In the season three finale of the USA sit-com Playing House, friends Maggie (Lennon Parham) and Emma (Jessica St. Clair), get sidetracked on their way to a double date with their boyfriends at a fancy restaurant. When their car breaks down, Maggie, as she often does when she thinks that the situation demands male intervention, turns into her male alter-ego Bosephus. But even a roughneck like Bosephus can’t fix their car, so they have to share a Lyft car with a stylist who is on his way to work. When he suddenly offers to give Maggie and Emma a makeover, Emma hesitates but Maggie immediately jumps on it on both their behalves. Cut to the dressing room in a gay club where former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants Katya and Jiggly Caliente turn Emma and Maggie into drag queens for the evening. Although Emma is slightly reluctant at first, Maggie convinces her by declaring that they are both “just like one set of false eyelashes away from it”. After giving a show-stopping Tina Turner performance at the gay club they then hitch a ride in an ice cream truck called “Yas, Dairy Queens” and drive by one of Maggie’s patients to steal a wreath from her front door. After all these shenanigans, they finally make it to the restaurant still in full drag.
I’d freely admit that I often seek out LGBTQ content in books, movies, and television, but I never expected to find any in Playing House; a show often described by critics as “comfortable”, which is not a word that is usually associated with queerness. But Playin House has always been queer. Even when I watched the pilot episode back in 2014, I knew there was a lot more to this show than an amiable portrait of the friendship between two white straight cis women living in suburbia. A few minutes into that first episode, for example, it is revealed that Maggie’s then-husband Bruce (Brad Morris) engages in non-heteronormative sex over the Internet. This is the catalyst for their divorce and, more importantly, for Emma's decision to quit her high-powered career and move in with the newly-divorced Maggie. The series’ queerness was right there in that very first episode.
Three seasons later and my initial impression of the show has been further confirmed. Playing House may not be as obviously queer as the Emmy-nominated RuPaul’s Drag Race or the recently canceled-and-then-renewed Sense8. It might be also perhaps less well known among LGBTQ viewers than those other shows, but its queerness is there. I am hardly the only one to notice this, as the episode “Let’s Have a Baby” (Season 1, episode 9) was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for an outstanding individual episode in 2015.
Women living together and raising children is not a new sitcom territory. A similar premise was used in the 1980s on CBS’s Kate & Allie, starring Susan St James and Jane Curtin. There is nothing that spells traditional feminity more than maternity. It is, after all, still largely our societal norm that women should raise children and not necessarily just their own (think of traditionally feminized occupations: nannies, nurses, or kindergarten teachers). But, unlike in Kate & Allie, the characters played and created by real-life friends Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair co-parent the same child. And that is a key difference. Seeing two women raising children together is still a rare sight on our screens.
The characters’ life-long friendship is the backbone of the series. Theirs is a relationship deeply rooted in mutual love and respect. An earlier review published in The Atlantic praised the show’s portrayal of female friendship. If the show’s queerness has not received much attention so far, it is perhaps because two women partnering in a non-romantic and non-sexual way, unusual as it is on TV, cannot be taken as an act of queerness in itself. There needs to be more to it. And in Playing House there is.
If the main two characters are not queer and their relationship is platonic, then what makes this show queer? Well, a piece of fiction doesn’t need to have queer characters to be considered queer. In the case of the situational comedy, Film scholar Jane Feuer makes a distinction between the gay and the queer sitcom. According to this distinction, a gay sitcom would be one that’d have at least some main characters be openly gay: the whole run of Will & Grace or the last couple of seasons of Ellen are all very well-known examples of this as Feuer acknowledges. And if you think those shows are a bit dated now, consider that Will & Grace is due to return to NBC this fall. More recent examples of gay sitcoms could include the now-canceled The New Normal or The Real O’Neals. A queer sitcom, on the other hand, would be one that uses “gay humor” and upends traditional male and female gender roles but doesn’t necessarily include characters who identify themselves as gay, bisexual, etc. Think of Frasier or the 1990’s British cult show Absolutely Fabulous, examples also mentioned by Feuer.
There are no openly LGBTQ characters on Playing House. Because all the storylines focus on Maggie and Emma, there is little room left to include many other characters. There are only three other main characters in the show: Maggie’s ex-husband, Bruce; Emma’s old flame from high school, Mark (Keegan-Michael Key); and Maggie’s little brother, Zach (Zach Woods). And, just like Maggie and Emma, they are all straight. So, the lack of main characters that are queer eliminates any possibility of considering Playing House a gay sitcom even if there is a new recurrent gay character in season 3, Maggie’s colleague, Jeff.
What makes Playing House queer is its humor and its approach to gender roles. The show upends traditional gender roles not merely in giving us a same-sex partnership but mostly in the roles these two women take adopt within their relationship. Emma and Maggie compliment each other but not in ways that would fit a masculine/feminine binary. Emma may have a solid background in the male-dominated world of international business but it is Maggie who is often portrayed as the more adventurous of the two who is not afraid to break with convention. Neither Maggie nor Emma fit squarely into gender stereotypes when it comes to parenting or anything else.
Apart from being platonically in love with each other, Emma and Maggie are often infatuated with other women: old high school classmate Tina “Bird Bones” (Lindsay Sloane) whose body they often declare to “be bangin’” or their self-defense trainer Cookie (Lauren Weedman). Hilariously, it turns out that Cookie is dating Maggie’s ex-husband Bruce. These examples of same-sex attraction by heterosexual characters could be problematic if they were presented in a titillating or mocking manner but they are not. Instead, they queer more traditional representations of female friendship making the characters both more complex and more relatable to queer and non-queer viewers alike. Then, there’s Maggie’s male persona, Bosephus, who in his own way is a personification of stereotypical masculinity and is, therefore, called upon when that sort of energy is needed, only to send up the performativity of that particular North American brand of masculinity. The show’s humor is always campy and much is made of defying gender roles’ expectations. When Mark, who works as a local cop, first sees Emma after many years his reaction is the following: “Emma? Mrs. Johansson from next door called and said there was a broad-shouldered, blazered man sitting on Maggie’s front porch.” Emma’s characterization as somehow masculine is one of the things that make the drag scene so successful but it is also a queer wink to the audience.
Another key element that makes Playing House feel freshly queer is the clever ways in which it sends up some of the conventions of the most heterosexual of genres: the romantic comedy. In the show’s storylines, heterosexual romance is often relegated to a secondary or tertiary place if not made a total mockery. In this case, the hypothetical “triumph” of heterosexual romance would effectively mean the end of the show. If Emma and Maggie stopped “playing house” together, the core of the show would cease to be what it is and the series would have to be put to an end. Whether that will happen or not is yet to be seen but, in the meantime, Playing House is not only one of the most solidly funny shows on cable TV and streaming but also one of the still rare queer spaces in current popular culture.
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