The Unexpected Queerness of Playing House

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.

Riverdale (Season 1), Reviewed

One of the most surprising shows of the 2016-2017 season was the CW's Riverdale. Despite not making a lot narrative sense and suffering for some character inconsistencies, this mystery teen drama series surprisingly works.

Riverdale is loosely based upon the Archie comics but that is largely irrelevant because, except for the characters' names and some of their most superficial features, there is very little that would remind you of the source text. Where the original comics dealt with teenage romance in an understandably cartoonish way, the new iteration deals with a murder mystery. Not only does redhead Archie get abs in this new version, he also gets a rather active sex life.

Atypical (Season 1), Reviewed

Netflix's Atypical is not the first TV comedy to have a main character who is Autistic, but it is the first show to give Autism such a prominent place. In a way, this new show comes to correct some of the errors its predecessors (most notably, The Big Bang Theory) have made when portraying characters with Autism. Yet, as it has been pointed out by people with personal experience in Autism, it falls short in some fundamental ways. 

Even viewers with no personal experience in Autism will find in Sam (Keir Gilchrist) a familiar portrayal of a character in the spectrum. Sam is the kind of high functioning person with Autism that we have seen before in movies and television. His major problem in season one is that he often comes across as rude and struggles to find a girlfriend at age 18. 

'Claws', Reviewed

In many ways, TNT's Claws is the perfect summer TV fare. It is at times violent, at times and at times humorous. It is also sexy, it's trashy, and it's set in Florida. 

Whether the combination of those elements works or not is a different matter. Set largely in a strip-mall nail salon, Claws is a pastiche of many television genres: the sitcom, the crime series, the soapy melodrama,... For my money, I'd say that it would work a lot better as a single-camera sitcom than it does in its actual form.