sharp Stick: Lena Dunham’s latest exploration of sexual coming-of-age is messy and unflinching in all the right ways. (Fri. in theaters)

Uncoupled: Scratches every Emily in Paris/Sex and the City itch. (Fri. on Netflix)

Resurrection: Rebecca Hall never misses. Pay her some respect. (Fri. in theaters)

Industry: This was last year’s “cool people are talking about this show but you’ve never seen it” series. Time to fix that! (Mon. on HBO)

Surface: As always, Gugu Mbatha-Raw deserves better. (Fri. on Apple TV+)

DC League of Super-Pets: Even for a kids’ movie/commercial cash grab, this one is surprisingly cynical. (Fri. in theaters)

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