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Queer as Folk was an American/Canadian television series co-production, produced by Showtime and Temple Street Productions, which was based on the British series of the same name created by Russell T. Davies. This US version of Queer as Folk used various Canadian directors known for their independent film work (including Bruce McDonald, David Wellington, Kelly Makin, John Greyson, Jeremy Podeswa and Michael DeCarlo) as well as famed Australian director Russell Mulcahy (Highlander) who directed the pilot episodes. The head writers were Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman who were also the executive producers of the series along with former Warner Bros. Television president Tony Jonas. Other writers in the later seasons included Michael MacLennan, Efrem Seeger, Brad Fraser, Del Shores, and Shawn Postoff.

The show's original theme song, "Spunk", was written and performed by Greek Buck and was used during seasons one through three. When the main title sequence for the show was changed for seasons four and five, the theme song was changed to "Cue The Pulse To Begin" performed by The Burnside Project. However, as a tip-of-the-hat to Greek Buck, the count-in from Spunk was left in the new opening sequence before Cue The Pulse To Begin was played.

General description

The series follows the lives of five gay men living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Brian, Justin, Michael, Emmett, Ted; a lesbian couple, Lindsay and Melanie; and Michael's mother Debbie. Another main character, Ben, was added in the second season. Due to tax incentives, the series was filmed in Canada, with frequent location filming in Toronto's Church and Wellesley gay village.

The show was noted for its somewhat frank depiction of gay lifestyles and sex. A disclaimer, "Queer as Folk is a celebration of the lives and passions of a group of gay friends. It is not meant to reflect all of gay society" appeared after each episode on Showtime in the U.S. but this disclaimer was not broadcast on Showcase in Canada (instead, the standard Showcase disclaimer "This program contains nudity, sexuality and coarse language -- viewer discretion is advised" was broadcast before each airing and after each commercial).

The title of the show comes from a dialect expression from some parts of Northern England, "there's nought pronounced 'nowt' so queer as folk", meaning "there's nothing as weird as people".

The show drew strong ratings for both Showtime and Canada's Showcase. In fact, in Canada, the series had such high ratings that by the end of the 5th season so many sponsors had purchased advertising time that Showcase had to air the show in an hour and ten minute time block to accommodate all the ads and not cut out any scenes. This was not a problem for Showtime, since that service is commercial free and no ads were ever broadcast during a QAF telecast.

The series ran for five seasons (2000 to 2005 on Showtime and 2001 to 2005 on Showcase). It was believed by fans that the show could have run for another year (most of the cast originally had six year contracts but according to one rumor the contracts were renegotiated to five years after the first season).

However, Showtime was concerned about the rising production costs due to the strength of the Canadian Dollar. Some of the cast, however, felt that Showtime didn't want to be known as a "gay only" network so they cancelled the show. Publicly, at least, Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman both stated that they didn't feel there were really any further stories that they could tell and also Randy Harrison (Justin) was reported as saying that had the series gone into a sixth season, he would not have been part of it.

Canada's Showcase, which was making a great deal of money from the advertising demand, did briefly consider producing a sixth season, but as Showtime owned much of the rights to the series and funded much of the budget, Showcase decided against it.

The series has been aired weekly in Brazil under the name Os Assumidos by the cable television channel Cinemax.

Since January 9, 2006, the series is aired weekly in Germany under the original title on the private channel ProSieben. The private Spanish channel Cuatro begins broadcasting the series from its beginning starting on June 30, 2006. All five seasons have been shown in Australia on the SBS Channel without commercial breaks.

Awards

2001
  • GLAAD Media Awards nominated for Outstanding Drama Series (winner)
  • Third Prize nominated for Effects Titles Ident's PSA's (winner)
  • Golden Reel Awards nominated for Best Sound Editing - Television Episodic - Music
  • Artios nominated for Best Casting for TV, Dramatic Pilot

2002

2003

2004

  • GLAAD Media Awards nominated for Outstanding Drama Series
  • DGC Craft Award nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Picture Editing - Television Series
  • DGC Craft Award nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Production Design - Television Series
  • Golden Reel Award nominated for Best Sound Editing in Television Episodic: Music

2005

  • GLAAD Media Awards nominated for Outstanding Drama Series
  • DGC Craft Award nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Picture Editing - Television Series
  • DGC Craft Award nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Production Design - Television Series
  • DGC Team Award nominated for Outstanding Team Achievement in a Television Series - Drama
  • Prism Award nominated for TV Drama Series Multi-Episode Storyline (winner) tied with Lost
  • Prism Award nominated for Performance in a Drama Series Storyline (Scott Lowell)
  • BMI Cable Award Ray Ketchem nominated for Television Music Award (winner)

Character descriptions, plot details

Brian is a handsome, 29-year old advertising executive with a voracious sexual appetite. He was raised by a carousing, alcoholic father and an obsessively Catholic mother. He lives a self-contained, self-centered life, preferring the honesty of lust to the dishonesty (and vulnerability) he perceives in love and romance. Michael is his best friend since childhood, and is also just turning 30. At the beginning of the series, Michael works at a retail store called The Big Q. Ted, 33, is an accountant with low self-esteem, and Emmett is a flamboyant Southerner who works in trendy clothing shop "Torso" on Liberty Avenue.

The first episode finds the four friends ending a night at an idealized gay oasis called Babylon. Jaded Brian picks up and deflowers the sensitive and artistic Justin, a 17-year-old prep school student who becomes far more than a one-night stand. Brian also becomes a father that night, having sired a child for college friend Lindsay, an art teacher, and her partner Melanie, an attorney who loathes Brian as much as Lindsay loves him. Debbie is Michael's mother and a committed gay-rights activist. She waits tables at the Liberty Diner, which serves as a haven for the group of friends. Her brother Vic is critically ill with AIDS and lives with her.

The characters become enmeshed and entangled in various ways over the course of five years. Michael's seemingly unrequited love for Brian fuels the story, which he occasionally narrates in voice-over. Justin's coming out and budding relationship with Brian has unexpected effects on Brian's and Michael's lives. Justin confides in straight high-school friend Daphne, while struggling to deal with homophobic classmates and his dismayed, divorcing parents, Craig and Jennifer. Later in the second season Justin & Michael co-create sexually-explicit underground comic "Rage", featuring a "Gay Crusader" superhero inspired by Brian.

Brian's son Gus, being raised by Lindsay and Melanie, becomes the focus of several episodes as issues of parental rights come to the fore. Ted is Melanie's accountant and once harbored a longstanding crush on Michael. He and Emmett begin as best friends, but briefly become lovers later in the series. Their relationship ends as Ted, unemployed and with a criminal record earned from running a porn website, becomes addicted to crystal meth. In the fourth season, Brian, who has lost his job by assisting Justin in opposing an anti-gay political client, starts his own agency. Michael marries Ben, an HIV-positive partner and the couple adopts a son, Hunter, who is also HIV-positive as a result of his experiences as a child prostitute.

Melanie and Lindsay's relationship, while on the surface, might represent a more "stable" relationship is actually quite tumultuous and controversial. Each cheats on the other at various points in the series, both tackle on a threesome shortly after they marry in an unlawful ceremony and become separated for much of the 4th and 5th season. Melanie is impregnated by Michael through artificial insemination in the fourth season, so that the best friends are now co-stepfathers. Brian's new advertising agency; Kinnetik, becomes highly successful both through a combination of Brian's customer loyalty and his edgier advertising. As a result of this, Brian is able to purchase Club Babylon from its now bankrupt owner.

In the fifth and final season, the boys have become men and the series, perhaps more comfortable in its role in gay entertainment, tackles political issues head-on and with much more fervor.

A political campaign called "Proposition 14" is depicted during much of the final season as a looming threat to the family-relations that the four principle characters have created. This proposition, like so many real-life recent legislative moves that have affected many US states, threatens to outlaw same-sex marriage, adoption and other family civil rights. The many ways in which such a proposition would affect the characters are depicted through nearly every episode. Debbie, Justin, Jennifer, Daphne, Emmett, Ted, Michael, Ben, Lindsay, Melanie and the children are depicted standing up and fighting against this proposition both by active canvassing, political contributions and other democratic processes, but are met with staunch opposition, discrimination, outright hatred and political setbacks by their neighbors.

The show climaxes near the end of the series when a benefit to support opposition to Proposition 14 hosted at Brian's club Babylon (after repeated relocations of the benefit, due to discrimination) is attacked by a bomb that initially kills 4, and eventually another 3 (including one supporting character) and injures 67.

This horrible event sets the bittersweet tone for the last three episodes in which Brian, frightened into reality by his third possible loss of Justin to an early death, finally declares his love for him. The two even plan a wedding, but Justin's artistic abilities get noticed by a New York agency and the two decide in favor of a more realistic approach to a relationship that works for their characters. Melanie and Lindsay, realizing they have more in common than they don't, resolve their relationship but relocate to Canada to "raise (their children) in an environment where they will be not called names, singled-out for discrimination, or ever have to fear for their life."

Brian and Justin resolve their relationship, as do Deb & Horvath, and the lesbians; Emmett becomes a Queer-Eye type TV presenter but is later fired when a professional football player kisses him on the news. Ted confronts his midlife crisis head-on and finally reunites with Blake. Hunter returns and the Novotny-Bruckner family perseveres.

The series came full circle with the final scenes staged in the newly re-built Babylon nightclub. In the final scene, Brian dances to Heather Small's "Proud," a song that accompanied a pivotal scene between Brian and Michael in the very first episode of the series, as Michael recites the final lines:

So the "thumpa thumpa" continues. It always will. No matter what happens. No matter who's president. As our lady of Disco, the divine Miss Gloria Gaynor has always sung to us: We will survive.

Cultural implications

The American version of Queer as Folk quickly became the number one show on the Showtime roster. The network's initial marketing of the show was primarily targeted at gay male audiences, yet a sizeable segment of the viewership turned out to be straight women.

Groundbreaking scenes abounded in Queer as Folk, beginning with the first episode, containing the first simulated explicit sex scene between two men shown on American television (including mutual masturbation, anal sex, and rimming), albeit more tame than the scene it was based on in the UK version. Despite the frank portrayals of drug use and casual sex in the gay club scene, the expected conservative uproar never materialized.

Initially, most of the actors kept their real-life sexual orientations ambiguous in the press so as not to detract from their characters, causing much speculation among the viewing audience. Since that time, Randy Harrison, Peter Paige, Robert Gant and Jack Weatherall have stated that they are gay, while the remainder of the cast have stated they are straight or have avoided public discussion of their orientation.

Controversial storylines which have been explored in Queer As Folk have included: coming out, same-sex marriage, recreational drug use and abuse (cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, GHB, ketamine, cannabis); gay adoption, artificial insemination; vigilantism; gay-bashing; safe sex, HIV-positive status, child prostitution; actively gay Catholic priests; discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation, the internet pornography industry and bug-chasers (HIV-negative individuals who actively seek to become HIV-positive).

The series was set in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which it depicted with a good deal of creative license. Pittsburgh was chosen as the closest parallel to the U.K. series' industrial setting of Manchester, England. However, since Pittsburgh does not have a large gay district like San Francisco or New York, almost all of the Liberty Avenue scenes were filmed in and around the Church and Wellesley area of Toronto which is that city's gay village. In fact, not a single shot of the real Liberty Avenue was ever used in the series. Toronto was chosen as the production center of the series because of its lower cost of production and established mature television and film industry. And, as it happens, Toronto's gay village had the look the producers needed to bring their vision of Liberty Avenue alive.

Woody's, the central bar in this fantasy Pittsburgh, is the name of a leading gay bar in Toronto, whose real exterior was shot with only minor disguise. (In a Season 4 episode in which several characters travelled to Toronto, the real Woody's was dubbed "Moosie's".) While Pegasus, the most popular gay club in Pittsburgh, is located on the real-life Liberty Avenue, it is not the gay mecca that is portrayed on the show.

The series has, at times, made humorous reference to its image in the gay community. A few episodes featured show-within-a-show Gay as Blazes, a dull, politically-correct drama which Brian particularly disagreed with, and which was eventually cancelled.

Criticisms of Queer as Folk

In many ways, the American series was groundbreaking on many social levels. Because of this, many gay critics and audience members, citing their under-representation in the past, have all made public claims that the show had a certain level of social responsibility. This feeling is perhaps the strongest reason for much criticism and controversy within the gay community concerning Queer as Folk's portrayal of gay and lesbian issues.

Like the original UK series, Queer as Folk has been strongly criticized by some in the gay community for what they feel is an unrealistic portrayal of actual gay relationships and/or gay life. The producers of the show have stressed from the beginning both in a written statement that appeared at the end of each show (Seasons 1-3) and in the press, that they were not attempting to make any representations or generalizations. However, many in the gay press have nonetheless charged that this would be the effect on many viewers, whether desired or not. A few gay columnists have therefore taken issue with what they feel are unrealistic portrayals as well as "hidden agendas" within the show's content. Examples used have been the lack of people of color on the show, the unrealistic (overly attractive) portrayal of patrons at bars/clubs, the overabundance of public sex at the bars (which is illegal in most places in the US, including Pennsylvania), and finally, the vilification of certain aspects of some gay men's lives (such as bareback sex), yet complacent treatment of hard-drug use and infidelity which, as critics have charged, is a taking of sides on controversial issues within the queer community and fails to "non-represent."

The lack of the realism of the setting has also been criticized, since the program depicts the gay scene in Pittsburgh as much more urbane and arguably sophisticated than it actually is. Still, others claim that while the depiction of drugs and sex is realistic, its portrayal is a counter-productive airing of "dirty laundry" to the larger community, to whom the gay community is appealing for legal protection of their civil rights.

Others in the gay community have praised it for its reflection of previously-taboo aspects of their lives, whether realistic or romanticized. On balance, many viewers see the show in a generally positive light for its contribution to gay media exposure.

Some critics and fans alike point out that some of these issues (including the lack of racial diversity and the heavy focus on sex) are common in TV shows about heterosexuals, too. As such, they argue that it is unfair to single out Queer as Folk for criticism on these issues.

The show was also criticized as a pale imitation of the original British series. Some argued that the US version over-emphasized sex and nudity as a cheap ratings grab, in comparison to the British series which, while it also depicted sexual activity, relied more on dialogue. Still others accused the US series of cowardice for making the Justin character older than the original British character, who was only fifteen at the start of that series.

Cast

Filming and Production

For a table of the episodes for seasons 1-5, see List of Queer as Folk Episodes.

Queer as Folk was produced by CowLip Productions, Tony Jonas Productions and Temple Street Productions in association with Channel 4 Television Corporation (the co-owner of the original UK series) and Showcase Television. Warner Bros. Television holds the international distribution rights to the series outside the US and Canada.

In the UK, season 1 was broadcast by the BBC on its digital channel BBC Choice. Seasons 3 and 4 were broadcast by Channel 4's digital channel E4 in an unpromoted post-midnight slot. While the BBC still holds the rights to season 2, it has never been broadcast since BBC Choice was rebranded BBC Three and its remit was changed. Only series 1 has been released on DVD in the UK exclusively through HMV stores.

All five seasons were filmed in wide-screen HDTV however only seasons 4 and 5 were regularly broadcast in HDTV in both the U.S. and Canada. In the U.S., Showtime did run Seasons 1, 2 and 3 in HDTV on Tuesday nights as a special repeat of an episode's full-screen broadcast the previous Sunday. These HDTV broadcasts from the first three seasons were not broadcast by Showcase in Canada. The episodes that appear in the commercially released DVD packages were taken from the HDTV versions.

Keeping up with the technology, Queer as Folk's Season 5 was one of the first series to be recorded using the relatively new digital video process rather than being made exclusively on film. The raw digital video was combined with some scenes that were filmed into a finished episode and then color corrected using a computer process to make the entire episode appear to be filmed.

Throughout all five seasons, the series was filmed primarily at Dufferin Gate Studios in Etobicoke, Ontario (a southwestern borough of Toronto).

Many of Season 3's non-location scenes of Babylon, Woody's and Liberty Diner were filmed at Greystone Studios in Mississauga (the city adjacent to Toronto's western border).

These same scenes for seasons 4 and 5 were filmed at the now-former Dufferin Gate Studios "B Studio" in Mississauga about 10-15 minutes from Dufferin Gate's home studio in Etobicoke. (This studio is now used by Shaftesbury Films as the home base for several of their projects including a Canadian series called ReGenesis).

Episodes

DVD Releases (U.S. only)

Season One was released on January 8th, 2002.

Season Two was released on February 25th, 2003.

Season Three was released on February 24th, 2004.

Season Four was released on April 5th, 2005.

Season Five was released on May 30th, 2006. (Season Five has not yet been released on DVD in any other country besides the U.S. although it will be released in Canada on July 18, 2006.)

See also

External links

Showtime network shows | 2000s TV shows in the United States | LGBT television series | American programs based on British programs | Television shows set in Pennsylvania

Queer as Folk | Queer as Folk (Estados Unidos) | Queer as Folk (version américaine) | 同志亦凡人 (美國電視劇) | ()

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Queer as Folk (US TV series)".

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