Because it’s fairly young, chatty, urban and bitchy, the new “Looking” (HBO, 10:30 p.m.) seems a naural fit with the network’s “Girls.” But the new series from Andrew Haigh and Michael Lannan is actually a throwback to all-male gay ensemble series like “Queer as Folk.”
As such, we meet a number of men, some in couples, some uncoupling, others wishing to be coupled, and all of them otherwise obsessed with coupling. This seems to be a disservice to gay couples who are monogamous and not on the make, but then again the title is “Looking.”
The ensemble, with Jonathan Groff, Frankie J. Alvarez and Murray Bartlett among them, are pleasant and attractive enough, and set in San Francisco. But the creators reject the “Folk” comparisons.
“It’s a different period, obviously,” Haigh told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tourlast week. “But I think it’s very different tonally. I think the concerns are different. I think stylistically it’s very different. I mean, it’s obviously about gay people, which that was too. I think that’s probably for me probably the limit of the kind of similarities.”
“One of the goals of the show, and something we talked about during development,” Lannan says, “is what is the most contemporary way we can portray some gay characters today, and as ‘Queer as Folk’ was very much of its time, I think ‘Looking’ is very much related to this time, which is so different from that.”
And it’s not just a gay show, Haigh says. “You watch anything and say, oh, these are gay people, but quite quickly you forget they’re gay, and it’s more their characters that kind of resonate and what’s underneath and you forget the gay stuff.”
In that way the series more resembles something like “How to Make it in America,” than it does “Folk” or “Girls,” and as such, it may be remembered as one of the lesser HBO series.