"Now Apocalypse": Beefcake, Gay Romance, and Reptilians at the End of the World

Well, the first episode was free on Amazon Prime.

Now Apocalypse (2019) begins with a slacker named Ulysses or Uly (former Disney teen Avon Jongia channeling Johnny Depp) wandering through a bleak urban wasteland done up in surreal colors.  A man approaches him!  Dark, sinister music plays.  Is this an assault?  Nope --  in the next scene, Ulysses is hooking up with him -- a glimpse of the trick's muscular naked body.

Any tv series that begins with a hookup and a brief glimpse of anal sex is fine in my book.

But then Ulysses goes home to his grim Brutopian apartment to find his roommate Ford (former Disney teen Beau Mirchoff, right) having sex with his girlfriend.  She bounces up and down on him, facing the camera so we see everything she has.  An entire conversation ensues.  No fair! Uly gets five seconds, the girl three minutes.

Uly informs us that Ford is a Kinsey 0, totally straight, but that doesn't stop him from fantasizing about his hunky roommie.  Uly himself is a Kinsey 4, bisexual tending toward gay.  But hookups make him feel "gross and pagan" afterwards, so he's looking for love at the end of the world.

It turns out that this bleak urban landscape is the Los Angeles that lies beneath the sunshine and palm trees, and everyone is looking to get into show biz somehow.

Ford, an aspiring screenwriter, is approached by a producer with the odd name Barnabas (Kevin Daniels).

Their other friend, Carly, an aspiring actress, also runs an online BDSM service, where she forces a clients to read lines with her.  She's dating a guy with the odd name Jethro (Desmond Chiam, left).

Now I'm looking through the cast list for other names from 1960s and 1970s pop culture.  I find Leif (Garrett), Magenta from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Daphne and Velma from Scooby Doo, and Cat Woman.

Back to Ulysses, wandering around the bleak urban wasteland, looking for love.   He meets Gabriel (former Teen Wolf teen Tyler Posey, tatted up also channeling Johnny Depp.  At first I thought Ulysses was hooking up with himself).  They hit it off, proclaiming that "not to be all stalky psycho," but it seems that fate brought them together.

On the way home, Ulysses is smoking a giant doobie, when he falls off his bicycle.  The next scene may be a dream or a vision: he sees a homeless man being raped by a reptilian humanoid.

Oh, no, this isn't going to be another Naked Lunch, is it?  Where disgusting reptilians are infiltrating the world, but maybe it's just a despondent end-of-the-world nightmare.

Then I saw that Gregg Araki wrote this.  He specializes in grim, bleak, nihilistic dramas about lost souls in urban wastelands.  It's not that they're despondent over the approaching end of the world.  It's that the end of the world has already happened, and there's nothing for them to do but get high and have sex and be really sad all the time.    The titles tell you everything: The Long Weekend o'Despair, Totally F*** Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere, This is How the World Ends, Kaboom...

There are always gay characters, in that postmodern, post-gay, pansexual, "if it's alive I'll screw it; if it's dead, I'll think about it" way.  But the potential for beefcake and gay romance is not worth the Gregg Araki weirdness.

I won't be buying the full season on Starz.