"This Close" Deaf "Will and Grace"

I don't recall any tv series featuring deaf characters in starring roles, so I went into This Close (2018-), on Amazon Prime, with high hopes.

It's sort of Will and Grace with deafness.  Gay man-straight woman life partners find their platonic romance disrupted  when Michael (Josh Feldman) gets dumped by his boyfriend, and Kate (Shoshana Stern) gets engaged to hers.

 I liked the depictions of the problems deaf people face in negotiating the hearing world ("Oh, you're deaf? I'll TALK LOUDER!").




I liked the fact that gay men in this series have sex.  On  Will and Grace, they were utterly chaste, even with their boyfriends.  Here we see poppers and condoms.  We even discover that Michael is a top.


ut Michael comes across as thoroughly disagreeable.  He spends the entire first episode having a series of hissy fits, first because Kate is engaged, and then because she didn't tell him about it.  Is this any way to treat your soul mate?

Another quibble: does everybody Michael meets necessarily have to hit on him? I don't think he's particularly attractive, but everyone he meets looks like they are barely able to restrain themselves from ripping his clothes off.

I also watched the Thanksgiving episode, with Michael's mom (veteran deaf advocate Marlee Matlin) and brother Jacob (Moshe Kasher), neither of whom Michael seems to like very much, even though they are completely fine with him being gay and having a female life partner who's engaged to someone else.

Various secrets come out:

1. Kate's fiancee Danny (Zach Gilford, left) lost his job.

2. Mom is dating again (which upsets Michael, naturally)

4. Kate lost her father on Thanksgiving (so she really likes the holiday?);

5. Jacob is into Kate.

6. Michael's ex (Colt Prattes, top photo) wants him back (wait -- who broke up with whom?). 

There's yelling and fisticuffs and crying, and everyone ends up depressed.

I'm starting to miss Jack and Karen.

This is the first writing, producing, and acting credit for Joshua Feldman.  Shoshanah Stern has been in many productions, including Jericho, Lie to Me, and Weeds.  Both actors are deaf in real life.

Will and Grace Rebooted: Not Awful, and There's Kissing

I don't have network tv anymore, so I only learned through the grapevine that the 1990s "gay men are really women" fest Will and Grace was getting a five-episode reboot.

 I just found out  that it returned for a whole season, a full fledged Season 9  (2017-2018), with Season 10 to start in October.  Curious, I dipped into a few episodes.

It's not awful.

Eleven years have passed, and the characters are pushing through middle age (Jack is 49 years old, Grace 51, Will  is 52, and Karen 59).

They have been rebooted: the relationships they had at the end of the last series have been dissolved, and there are no children to grow up and get married to each other.  Will and Grace are living together again.

Jack and Karen are still shrill and theatrical.

But Will and Grace are not quite as self-possessed.  Remember: "We don't believe in anything?"  Now they believe in things.  I guess you could get by with complacency in the Clinton 1990s, but in the alt-right era, it's time to march.

And the Fab Four no longer seem to hate each other.   The undertow of hostility is absent.  There are few barbs and put-downs, except for the ubiquitous ones about Will being too feminine and Grace being too masculine.

 The plotlnes are different. They face ethical dilemmas.


They face their mortality.  Grace has a cancer scare.  Karen's beloved housemaid Rosario dies.  Jack has a grandson.

They are actually affected by current events, although sometimes with a weird twist.  Instead of a bakery refusing to bake a cake for gay people, it's refusing to bake a cake for the President).

And being gay is different. In the earlier series, gay men were actually transgender bisexuals.  They thought of themselves as women, referred to themselves as women, and displayed traditionally feminine traits, with skin care products and romantic comedies.  They dated men (without kissing them), but they preferred sex with women and sought out female life partners.

Now gay men are still "girls," but they rarely express any heterosexual desire.

In the earlier series, gay men (or rather, transgender bisexuals) faced no homophobia.  Even the ubiquitous "You're really a woman!" wasn't actually homophobic, since they agreed with the evaluation.  There was no discrimination, no prejudice, no homophobic rage.  There was no coming out: everybody always knew, everyone was always out (except no kissing). Now there is homophobic bias.  There are guys on the downlow.  You have to come out to friends and family.

There are some hunky guest stars and recurring characters, like Kyle Bornhammer (above) as a secret service agent.

Ryan Pinkston (left), one of my long-time favorite actors, as a closeted cop who dates Jack.

Ben Platt as a 23-year old who dates "daddy" Will (I know the feeling).

Another of my long-time favorites, Michael Angarano, as Jack's son.

I'm actually not hating it.

At least there's kissing.

See also: Ryan Pinkston;  Will and Grace

The 9 Worst TV Series Finales in History

If you watch every episode of a 100-episode sitcom, you've spend 2300 minutes, not including reruns.  That's the equivalent of 19 feature-length movies or 11 novels (at the average adult reading speed).

If it was a 60-minute dramatic series, make that 38 feature length movies and 22 novels.

Then comes the series finale.  There will be no more episodes.

You know the characters better than many of your real-life friends.  Saying goodbye is going to be painful.

For years you've set aside a special part of your week for the program.  You rarely missed it, and when you did, you taped it to watch later.  You watched all of the summer reruns.There will be a hole in your life for quite some time.

So you sit down for the series finale, hoping for a warm, funny, memorable sendoff.  But instead, you get garbage.  Mind-destroying, depressing, confusing, WTF garbage.

May 10, 1983: Laverne and Shirley (1976-1983).  A sitcom about two bromantic "girlfriends" sharing an apartment in 1950s Milwaukee, right?  Except by 1983, there was just Laverne, it was Los Angeles, and the heart of the 1960s (Laverne's boyfriend is a Star Trek fan).  Way to destroy your premise.

But the series finale isn't even about that; it's about Laverne's singer/dancer/male prostitute friend Carmine going to New York to audition for Hair.  

We don't find out if he got the role or not. And we don't see his nude scene.

May 21, 1990: Newhart (1982-1990): For eight years, Bob Newhart played the owner of a bed and breakfast in a small New England town full of quirky residents, whom you grew fond of over the years.  Who can forget "I'm Larry, and this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl?"

But on May 21st, 1990, Bob wakes up in bed as Dr. Bob Hartley, the psychologist in his old series, and tells his old wife, Emily, "What a dream I had!"  Way to destroy beloved characters, Bob!

July 20, 1994: Dinosaurs (1991-1994).  A nuclear family spoof starring cute, cuddly dinosaurs in ABC's kid-friendly Friday night lineup.  Remember "I'm the baby, gotta love me"?

How best to end the hearwarming series:  how about with a eco-catastrophe that kills every dinosaur on the planet?  Including the entire Sinclair family?  Including the baby?

May 20, 1997: Roseanne (1988-1997).  The queen of lower-middle class urban blight and her ragtag family spent eight seasons being the anti-Cosbys, not affluent, or educated, or elegant.  It featured Johnny Galecki as a teenager with a terrible hairdo.  Then Roseanne wins the lottery, and spends the last season hob-nobbing with the rich and famous.

That's not the worst of it, though -- in the last episode, we are told that this has all been a story that Roseanne has written.  The real people are all different.  Dan is dead.  Jackie is a lesbian, so her husband and child don't exist.  But Mom isn't a lesbian.  The daughters switch husbands.  Everything we thought we knew about the show is wrong.

May 14, 1998: Seinfeld (1989-1998). In this execrable finale for what critics termed the best series in the history of television, the Fab Four are facing jail time for violating a "good Samaritan" law that, if it existed, would get them a fine, at most.

And everyone they've interacted with comes rushing to town to complain.  Their honest attempts to help are recast as diabolical plots.  Mistakes and accidents are recast as deliberate malice.  Everything we thought we knew about the show is wrong. Oh, and they go to prison.

August 9, 1999: Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1985-1999).  For 12 years, Dr. Forrester and TV's Frank tortured the hapless heroes on the Satellite of Love, Joel/Mike and the bots, with "cheesy movies, the worst that we can find."  The only way they could keep their sanity was to riff on the cheesy plots.  In the series finale, Mike and the bots finally escape.

Do they change the world? Reveal the diabolical plot in a tell-all book?  At least find a life far removed from their 12-year imprisonment?  No -- they are shown living in a small apartment, eating pizza and riffing on bad movies.

At least they don't meet girls.

September 8, 2004: The Drew Carey Show (1995-2004).  This program was all about setting: the sprawling Winfred-Lauder Department Store in downtown Cleveland, where Drew worked as a middle-management drudge, Mr. Wick as head of personnel, and Mimi as his secretary.

So how to handle the last season: end the department store, drop some of the characters, and give the others nonsensical new jobs at a new store. Oh, and have Drew and Mimi live together, raising a 10-year old boy who was a baby last season.

May 18, 2006: Will and Grace (1998-2006).  After endless seasons of proclaiming that gay men are really women, that gay men all have sex with women,  that gay people simply do not exist, Will and Grace went out with a bang: Will and his cop beau adopt a daughter, Grace and her husband gave birth to a son, and twenty years later, the son and daughter marry.

Whatever momentary glitch being gay caused in the cosmic order, it has been resolved with a man and a woman gazing into each other's eyes forever.

May 20, 2010: Lost (2004-2010).  For five seasons, we were told that the crash survivors facing paranormal peril on a crazy island weren't in Purgatory.  Well, guess what -- they are.  Well, actually, in an alternate world where they forget that they were ever on the island, until they are reminded.  Then they get back together and go into the light.

And Vincent the Dog dies.