TV: Look, But Don't Touch

The long-promoted TV show 'Looking' finally premiered last night on HBO. Brought to fruition by Andrew Haigh, the creator of the much-praised UK film Weekend, and Michael Lannan, one of the people who helped helm Interior. Leather Bar. and I Want Your Love, the promos of 'Looking' looked like a modernized and Instagrammed 'Queer as Folk', a 'Girls' for the gay boys of the 21st century.

The hazy glow of San Francisco is perfectly rendered, with foggy nights and sun-dappled days. The perfectly-rendered cramped apartments and bustling downtown make the backdrops of the multiple dating/relationship dramas sometimes overwhelm the action, especially when it centers around Patrick, a milquetoast blonde twink who doesn't like men "too hairy"(a park tryst), or "too chubby" (his ex's new fiance). This blank everyman finds his visual mirrored twin on a first date with a blonde doctor who drops him mid-date for being shallow. Signs, people!

One of the more interesting characters is Agustin, an artist's assistant with a boyfriend contemplating both three-ways (yes) and moving in with his boyfriend...in Oakland (possibly?) It's interesting how the affordability of SF is only brought up this one time in the debut episode. I wonder if this looming social trend will reappear in the series.

The other lead character is Dom, an approaching mid-life waiter who thrives on his Romeo status and measures his worth on his skills of racking up interested men. Cliche? Yes. But it will be interesting to see this character get his comeuppance or at least maybe a sea change of ideas towards ageing gracefully.

These two co-leads threaten to take over their drippy, dull friend Patrick as the real points of interest for this series.

The laughs are very subtle, the character-building is slow, but 'Looking' has a shot at becoming the next series about gay men with actual legs to stand on.

TV: Boys who like 'Girls' to be Girls Who Like Boys

Season 3 of 'Girls' premiered this week and I still don't know what to make of it. We always knew this show would be a navel-gazing, fake-problems stacked, eye-roll inducing twentysomething smorgasbord, but there were always truth kernels, clever dialogue and a few genuinely touching moments in Seasons 1 and 2.

Where did the problems start? What have the symptoms been?

I particularly liked the dark turn Season 2 took, but found Hannah's instant OCD affliction a bit phony. We're just hearing about this now?? In Episode 19 of the show? The new season starts out with this cutesy, gross shot of Hannah swallowing her "OCD control pill" and boyfriend Adam making her open her mouth and stick out her tongue to make sure she took the pill. Coz, you know, most OCD sufferers would want to fake taking the pill so it wouldn't be under control and their lives can spiral out of control. Point being: pill taken; sitcom control over debilitating disease: done. May we never speak of it again.

Only in the world of fairytale NYC, can three twentysomething New Yorkers take multiple days off from their 'jobs'(?) to take a long and winding road trip upstate to pick up a friend. Although Jessa was the naughty, real-talk spark of the first two seasons, her stint at rehab seems phoned in. Her role as the snarky, bored-with-it-all, jaded princess of group therapy is a cliche. A pissed-off therapy member throwing a drink in her face is a wonderful wake-up call to Jessa's character and the show. Can we throw a pitcher of Kool-Aid in Lena Dunham's face to wake her up?

Apparently Hannah is writing a book about....something? Life? Coffee shops? Ill-advised, shapeless haircuts (if you're gonna go for the pixie cut, go REAL pixie.) She's veering dangerously close into 'The Real World: London' Jay's territory and his obsession with "My play! My play!" Her book! Her book!

We're only on Episode 3 next week, so there is plenty of time to turn this ship around and make things a bit more real and less...Freshman year on a bad day.

To quote Belle & Sebastian: "You wrote a book about yourself/The people left it on the shelf/Write another one/Now you've got a story that's worth talking about."