I’ve heard mixed reviews about the new show by Q. Allan Brocka;

Rick and Steve : The Happiest Gay Couple In All The World

Personally, I saw this when it aired in the States last year, and the first series, although short at 6 episodes, was absolutely fantastic I thought. I’ve just started re-watching it on E4 at the moment.

That said, my sense of humour is somewhat different from other peoples I guess and, although it fits in with a lot of the people who I converse with online and certain gay web communities, I appreciate that it’s not for everyone. Indeed one of the people that I know was absolutely outraged by it. I guess it all depends on your view points, the type of social environment that you place yourself in, and what you consider to be acceptable humour. It goes without saying that this show is not for children or those who offend easily.

I think this is actually an advancement of gay rights, and not a step backwards as some have suggested. At the end of the day, you could apply the same argument to Queer as Folk, and again to every time they put a camp-as-tits actor on Corrie. They may be stereotypical or you may not feel that they are relevant to you, however at the same time, they are getting gay people and gay-media into the spotlight, normalising it, and that’s got to be a good thing.  Do you think every straight person relates to everything on TV? Of course not, not every character on TV has to relate to you, whether gay, straight or whatever! Hopefully shows like this will help to make gay-media a little more mainstream so that higher budgets can be attracted and some quality stuff can be produced, rather than the current low-budget that gay media generally gets.

I absolutely hated South Park when it came out, so I can see where folk are coming from, however I think you could argue that in terms of its ‘shock-value’ this is no different to that show really.

Q. Allan Brocka is a great gay director though – perhaps most well known for ‘Eating Out’ staring the delicious Ryan Carnes! (any excuse to be able to post a picture hehe!). 

I was rather surprised to see that Q. Allan Brocka was going to be doing something such as this, as it is a little bit of a niche market in my opinion. That said, he’s managed to get this fairly mainstream, the digital TV station ‘E4’ in the UK has picked it up and is currently airing it 22:30 every Wednesday evening.

E4’s website for Rick and Steve

A few ‘big’ names lend their vocal talents to this show include Lori Alan (Family Guy) as ‘Ivory’, Wilson Cruz (‘Angel’ in Rent 1998, and also ‘Angel’ in the film Party Monster’) Lorna Luft (Judy Garland’s daughter) provides the voice of ‘Joanna’ and Alan Cumming provides the voice of ‘Chuck’.  A great range of vocals there from actors with a lot of experience with working within media with gay themes running through them.

Well worth a watch in my opinion!