"The Parenting": Gay couple meets the parents and a demon. With Logan Roy's backside and Brandon Flynn's d*ck

The blurb of The Parenting (2025), on MAX, made my jaw drop: "Boyfriends Josh and Rohan plan a weekend getaway to introduce their parents, only to discover that their rental is home to a 400-year-old poltergeist."

So the draw here is the poltergeist?  Being gay is perfectly ordinary, not worth commenting on?  I'm in.

Scene 1: 1983. A crying woman calls her teenage son to watch the series finale of MASH, then pours a glop of disgusting French dressing over a salad.  Wait --he can't be Josh or Rohan, unless they are in their 60s.  He must be one of the parents.  

The son doesn't want to call his sister, Allie, to dinner, so Mom says "I hate you kids."   She goes upstairs to knock on the sister's door and yell, but no answer.  Is the sister dead in there?

Smoke detector, burnt pizza -- and a monster hand shoots out and grabs Mom! Growl, scream.  Son tries to investigate, is grabbed, too!  Growl, scream. Daughter Allie is next.  I thought they were going to be major characters.

Scene 2:  2025. Rohan (Nik Dodani) and Josh (Brandon Flynn) are driving through a cold wilderness with their dog, discussing how excited they are to be spending the weekend with both sets of parents at the mansion they rented, so everyone can get to know each other.  Their first meeting?  Maybe start with dinner.  Rohan notes that his parents are very demanding, so every detail has to be perfect.  

Other talk is rather disquieting: a cat with a human bottom, being horny for a house.  I know this is a step forward in LGBT representation, but does it have to be so gross?  

Scene 3: They arrive at the house, love it. kiss -- one of those "mwah" kisses.  Brenda, the creepy caretaker, explains that the house has been deserted since the previous family died in a fire 40 years ago.  The new owners decided to renovate and rent it out for tourists.  "Wait  -- are you gay?"

Um...what?

"I'm thinking you're gay."

"Um...yes. Is that ok?"  You should definitely check that before renting a place.  You don't want to be screamed at, or forced into a room with twin beds.

"That'll work."  WTF, lady?  She leads them inside, chatting about the upcoming Worm Moon, ignoring the circle etched into the floor.  The wifi password is: ego sum tibi artha, "I am for you, Artha."  

In other news: Sarah the dog sitter is in their apartment. She warns Rohan not to propose to Josh: too much for one weekend. She accidentally texts the same message to Josh, har har. 

Rohan says "I have something I want to ask."  Uh-oh, this is it, the Big Question. Psych!  It's "Don't tell my parents that you were fired.  They're perfectionists."  Har-har

Scene 4: Rohan's uptight dad and judgmental wife arrive (Brian Cox, Logan Roy in Succession, and Edie Falco, Carmela in The Sopranos).  "Trip ok?" "Yes." Why aren't they South Asian?  Max only wanted actors from its series?

Left: Brian's backside in 1980 and 2025 are on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

They haven't met Josh yet, so they grudgingly shake hands.  Then the dog rushes up and sniffs at Mom's private parts.

Josh: "We're beginning to think she's a lesbian.  She loves the smell of..."  Oy vey, this is painful to watch.  First, a lesbian dog would be attracted to female dogs, not people.  Second, why would you ever, ever reference the private parts of your boyfriend's mother?

Dad complements Josh's physique (top photo) and asks about his job. They prevaricate.

Scene 4: Unpacking in their room, Rohan lays into Josh for the "loves the smell of..." comment, and Josh lays into Rohan for having a dad who...um...complements his physique?   

Rohan is stressed because he never introduced his parents to a boyfriend before.  So you do it for a whole weekend?  Josh suggests de-stressing with some edibles.  "No drugs.  I forbid it!"

They continue arguing out into the hall.  "And no more p*ssy jokes in front of my mother."

"Fine.  But if your mom can't appreciate a good p*ssy joke..."  He swings open the bathroom door...guess who is on the toilet?  

First of all, in a mansion, the guest bedrooms should have private bathrooms.  Second, bathroom doors can be locked.  Third, I just saw the p*ssy of Carmela Soprano, but 10 to 1 we won't be seeing Logan Roy's d*ck.

More after the break. 

"The Girl in the Mirror": Amnesia, Demons, Mafiosi, and a Gay Couple in a Paranormal/Teen Angst Drama

 

The icon of the Spanish teen drama series The Girl in the Mirror shows two guys hugging.  Neither the blurb nor the episode descriptions give any hints of gay characters: a girl loses her memory in bus crash that kills most of her classmates.   A boy also survives.  Trying to unravel some mysteries involving both drug-deals and paranormal prophecies, they spend all of their time to together, and no doubt fall in love.  

So where's the guy-hugging?  I watched Episode 2, where "Tom says goodbye to a friend."  Maybe his boyfriend died in the accident?

Scene 1: We jump right into the paranormal: a voiceover tells us that this land is the hiding place of the demon Therion.  A prehistoric boy summons him by making carvings of his five animal spirits, and then eating a poisonous mushroom, so he's close to death.  Therion then decides to save him by taking over his body.   Why would you want a demon to possess you?

Scene 2: An old guy tells a boy named Alex (Alejandro Serrano) that he has only one of the animal carvings.  He hid the others far apart, so no one could bring Therion back into the world.  A Bearded Guy, Alex's brother, comes in and notes that Grandpa is having one of his semi-lucid days.

Meanwhile, bus crash survivor Alma is getting ready to leave the hospital and go home with parents that she doesn't recognize.  She says "Adios" to an empty chair.  Getting visions of Therion?

Scene 3: On the way home, Alma gets a memory of someone named Deva telling her "I have to talk to you about what happened yesterday."  Of course, she doesn't remember what it was about.  Is this  teen angst or demonic possession?  You can't have both.

Meanwhile, at the hospital, the doctor hacks into a secret security system and looks at the cell phone records of someone named Martin.  Sinister music plays.

Scene 4: Bearded Guy is in the mountains, searching for something -- the other animal carvings?  He looks at some texts from Martin: "I wish I could stay with you...."  Ok, Martin must be the dead boyfriend.

Scene 5: Alma is surprised to find that she lives in a dark, sinister mansion in a cliffside village.  How Gothic!  

Uh-oh, she's on crutches, and her room is upstairs.  Getting up there is too much of a struggle, so Dad carries her to one of the downstairs guest rooms.  Later he tells Mom that he didn't want Alma to see her old room: because then she would find out about Lara, and she must never know. Are Mom and Dad in cahoots with Therion?

Scene 6:  Cute curly-haired Tomas (Alex Villazan, top photo and left) wakes up in a room full of swimming trophies. He lost a leg in the bus crash, so no more swimming, but at least the flashback shows a muscular physique and nice bulge.  He falls on the way to his wheelchair, and Dad rushes to his aid.  "I don't need help, snarl snarl!  I'm not a useless puta (asshole)."

Two detectives visit.  The autopsies revealed that most of the students in the crash had been taking drugs, and Carlos, the bus driver, had a bag of pills on him.  So maybe he was DUI, driving under the influence.

Tomas remembers what caused the accident: something jumped into the road with flashing lights and a strange buzzing sound.  The detectives imply that it was a hallucination from the drugs. Are we adding aliens to the mix?

Scene 7: Bearded Guy, Bruno (Pol Monen), goes back to the hotel he runs.  The doctor from Scene 3 is there.  She's Martin's sister, suspecting that he's still alive, and hiding out with Bruno.  "No.  He was a nice guy, very sensitive.  I've been looking for him since the accident."  So Martin was on the bus, but his body was never found. 

Doctor Sister: "Ok, but an employee of my father is looking for Martin, too.  It's very important that he DOESN'T find him."  So Martin's dad wants him killed?  

Scene 8:  Scraggly-haired girl, shaved from recent brain surgery, tells Tomas: #1, I believe your story about the thing that jumped into the road; #2, Alma's lack of memory is not amnesia; #3, all of the survivors are in danger. 

Scene 9:  In the scary Gothic mansion, the dog begs Alma to play fetch with a ball of yarn.  It rolls out into the corridor.  Alma follows, and dog is begging someone else to play fetch.  But there's no one around!

Scene 10:  Grandpa and Alex from Scene 2 have invaded the cheese cave.  Bruno chastises them for eating cheese. He hears a strange noise from deper in the cave, "probably an animal that fell down a crevice.  We have to rescue it."   

Alex is small, so he goes in, attached to Bruno by a rope.  Instead of an animal, he finds a huge altar, human skulls, and a flickering shape -- that chases him.  Plus Martin's bracelet!  Obviously he stumbled into the cave after the accident.  

Back home, Bruno calls Doctor Sister (Diana) with the new intel.  She freaks out.  "Delete this call, and don't tell anyone else about this!"  "But we have to call the rescue squad.  He could still be in the cave." 

Bruno: "I know Martin isn't dead.  When our parents died, I knew.  I could sense it, like a vast emptiness.  I don't feel that with Martin."

Alex: "But they were our parents. You loved them, so there was a powerful psychic link.  But you didn't love Martin, right?...um....ok, that explains the guy from Australia last year...."  Big Brother just came out to you, kid.

Scene 11:  At the hospital, a girl tells Tomas that her brother, survivor Roque, is being taken off life support.  "I thought you'd want to say goodbye."  She wheels him into the hospital room.  "We know this is not easy for you," Roque's Mom tells him.  Wait -- it's harder for Tomas than for the guy's Mom.  Was he a boyfriend?  

They leave him alone to say goodbye.  He grabs Roque's hand and talks about how much he loves him, and he has to fight.  "You can't leave!"  

I expected Roque to get up, but apparently Tomas didn't get psychic powers in the accident.  Instead he goes home, looks at photos of Roque, and cries, while the family gathers for the plug-pulling.  

Scene 12:  Middle of the night.  Alma gets up and goes into the kitchen for a snack.  A thread from the ball of yarn is taunt, leading up the stairs. to what is apparently her old room, with lots of photos of her and another girl. She asks "Who are you?  Why did you bring me here?"

Meanwhile, Tomas is awakened by an "eerie whooshing sound," and gets a text from a dead girl.  Darn, I thought he was gay.  And Roque wakes up!

Beefcake: The Tomas flashback.  Also he hangs out in a muscle shirt a lot.

Heterosexism: No boy-girl romance was evident in this episode.

Gay Characters:  Obviously Bruno and Martin.  I think Tomas has a dead girlfriend.

My Grade: Trying to combine the bus crash investigation, the demon, various paranormal activities, and high school secrets that may or may not be related?  It's exhausting.  When you try to do everything, you end up doing nothing.  But at least there's a gay couple.  C+.

"The Uncanny Counter": A Gay-Subtext "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" from Korea

 

The Uncanny Counter: "Noodle shop employees by day and demon hunters by night, the Counters use special abilities to chase down malevolent spirits that prey on humans."  Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Korea might be interesting, with demons derived from Buddhism rather than Christianity.  And it's a weekly series, which I actually prefer over dumping a whole season at once.  Plus one of the characters is bound to be gay.

Scene 1: Mom and Dad  (Gwon), drive their young son (Mun) through the dark suburban streets of Jungjin, Korea. They are planning to drop him off at his grandparents and go off by themselves, but when Mun paints them into his picture, they magically decide to stay with him.  Creepy powers, kid!

Cut to a rain-soaked young man, Detective Ga, standing on a building roof.  He calls Gwon: "Be careful!  Be sure you survive!  You have to!"  Then he jumps off the roof.

A truck crashes into the car.  The driver approaches., slowly, as Mun loses consciousness.

Scene 2:  Seven years later, the teenage Mun (Jo Byung-gyu, below) is trying to bathe his senile grandmother, who is combative and blames him for his parents' deaths: "You killed my daughter!  Why are you still alive?" Meanwhile Grandpa is making breakfast Personally, I would have Grandpa bathe ihs wife and Mun cook).  

Mun rushes to get dressed.  We see his  art awards, his superhero sketches.  He walks with a limp due to the accident.

Scene 3: On the way to the noodle shop Mun, Boy Friend, and Girl Friend (they don't get names) discuss they superhero characters for their video game or manga.  Mun insists that they stop to pick up a flier about a missing person. Maybe this will be important later?

Scene 4: The noodle shop is very famous, and packed, with a line around the block outside. It's run by people with super powers: when Young Man's kinfe breaks, Middle Aged Woman throws a new one across the room, and he catches it by the handle!. Meanwhile Young Woman carries four 50-liter jugs of water through the back alley.  Isn't the first rule of scriptwriting to identify your characters by name?. 

Young Woman has a vision of someone being killed, and rushes back into the noodle shop to announce that it's a Level 2, Maybe a Level 3.  They all leave their customers and jump into the  Mystery Machine.  Mun and his friends, who have been waiting in line, protest.

Mun and Boy Friend comment "She's pretty."  To identify themselves as heterosexual? 

Scene 5: The Demon Slayers  arrive at the demon-sighting location, put on red hoodies and black masks, and call the middle-aged Cheoi-jung, who is wearing a stupid-looking toupee.  He says he'll get there as fast as he can.

The Demon is a cute guy in a black hoodie.  They chase him over rooftops and fight him with Asian martial arts.  In the end, he gets away, Cheoi-jung is killed, and a ball of energy shoots off into the sky.  So far we've had four characters named, and three of them died immediately.

Scene 6:  Back at the noodle shop, Mun and his friends finally sit down to eat.  They gush annoyingly over how good the food is.  Even after they lealve, they continue to gush over the food.

Do we really need to spend five minutes of air hearing "it was so good!" over and over?  At least use a thesaurus!

The ball of energy zaps into Mun, who rises into the air, falls back down again, loses consciousness, and suddenly has the same bad toupee as Cheoi-jung!  

Scene 7: Mun goes home.  It's his birthday, so Grandpa made him a cake.  This is the first I'm hearing of it.  Neither of his friends mentioned that it was his birthday, or gave him presents.  Maybe that's the custom in Korea?

Scene 8: Mun washes his hair, but the bad toupee is still there.  He falls asleep and awakens in his bed on a vast, muddy lake.  An elderly woman introduces herself as Wi-Gen. And he wakes up.

Scene 9:  In the library the next day, Mun discusses the experience with Girl Friend.   She kids him that it was an erotic dream.  Suddenly he sees the bullies extorting money out of Boy Friend. -- he finally gets a name, Ung-min.  

Mun intervenes, with a lot of gay subtext buddy bonding rhetoric: "You're my friend!  I would die for you!"

Head Bully (Lee Hong-nae), who has red hair to make him more sinister, happens to be the Mayor's son.

Scene 10: Scary Sunglass Guy climbs out of his limousine feet first. Interesting -- it's usually a woman who gets out of a car feet first, so the audience can perv on her high-heel shoes. 

He bows at the shrine set up for the memory of Cheoi-jung (who died in Scene 5). Then he visits the Demon Slayers and announces that the mourning period is over, so it's time to get back to work: the Level Three Demon captured Cheoi-jung's soul, but Wi-Gen (whom Mun dreamed of) got out and latched onto the body of a "splendid guy." He was just walking around, not even in a coma.

A boy possessed by the soul of an elderly woman!  Sounds interesting!

They are shocked.  How can someone who is not in a coma become a Counter?  

Scary Sunglasses Guy asks Mo-Tak to mentor the boy, make something of him, so they can catch the Level Three Demon who ate Cheoi-jung's soul. So, which one is Mo-Tak?

Scene 11: A male and female detective are bickering at the scene of Cheoi-jung's "suicide." Wait-- the morning period is over and they're still investigating?  Don't you mourn for like six months?

. Everyone criticizes the woman: "What an attention whore!  We need to get her married off!"  So, in Korea married women can't be cops?   

Apparently the police are in bed with the demons, so all of the evidence has been removed and destroyed.

Scene 12: The Mayor and his assistant discuss Cheoi-jung's "suicide" while passing protesters: "Keep our city safe!" "The mayor is killing our children!"  Uh-oh, the mayor is in bed with the demons, too.

Scene 13: At school. Boy Friend is angry with Mun for standing up to the bullies.  Now he'll be beat up, or even killed, which would be bad because...well, you know how I feel.   Girl Friend agrees with him: now they'll both be killed.  

Scene 14: On the way home, Mun runs into the bullies, but they're more interested in taunting him and stealing his stuff than killing him.  Young Woman (is she Mo-Tak?) intervenes, beats up the bullies, and tells Mun "You'd better come with me."

She takes him to headquarters for pizza and an exposition dump: The Demon Slayers hunt down dead souls who have escaped from Hell   Mun thinks they're all crazy.

Aha! The Young Man is Mo-Tak (Yoo Jun-Sang, left).  He refuses to train someone so weak and wimpy.  

Middle-Aged Woman shows Mun how to visit the afterlife.  It looks different to evreyone, but for him, it's a vast muddy lake.  

More exposition dump: when bad people escape from the afterlife, they possess the body of a living person (Level 1), who gets superpowers.  The demon gradually takes over, and kills someone and eats their soul (Level 2).  The more souls they eat, the more powerful and evil they become, until they reach Level 3.   

I deduce that good people take over the living, too, and become Counters.

Scene 15: Back at headquarters, Mun says "thanks, but no thanks, the job is too dangerous, but I'll still come to your noodle shop."  They ask him to think it over.

Boy Friend calls: The bullies have kidnapped him, and Mun must meet them at the gym or they will kill him.  Rescuing your Boy Friend instead of a girl?  That's the definition of gay subtext!

Mun rushes to the gym.  They taunt him.  The end.

Beefcake:  No, although some of the cast looks good shirtless.

Other Sights: Nice exterior shots.

Gay Characters:  Gay subtext romance between Mun and Boy Friend.

Names:  Most of the major characters don't get named.  I figured some of them out using wikipedia, but others are a mystery.   The top photo, for instance, is Jung Won-chang, who plays Shin hyuk-woo. He's not Mun, Boy Friend, Head Bully, or Mo-Tak   

My Grade: B-.  Points off for the five minutes of "These noodles are so good!"  "They are good!" "They are so good!" 

"Dead End: Paranormal Park": LGBT and Neurodivergent Teens Fight Demons

Netflix has a good track record of including gay/lesbian characters in its animated series, so when Dead End: Paranormal Park popped into my recommendations, I reviewed the first episode.

Prologue: A woman in a red dress and high-heeled shoes runs toward an old mansion, chased by an invisible presence.  She runs inside, up some stairs, and into a hall of mirrors.  Where she is attacked by a zombie version of herself!

Scene 1: A pastel-colored suburban street.  A boy with a tuft of purple hair and a bulbous red nose (Zach Barack) gets dressed and looks at an flier: "Humans wanted for job at Dead End in Phoenix Park."

Meanwhile, three houses down, a girl is preening in front of a mirror in a room cluttered with pictures of the red-dress woman.  On tv, people are discussing how photographs capture your soul.

Scene 2: Mom tells the boy that his job interview --- "at sundown" -- conflicts with Grandma coming  to dinner tonight.  "Did you tell her Barney would be there?" he asks.  "She wouldn't understand," Mom counters. Is Barney, like, a boyfriend? And out into the pastel world, accompanied by a chubby dog named Pugsley.

Meanwhile, three doors down, the girl fights off her mom's excessive hugging and kissing and goes out into the pastel world herself.  She has a copy of the job flier.

Scene 3: They get on the bus together.  They're the same age and live close by, but she doesn't know him.  She gets all "stranger danger" frightened, and when he calls her by her name -- Norma -- she attacks.  "Wait -- we know each other.  We go to school together.  We're lab partners."  Turns out that Norma is neurodiverse, so when she sees someone she knows in an unusual environment, she doesn't recognize him.  

The boy's name turns out to be Barney. Maybe he's transgender, and Grandma insists on calling him by his deadname?   

The red-dress woman appears on tv: famous actress Pauline Phoenix, explaining that she built a theme park with five zones based upon her movies and tv shows.   "And if you see anything suspicious, keep it to yourself."  Gulp.

Scene 4: At Phoenix Park -- you enter through the mouth of a giant Pauline Phoenix head.  Gulp.  A parody of Disneyland, except instead of Cinderella's Castle, it's dominated by the Dead End, the haunted house that Pauline was attacked in earlier.  It's been closed, Norma tells us, since one of the park's Pauline impersonators vanished a year ago.  So the woman in the Prologue must have been a Pauline impersonator.

When they enter Dead End, a small orange demon with a tubular head appears: "Welcome, mortals.  You two must be the offerings.  I didn't realize that there'd be choices."  Wait -- aren't you the one who sent the fake fliers? Why did you send two, if you didn't expect two victims?

Various scary beings appear, I am particularly freaked out by a human figure with a sheet wrapped around its head and a pice of paper pinned to its face.  Barney catches on that this is not an ordinary job interview, but Norma, still oblivious, asks "Does this job come with benefits?"  "Blood made of fire," the orange demon tells her.  "Immortality."

Temeluchus the Demon King ascends from the underworld in an elevator.  Orange Demon tells him that she brought two humans.  "They'd both make excellent new bodies for you.  Which do you prefer?"  

The Demon King chooses Barney, but just as the green protusion streteches across to him, the dog Pugsley intervenes.  Now he is trapped in the dog's body!  Orange Demon argues that she provided bodies -- it's not her fault that Demon King chose the wrong one -- so can she be released from the curse and go home?  "No." Demon King/Pugsley flies off to find a throne, so he can rule this world.

Scene 5: Barney follows to save his dog.  Norma stays behind to interrogate the Orange Demon (named Courtney): the only way to get Temeluchus out of the dog is to trap him in a new vessel.  Fortunately, Norma remembers from earlier today that photographs capture your soul.

Barney and Norma find the Demon King/Pugsley sitting on a throne in the Medieval section of the park, Camelot Court.   They try to take photographs, but he crushes their cell phones. But Medieval section's log ride takes your picture automatically.  They just need to lure him onto the ride, and stay alive long enough....

Scene 6: The plan worked -- Demon King is trapped in a photograph.  They return to the Dead End house and give it to Orange Demon.  A lot of demons are going to be upset over the loss of their king, and come after her for revenge.  Would they like real jobs at the park, as demon busters?  Of course -- otherwise be lousy story.

Norma goes home. Barney stays behind; he wants to stay overnight in the Dead End house.  To avoid his transphobic  Grandma?  The dog Pugsley has been changed by his encounter with Demon King -- he's sentient!  He can talk!  The end.

LGBT Characters: If I hadn't done any research, I would not have caught the hint that Barney is transgender.  Maybe they are more overt in future episodes.

The series is based upon the Deadendia graphic novels by Hamish Steele, which also feature a trans boy protagonist and a neurodiverse sidekick (and bulbous noses and tufts of blue hair).  Several voice artists are LGBT, including Zack Barack (Barney) and Miss Coco Peru (Pauline Phoenix). 

Heterosexism:  Norma seems attracted to Barney.  She invites him to dinner with a red-faced embarrasment.  But apparently Barney gets a boyfriend later on.

Runanway: I don't understand why Barney doesn't want to go home.  Grandma may be transphobic, but Mom seems fine.  I didn't notice any hints of abuse.

Neurodivergent:  That should actually be explained. Otherwise it makes no sense for Norma to fail to recognize someone who she sees all the time.

The Hall of Mirrors: The opening, with Pauline or one of her impersonators being attacked in a hall of mirrors, seems unconnected to the plot about the Demon King.  Barney walks through the same hall with no mishaps, not even a scare.

My Grade: B+.