Television
‘Flatch’ delivers a ‘welcome’ dose of comfort comedy
A place where people are accepted, no matter their sexual orientation
Television, a medium less than a century old, has evolved so much since it became a fixture in our households that the pioneers who first produced its content would surely be overwhelmed by what it is today. Where there was once a limited selection of mostly middle-of-the-road (i.e., bland and banal) entertainment choices designed to amuse and distract us during our after-dinner family time, there is now a seemingly infinite array of channels to choose from, loaded with enough complex, provocative, stimulating, and otherwise challenging content to keep even the most intellectual viewers busy for the rest of their lives.
And yet, with all that, sometimes you just want to shut your brain off and laugh – and that’s when we are reminded that television, no matter how respectable it may have become, is still at its most essential when it gives us an outlet to do exactly that.
Take, for example, “Welcome to Flatch,” a new half-hour comedy from Fox that might seem, at first glance, to be about as mindless as they come.
Adapted from a BAFTA-winning BBC series titled “This Country,” “Flatch” has been brought to U.S. television by writer Jenny Bicks (“Sex and the City,” “The Greatest Showman”) and producer/director Paul Feig (“The Office,” “Bridesmaids”), who joined forces to executive produce it. It’s set in a small Midwestern town called, well, Flatch, and its unabashedly flimsy premise revolves around the idea that a documentary crew has been sent to explore small-town American life. That’s more than enough to let you know exactly what to expect going into it.
The first episode introduces us to most of the townsfolk who will become our main characters, starting with a pair of young cousins and best buddies – the Mallets, Kelly and Lloyd (who goes by “Shrub”) – who quickly establish themselves as our unofficial guides; they’re your classic underachievers, two teens in a town where there’s nothing to do except indulge in juvenile pranks and concoct get-rich-quick schemes. Played by out queer newcomer Holmes and former “The Kids are Alright” actor Sam Straley, their effortless chemistry, combined with their endearingly dim-witted blend of false bravado and insecurity, wins us over right from the start.
We next meet Flatch’s local minister, “Father” Joe (Seann William Scott), whose enthusiasm for his role as the “youthful-and-hip” spiritual center of the community doesn’t quite keep him from missing his former girlfriend Cheryl (Aya Cash), now the plucky and determined editor of the town newspaper, for whom he still carries decidedly worldly feelings. There’s also Big Mandy (Krystal Smith), a large-and-in-charge force of nature whose confidence and street smarts make her as respected as she is incongruous in this tiny rural town; Nadine (Taylor Ortega), Kelly’s rival and “frenemy,” a teen socialite and mean girl who runs the Flatch historical society; and Mickey (Justin Linville), an eternally upbeat nerd who relentlessly attempts to become Shrub’s best friend.
There are others, too, that we meet as the show progresses, but you get the idea. It’s a cast of eccentrics – probably the number one ingredient in making a “mockumentary.”
Of course, it’s not enough for them just to be eccentrics. They have to be loveable, too – something that has been the hallmark of every great mockumentary since “This is Spinal Tap” more or less created the genre as we know it today. That film, and the series of comic masterpieces from Christopher Guest (“Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show,” “A Mighty Wind”) that followed in its wake, all made us laugh with the absurdity of the insular communities they were sending up, but they won our hearts with characters who never let us lose sight of their humanity even in their most wacky and embarrassing moments. It’s a formula that has proven to be comedy gold for TV shows from “The Office” to “Modern Family” to “What We Do in the Shadows” – not to mention “Parks and Recreation,” which along with “Guffman” is closest of these examples in tone and spirit to “Flatch” – and in every case, it only works when the characters are played by a remarkably gifted cast of actors.
In this regard, “Welcome to Flatch” is off to a good start. The performers make a strong showing from the very start, and while it’s hard to say this early in the series whether the character arcs they develop will be worthy of the players’ talent, they earn enough credit within the first seven episodes (all available if you’re a Hulu subscriber, doled out a week at a time if you’re not) to keep us watching longer.
That’s a good thing, because “Flatch” – perhaps unsurprisingly for a comedy about a place where nothing interesting ever happens – has some challenges if it’s going to have any staying power. Early on, the episodes are geared around skewering aspects of modern life by putting them into a small-town context; in one, for instance, Kelly starts her own version of a ride-share app, while in another an elderly resident is “catfished” on a dating site while attending an adult computer education class at the church. Others rely on bemusing us with the eternal tried-but-true tropes about small-town life; there’s a rivalry between Flatch and neighboring Pockton over an obscure historical dispute, and a contingent of outraged conservative women who try to close the town’s combination vape-and-magic shop for Satanism. These familiar scenarios are enough to conjure smiles, maybe even chuckles, for a while – but without some more substantial fodder to drive the show’s development, it won’t be long before they start to wear thin.
Fortunately, the seeds for future storylines are clearly planted within the first handful of shows. Most obvious is the will-they-or-won’t-they interplay between Father Joe and Cheryl, given a twist by their status as an ex-couple with second thoughts on their split, but Kelly’s unrequited need to be accepted by her estranged father (Jason MacDonald) is an early recurring theme, as is Shrub’s infatuation with home-schooled Beth (Erin Bowles). These and other beginnings seem promising as avenues toward opening the characters up and allowing the cast to flesh them out into the kind of people we look forward to spending time with.
Perhaps even more encouraging, the mockumentary format, rather than simply being a convention in which the actors talk to the camera, is taken a bit further in “Flatch.” Though we never see the documentary crew, we are reminded of their existence frequently – characters address them off-camera, and their presence in the room becomes a factor that affects outcomes, though to go into any more detail about that would warrant a spoiler alert.
Finally, though, what makes “Welcome to Flatch” worth jumping on board for might just be its refreshing – and frankly, for the genre, unprecedented – diversity. Though our expectations of a rural Midwest community tend to lean toward a very white and very straight demographic, the series goes out of its way to defy them. Much like “Schitt’s Creek,” “Flatch” is a place where people are accepted, no matter their race, gender, body type, or sexual orientation – just as long as they’re not from Pockton.
“Welcome to Flatch” airs on Fox on Thursday nights.
Television
‘Big Mistakes’ an uneven – but worthy – comedic showcase
In the years since “Schitt’s Creek” wrapped up its six season Emmy-winning run, nostalgia for it has grown deep – especially since the still painfully recent loss of its iconic leading lady, Catherine O’Hara, whose sudden passing prompted a social media wave of clips and tributes featuring her fan-favorite performance as the deliciously daft Moira Rose. Revisiting so many favorite scenes and funny moments from the show naturally reminded us of just how much we loved it, even needed it during the time it was on the air; it also reminded us of how much we miss it, and how much it feels now like something we need more than ever.
That, perhaps more than anything else, is why the arrival of “Big Mistakes” – the new Netflix series starring, co-created and co-written by Dan Levy – felt so welcome. We knew it wouldn’t be the Roses, but it seemed cut from the same cloth, and it had David Rose (or at least someone who seemed a lot like him) in the middle of a comically dysfunctional family dynamic, complete with a mother who gets involved in town politics and a catty sibling rivalry with his sister, and still nebbish-ly uncomfortable in his own gay shoes. Only this time, instead of running a charmingly pretentious boutique, he’s the pastor of the local church, and instead of a collection of kooky small town neighbors to contend with, there are gangsters.
As it turns out, it really does feel cut from the same cloth, but the design is distinctly different. Set in a fictional New Jersey suburb, it centers on Nicky (Levy) and his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega) – he openly gay with an adoring boyfriend (Jacob Gutierrez), yet still obsessive about keeping it all invisible to his congregation, and she drudging aimlessly through life as an underpaid schoolteacher after failing to achieve her New York dreams of show biz success – who inadvertently become enmeshed in a shady underworld when a gesture for their dead grandmother’s funeral goes horribly awry.
They’re surrounded by a crew of equally compromised characters. There’s their mother Linda (Laurie Metcalf), whose campaign to become the town’s mayor only intensifies her tendency to micromanage her children’s lives; Yusuf (Boran Kuzum), the Turkish-American mini-mart operator who pulls them into the criminal conspiracy yet is himself a victim of it; Max (Jack Innanen), Morgan’s live-in boyfriend, who pushes her for a deeper commitment and is willing to go to couples’ therapy to prove it; Annette, his mother (Elizabeth Perkins), who lends her society standing toward helping Linda’s campaign against a misogynistic opponent (Darren Goldstein); and Ivan (Mark Ivanir), the seemingly ruthless crime boss who enslaves the siblings into his network but may really be just another slave himself. It’s a well-fleshed out assortment of characters that helps our own loyalties shift and adapt, generating at least a degree of empathy – if not always sympathy – that keeps everyone from coming off as a merely “black-and-white” caricature of expectations and typecasting.
To be sure, it’s an entertaining binge-watch, full of distinctive characters – all inhabiting familiar, even stereotypical roles in the narrative – who are each given a degree of validation, both in writing and performance, as the show unspools its narrative. At the same time, it makes for a fairly bleak overall view of humanity, in which it’s difficult to place our loyalties with anyone without also embracing a kind of “dog eat dog” morality in which nobody is truly innocent – but nobody is completely to blame for their sins, anyway.
In this way, it’s a show that lets us off the hook in the sense that it places the idea of ethical guilt within a framework of relative evils, as it permits us to forgive our own trespasses by accepting its “lovably” amoral characters, each of whom has their own reasons and justifications for what they do. We relate, but we can’t quite shake the notion that, if all these people hadn’t been so caught up in their own personal dramas, none of them would have ended up in the compromised morality that they’re in.
However, it’s not some bleak morality play that Levy and crew undertake; rather, it’s more an egalitarian fantasy in which even “bad” choices feel justified by inevitability. Everybody’s motivations make enough sense to us that it’s hard to judge any of the characters for making the choices – however unwise – that they do. In a system where everyone is forced to compromise themselves in order to achieve whatever dream of self-fulfillment they may have, how can anybody really blame themselves for doing what they have to do to survive?
Of course, all things considered, this is more a relatable comedy than it is a morality play. As a comedy of errors, it all works well enough on its own without imposing an ideology on it, no matter how much we may be tempted to do so. Indeed, what is ultimately more to the point is how well this pseudo-cynical exercise in the normalization of corruption – for that is what it really about, in the end – succeeds in letting us all off the hook for our compromises.
In the end, of course, maybe all that analysis is too deep a dive for a show that feels, in the end, like it’s meant to be mostly for fun. Indeed, despite its focus on being dragged into the shady side of life, the arc of its messaging seems to be less about a moralistic urge toward making the “right” choice than it is a candid recognition that all of us are compromised from the outset, often by choices we only force upon ourselves, and that’s a refreshing enough bit of honesty that we can easily get on board.
It helps that the performances are on point, especially the loony and wide-eyed fanaticism of Metcalf – surely the MVP of any project in which she is involved – and the directly focused moral malleability of Ortega; Levy, of course, is Levy – a now-familiar persona that can exist within any milieu without further justification than its own queer relatability – and, in this case, at least, that’s both the icing on the cake and substance that defines it. That’s enough to make it an essential view for fans, queer or otherwise, of his distinctive “brand,” even if he – or the show itself – doesn’t quite satisfy in the way that “Schitt’s Creek” was able to do.
Seriously, though, how could it?
Television
‘The Pitt’ stars discuss what season two gets right about queer representation
Noah Wyle and Taylor Dearden spoke with Blade in LA
As season two of “The Pitt” comes to a close this Thursday, stars Noah Wyle and Taylor Dearden are looking back on what this season got right about queer representation.
“There is some intentionality behind it, but it’s not necessarily for the representation to be anything other than human or ubiquitous to anyone that would come into an emergency room,” Noah Wyle, who plays Dr. Robby, told the Los Angeles Blade at PaleyFest event in Los Angeles on April 12. “I know that we’ve done some storylines with some gay couples, and we did a storyline in season 1 where a woman comes in who’s cut her arm, who’s trans. But in both of those storylines, that wasn’t the point.”
Wyle continues, “In doing it that way, and not making a point of orientation being part of the problem that brings you to the emergency room, we have been told in feedback that that has been extremely revolutionary, almost, and extremely appreciated. But that’s true whether we do storylines with any kind of minority or a person with a disability. We try to have a cosmology of cast and representation on the show that’s indicative of what you find in Pittsburgh.”
Dearden, who plays Dr. Mel King, echoed Wyle’s sentiment: “I think constantly battling tropes is always important. It’s not a show about romance; it’s a show about real life and a shift in the ER. The more we represent everyday people going through everyday life, they just happen to be queer, they just happen to be trans, and making it not the plot, is putting everyone on equal playing [field]. You don’t have to have a big coming out scene.”
Queer representation on “The Pitt” is also notable through the actual actors themselves, including openly queer actor Supriya Ganesh, who plays Dr. Samira Mohan (who didn’t attend PaleyFest after the news that she is not returning for season three), and Amielynn Abellera, who plays Perlah Alawi.
“Doctors don’t put value judgments on who they treat,” Wyle concludes. “That’s not a luxury extended to them, and so that’s not part of our storytelling.”
The season two finale will air Thursday, April 16, on HBO Max, while season three has already been confirmed and is currently being written.
Television
‘Heated Rivalry’ is the gay hockey romance you didn’t know you needed
Spoiler alert: It’s not really about hockey
Spoiler Alert: “Heated Rivalry” is not about hockey.
The new limited series, produced for the Canadian streaming service Crave and available in the U.S. on HBO Max, may look from its marketing like a show about hockey. It definitely contains a lot of scenes involving hockey – being played, being watched, being talked about – and the story is surrounded by hockey; its two main characters are professional hockey players, and their competition as opposing hockey champions (the “rivalry” of the title) is a major factor that moves the plot.
Even so, if you’re a hockey fan who knows nothing about it, and you stumble across it while looking for something to watch, be warned before you press “play” that you are probably in for a big surprise.
Adapted from “Game Changers,” a popular book series by Canadian author Rachel Reid, the show follows the two above-mentioned hockey pros – Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), each of whom is a star player for their respective team – as they compete against each other with puffed-up “alpha” swagger, on the ice and in the media. When the skates (and cameras) are off, however, there’s a different story going on. Despite the jocular animosity of their public relationship, there’s something else brewing between them in private, and it comes to a head when a commercial shoot leads to an unexpected rendezvous in a hotel room.
Well, unexpected for them, at least. We in the audience have seen it coming since that first smoldering glance across the rink.
From there, “Heated Rivalries” continues over a course of years as the two secret lovers use every match, tournament, or Winter Olympics where they compete against each other as an opportunity for more rendezvous in more hotel rooms. But while their meetings may be all about a release of pent-up passion, the bond between them is based on something more. In the high-stakes world of professional hockey, there’s not much they can do about that – publicly, at least – without killing their careers; in Ilya’s case, as a Russian citizen and the son of a prominent government official, the situation carries the potential for even graver consequences.
That’s just at the end of the first two episodes, though. The show, which drops an episode weekly through December, leaves us hanging there to explore the story of another hockey player, Scott (François Arnaud), teammate and best friend to Shane, who becomes entangled with smoothie barista Kip (Robbie G.K.) in a whole secret gay life of his own.
If you’re thinking that the idea of a gay love story between two butch hockey players is a preposterous premise for romance fiction, think again – or at least redefine your idea of “preposterous.” It’s a genre that has exploded in popularity among a surprisingly large demographic of romance literature fans who also love hockey, combining the thrill of forbidden love with the drama and excitement of their favorite sport to catapult numerous writers, including Reid, onto the bestseller lists, which was surely a factor in the choice to translate her “Games Changers” books to the screen, courtesy of the show’s queer creator/writer/director Jacob Tierney.
The latter (also co-creator of “Letterkenny,” another popular and queer-friendly Canadian show with a strong hockey presence) delivers it with all the glossy, high-charged passion one would expect – and more – from a romance about world-class athletes in love. Set within the rarified world of wealth and privilege that is professional sports, the drama takes place against a backdrop of packed arenas, awards ceremonies, elegant fundraisers, and luxury hotels, where the protagonists must play at being enemies while secretly planning their next hook-up with each other.
Which brings us to the thing that really makes “Heated Rivalry” the buzziest queer show of late 2025: the sex. The show takes full advantage of its story’s obvious sex appeal – as well as its leading actors’ sculpted, athletic bodies – to serve up some of the hottest onscreen trysts in gay TV memory. Though they stop just short of being “explicit,” they’re the kind of sex scenes that push the limits of “softcore” right to the edge and make sure we know exactly what’s happening, even if we can’t see the details. Tierney turns those steamy private meetings between Shane and Ilya into set pieces and centers entire episodes around them, because he knows they’re what the audience is there for. Like we said, this is not really a show about hockey.
That said, it’s not really just a story about sex, either. In between those steamy scenes of athletic carnality, there’s a lot of percolating emotion happening – and thanks to the exquisitely tuned performances of Williams and Storrie, whose electric chemistry doesn’t just spark during their lovemaking scenes, but crackles through their every moment together on screen, it all comes across with elegant clarity. Shane and Ilya may want each other’s bodies, but there’s something more they want, too. There’s a tenderness in the way they look at each other, even when they’re smack-talking on the rink, and it infuses their scenes of passion, too, which arguably makes them even more blistering hot. More than that, it calls to us with its fond familiarity; it’s that heady feeling to which most of us, if we’re lucky, can relate, a sense of yearning, of needing another person so keenly that it feels like a physical sensation. In other words, it feels like being in love.
Of course there’s another layer too, which hangs over everything and ultimately fuels all the conflict in the plot: the pervasive homophobia that exists in professional sports, creating an atmosphere in which players are pressured to present nothing but a masculine, definitively “straight” image and any hint of non-heterosexual leanings is enough to destroy a career. That’s not a situation limited only to pro athletes, of course; many of us in the wider world also face the same dilemma, which is why we can all relate to this aspect of their love story, too.
Still, it would be misleading to say that “Heated Rivalry” is really about social commentary either, though it certainly brings those issues into the mix. With only half the six-episode season released so far, it’s hard to draw a certain conclusion, but what stands out most about the series so far is the way it captures the palpable joy of being in love – and yes, that includes the joy of expressing that love physically. These joys come with pain, too, when they can only be shared in secret, and it’s that obstacle that Shane and Ilya – and apparently, with the side trip of episode three, Scott and Kip as well – must find a way to overcome if they want their real yearning to be fulfilled.
For now, we’ll have to wait to find out if they can all make it. In the meantime, you know we’ll all be watching each new installment with our full attention, waiting to see what happens during Shane and Ilya’s next match-up.
And no, we’re not talking about hockey.
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