Life is Still Unfair: "Malcolm in the Middle" returns, with a super-jerky Malcolm, a n*de Hal, and a nonbinary sibling. Plus Francis and Alex d*cks

 

Link to the n*de dudes

Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2006) starred Frankie Muniz as Malcolm, the genius son in a struggling, working-class family with four boys.  I watched mainly because it was inserted into the must-see Sunday night lineup on Fox: Futurama, King of the Hill, The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, Family Guy, American Dad. 

 I don't remember many of Malcolm's plotlines, but I liked the delinquent older brother Francis (Christopher Masterson) in military school amid hunky gay-subtext dormmates, then moving to Alaska with his...um...best buddy.

Christopher c*ck on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

And middle brother Reese (Justin Berfield), who had so many queer codes that I expected a coming-out episode -- until the spineless writers lost their nerve and gave him a girlfriend. 

20 years have passed, and three of the four brothers (plus their parents, buddies, marital partners, and kids) are back in a four-part miniseries on Hulu.

Scene 1: Suited 40-year old Malcolm tells a reporter that his company does tech stuff to hook up grocery store chains with food banks, so their unsold merchandise goes to people who need it.  Then, addressing the audience, he brags that he is rich, successful, and infinitely happy. And he did it all by cutting off his family. 

I'm not happy about the "Looking at me, I'm so much better than you!"  And your family was not abusive. Cutting them off is cold.

Scene 2: At the house, Mom Lois is shaving Dad Hal's back hair, while he stands n*de  in front of a laptop, face timing with youngest son Dewey. We're supposed to find this disgusting, but Hal has a perfectly presentable physique for a 70 year old (butt after the break).

Dewey (now played by Caleb Ellsworth-Clark) is performing before King Carl Gustaf of Sweden.  And he brags about his numerous girlfriends. Was the original series this annoyingly heterosexist?

Did you remember that Hal and Lois had a fifth child in a late-series "Why not have a wacky birth?" plot arc?   I didn't, but, but here they are: the young adult Kelly (Vaughan Murrae), who is nonbinary.  

Hal makes a big show of not understanding their pronouns: "We're going shopping.  Does them want to come?"   But Kelly fights back: "Him can't come with we. Us have homework."

In other news, Lois and Hal's big anniversary party is coming up.

Scene 3: On the way home, Malcolm continues to brag about how cutting off his family changed his life: "I don't act like a sociopath.  I'm less angry, more mature. But whenever I'm around them, I revert."  Montage of Malcolm yelling at a family dinner, at a funeral, when his brother criticizes him for bragging about his car.  Now he lives far away, and avoids holiday visits, but a stream of phone calls and emails makes them think that he still cares.

Cut to Hal and Lois at a big box store, looking for a ruby garland.   Craig (David Anthony Higgins), who used to be Lois's boss with a crush on her, pops up to explain why he's no longer working at the drug store.

Suddenly Hal and his old musical group perform an a capella love song -- right in the aisle!    Well, not a love song, precisely: "Your bedroom activity takes me to paradise..."

 I remember that group vaguely -- he's the only white member, but he feels left out because the other guys are more successful.  Didn't they also prank Lois's racist mother?

Musical group member Alex Morris d*ck on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

Lois is embarrassed by the "romantic gesture."  Could they do something likes, for a change?  

Scene 4:  Back to Malcolm.  He introduces his daughter Leah, "a trophy I won for attending my first kegger in college Her mother left three days after giving birth.  I'm a single father, but I'm good at it!"

Cut to Leah crying in her room.  She addresses the camera, explaining that she doesn't cry all the time. She usually does depressed apathy or rage.

Malcolm wants to know what's wrong: she's isolated at school, with no friends, and Mean Girls prank her. 

"Don't worry, it will get better once you go away to college and cut me off."

Mom Lois calls, insisting that they come to the anniversary party. This is her third text, so Malcolm has to strategize, explaining why he didn't answer the others in a way that makes it look like he cares.

More after the break

Billy Howle: A serious actor, crazy cute, who shows his stuff a lot. Do you need anything else? With bonus Tommy Knight

Link to the n*de dudes

I've reviewed two tv series starring British actor Billy Howle (not Howlie), and two things about him stand out:

1. He is crazy cute.  What we used to call dreamy, the sort of guy who elicits fantasies of holding hands in the moonlight rather than going downtown.

 

2. Speaking of going downtown, he is not shy about showing his stuff on screen.

I always ask two questions in these profiles.

1. Is he gay in real life?

Billy has no social media presence, but various interviews note that he is in a long-term relationship with a lady.  He could be bi or gay-and-closeted, but for now we'll call him straight. 

2. Has he played any gay characters?

This one will take some research.  We'll start with his bio.  

Billy was born in Stoke-on-Trent in the Midlands, about an hour from Birmingham, son of a college professor and a "schoolteacher."  He graduated from the Bristol Old Vic Theater School in 2013.  His theatrical credits include:

The Ibsen play Ghosts (2015), which is about religion, free love, and incest, not about ghosts.  We had to read Ibsen in college.  Ugh.

Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey into Night (2016).  We had to read O'Neill, too.  Double ugh.

Hamlet (2022).  Maybe a gay subtext between the Prince and Mercutio.

Dear Octopus (2024), which is about a large, suffocating family, not an octopus.  At least it's not Ionesco.

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (2024) about marital problems.

No significant gay content, I'm afraid, and pretentiousness as the summum bonum.  

Next, Billy's on-screen roles.  He has 21 acting credits on the IMDB.  A  mostly pretentious lot, with only one science fiction movie and not a whiff of comedy.  I'll check the projects that I've reviewed already, those listed as "known for," and those with n*de scenes.

Already Reviewed:

The Perfect Couple (2024).  When the Maid of Honor is murdered on the night before the wedding, everyone is a suspect, including the Bride and Groom.  Billy plays the Groom's brother, who has a girlfriend. 

Under the Banner of Heaven (2022). Lapsed Mormon Allen (Billy) is accused of murdering his wife, but he says that his fundamentalist family did it to punish her for wanting a career and being uppity. 

More after the break

What's the Gay Connection in "The Sound of Music"?

When I was living in West Hollywood, people kept saying things like:
"I can't go out tonight -- The Sound of Music is on!"
"Which Sound of Music character are you?"
"The Sound of Music is playing at the community theater.  We have to go!"

I have never seen it all the way through.  It gives me bad vibes.

It's my fourth grade teacher's fault.  She told us about Anne Frank and The Sound of Music at the same time, and I got them mixed up, thinking that the musical ended with everyone dying in a concentration camp.

When I used to hear the songs, they gave me a frisson of dread, since I thought they were being sung by the prisoners at Auschwitz.

But even without the horror, they made no sense.  Look at "Do, Re, Mi":

Do, a deer, a female deer.  It's a doe. 

Ray, a drop of golden sun.   It's a ray, not a drop.

Mi, the name I call myself.  No, it's a personal pronoun in the accusative case.

Fahhhh, a long, long way to run.  It's  pronounced far, not fahhhh.

Ti, a drink with jam and bread.  Who drinks tea with jam and bread?  For that matter, what the heck is jam?

Or "My Favorite Things":

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels.  Ponies don't come in cream colors, and strudel is a soft pastry, not crisp.

When the dog bites -- when the bee stings.  If a dog bites you, thinking of "favorite things" wouldn't help -- you need a rabies shot. And why would you feel sad when bitten or stung?  It's not sad, it's painful.

"Oh, no," everyone kept telling me.  "It's the greatest musical of all time!  And the gayest!"

So I've been looking for the gay connection.

Not in the plot: it's just a "servant inspires joie de vivre in dysfunctional family" story, done to death on tv: Hazel, Charles in Charge, Mr. Belvedere, Give me a Break, The Nanny.  Here the nanny is future nun Maria (Julie Andrews), and the family belongs to the stern Captain Von Trapp of the Austrian army (Christopher Plummer).  After they learn joie de vivre, the family hits it big as professional singers, and finally they escape from the Nazis by climbing over the hillside into Switzerland.



There is no beefcake or buddy-bonding.

There are no gay or gay-vague characters, except maybe Max Detweiler, who becomes the children's agent.

 In 1965 he was played by Richard Haydn, who was gay in real life.  This scene does not appear in the movie.

Maybe there's a gay connection in the cast?

Julie Andrews, of course, went on to play a woman disguised as a drag queen in Victor/Victoria (1982).

Christopher Plummer  won an Academy Award at the age of 82, for playing a gay man who comes out after retirement in Beginners (2010).  In the top photo, he seems to be having a little loincloth malfunction in The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969).

Nicholas Hammond (left), one of the two boys in Von Trapp's mostly female family, played Spider-Man on tv (1977-78), where he is adequately cute.  He was married for only four years, and is rumored to be gay.

Not a lot of gay connection there.

What about the real life Von Trapp Family, lead by patriarch Georg Ritter Von Trapp (1888-1947)?  Ok, they were professional singers long before they met Maria, and they were Italian citizens who didn't need to escape Germany -- they just bought train tickets.  After the War, they opened a lodge in Stowe, Vermont.  

Most of the kids eventually married, although Agathe may have been gay: she ran a kindergarten with her "friend of 50 years," Mary Louise Kane.

Still not a lot of gay connection.

The Sound of Music Live! (2013) starred Carrie Underwood as Maria and Stephen Moyer (left) as Captain Von Trapp, Christian Borle (second photo), who plays a lot of gay characters, made his Max Detweiler as gay-vague as possible.

Not much there, either.

So the gay connection of The Sound of Music consists mostly of bulges?

See also: Charles in Charge

Mr. Belvedere

My Fair Lady.

"Speechless," Season 2: I Am Disgustipated

I liked the first season of Speechless (2016-), the sitcom starring J. J. DiMeo (Micah Fowler), a teenager with cerebral palsy, who is wheelchair bound and "speechless," and his crazy relatives. It was nice to see a disabled character who was neither a saint nor a jerk, especially since the need to communicate without speech results in broad, theatrical, feminine gestures that could easily be read as gay.

Micah Fowler can speak but uses a wheelchair in real life.  Here he completes a mile-long walk with the aid of a special walking device.  Nice arms.

Plus J.J.'s early-teen brother Ray (18-year old Mason Cook, left) was not unbearably girl-crazy, and his personal attendant Kenneth (Cedric Yarbrough) was presented as so roly-poly asexual that he could be read as gay, too.

That left Mom and Dad, who were of course the leaders of a frazzled sitcom nuclear family, but came across more like team leaders than romantic partners.



Then came Season 2. Gulp.  Ok, we've got the audience used to this disabled kid, so let's pull out all the stops.  It will be nonstop Girls! Girls! Girls!

In the season premiere, the family hatches a wild scheme to get J.J. to kiss the girl he met at summer camp. Later he dates Norah, a new special needs girl at school.

J.J. and his brother get free tickets to a movie they're both dying to see, but at the last minute J.J. ditches him for a girl. Ray shouldn't be upset; he should know that on tv, male friendships are ephemeral.  A buddy will drop you in an instant if a girl smiles at him.

J.J. lies about his disability on an online dating app to get more girls interested.

In one episode, J.J. starts a brief buddy-bond with an actor starring in a movie he wants to be in (Nick Viall, left).

Later he has a "friend date" with Aaron (Christian Lees), a boy he really, really wants to like him.

And in a Halloween episode, Ray switches bodies with a girl and doesn't express any homophobic panic.

But that's cold comfort.

Ray pursues several girls before settling down with Taylor. So episodes involve meeting the parents, wanting to get more physical, having "the talk" with Dad, and so on.  Then they break up, and Taylor starts dating another boy, so Ray is jealous.

Ok, the kid is 18, but his character is about 15.  Do we really need a serious romance?

Kenneth suddenly has an ex-wife and girl-crushes.

Even the preteen Dylan, a girl, starts sparking over boys.

Of course, gay people do not exist.

I am disgustipated.

See also: Mason Cook: The "Speechless" kid grows up, turns hipster-bohemian, and shows his biceps and dick

The 44 Dumbest Things You See on TV

I've watched a lot of tv, mostly sci-fi and sitcoms.  The set was on all the time when I was a kid.  In adulthood, it's like comfort food, warm, predictable, mildly amusing.  But is it really necessary to have so many plot conventions that strain credulity?  Plus are sexist, heterosexist, or downright homophobic?  Almost makes you want to pick up a book instead.

1. No one ever says a complete sentence; everyone takes turns.  "This looks like the work of..." "Two killers."  "So we should..."  ",,,get backup."

2. Whenever someone says "It's possible that...", as in "It's possible that the signals are coming from Mars" or "It's possible that the killer worked for the FBI," they mean "It's an absolute certainty."

3. Whenever someone says, "The chances against this working are a million to one," they mean, "It will absolutely work."

4. You cannot discuss the plan on the way to the site, even if it takes two hours to get there.  You must always wait until you have arrived.

5. All discussions of plans must begin with the phrase: "And that's the plan.  First we...."


6. Whenever anyone prepares food, they must tell the person they are preparing it for that it is "Your favorite."

7. The only people who can eat dinner at home are heterosexual nuclear families: The Man in a lumberjack shirt, a son and a daughter under age 10, and The Woman, usually blond.  The Man must always say "Great meal, honey."

8. The only people who can eat in restaurants are four young adults, divided into male-female couples.  One is always shown shoving a forkful of food into someone else's mouth.  Sometimes this happens in groups, too.

9. Whenever anyone turns on the tv, they must  hear a news story pertaining to their situation.

10.  If they are shown watching tv alone, it should be an old black and white movie, usually a Western.

11. Except for kids and serial killers, who must watch public domain cartoons from the 1930s.

12. The only people who can watch tv in groups are heterosexual nuclear families, and they are always cuddling while holding a gigantic bowl of popcorn.  No one in the real world eats popcorn while watching tv.

13. If someone wants to talk to you, they can't call, they must drive across town to see you in person.

14. And the drive is extremely short.

15. And the door is unlocked, so they just walk in.

16. Whenever you enter a scary place, someone must say "This place gives me the creeps."  But no one in real life ever says this.

17.  People always complain that they don't have enough money to pay bills, but have thousands of dollars to spend on expensive props.

18. Poor people live in huge, well-appointed houses.  Middle-class people live in mansions. There is no such thing as an apartment, except in New York, where poor people live in huge apartments with a view of the Empire State Building.

20. Every hotel room in Paris looks directly out onto the Eiffel Tower. 

21. Men may not be shown engaging in any housecleaning activity.  Ever.  They can be asked to cook, to "help their wives out," but they must flub the job and take the kids to McDonald's.

22. The main characters must be white, but the captain, chief, or judge who appears in just one episode should be black, to demonstrate that racism no longer exists.

23. Everyone belongs to a huge number of clubs and organizations, but only for one episode apiece.  Then the club is never mentioned again.

More after the break

The twelve scruffy hunks of "Animal Kingdom." WIth a lot of bare butts

  

Someone recommended Animal Kingdom, not to be confused with the Animal Kingdom at Disney World, the Animal Planet network, or a tv show entitled Animal Control.  This one is a drama TNT featuring the struggle for succession in a crime family led by...Smurf?  "Ok, boys, I want you to go smurf out those rival smurfs and bury their smurfs in the smurf."

Link to The 12 bare butts of "Animal Kingdom"

There are a lot of sons, grandsons, and boy toys, even a gay one.  Most are sleazy, scruffy, and tattooed, not my cup of tea.  But most get bare butt scenes, so you don't have to look at their face.

1. Scott Speedman as Baz, adopted Smurf, who wants to try new crime techniques instead of Mama Smurf's old fashioned smurfing. 

2. In flashbacks to 1992 and 1996, Baz is smurfed by Darren Mann, left

3. Shawn Hatosy as Pope, eldest Smurf, who suffers from mental illness and does a lot of risky smurf. Plus he's smurfed in prison.

4.  Kevin Csolak smurfs as Pope in the flashbacks.

5. Ben Robson as Craig, middle Smurf, who parties and does drug instead of paying attention to the smurfing. 

6. Jake Weary as Deran, youngest Smurf, the moral smurf who is trying to distance himself from the family, running a surfing shop instead of smurfing crime. He is closeted for a long time, but when he finally comes out they are fine with it. 

More butts after the break

What's Gay about "Married with Children"

One day in 1988, I was at the gym in West Hollywood, and I saw someone wearing a t-shirt reading "Married...with Children Fan Club."

I knew about Married...with Children.  On Sunday nights, my roommate Derek and I always watched the beefcake-heavy: 21 Jump Street and Werewolf  on the fledgling Fox network, but we turned the tv off when the "Love and Marriage" theme song began.

Who wanted to watch a tv show that praised the heterosexual nuclear family?

Big mistake.  Married skewered the institution.

Al (Ed O'Neill) and Peggy (Katey Sagal) are a middle-aged married couple who hate each other.  Sexually voracious Peggy keeps trying to trick, cajole, or berate Al into having sex with her, but he isn't interested (although he likes women in general).

In the first season plot arc, Al and Peggy have fun trying to destroy a naive newly married couple, Marcy (Amanda Bearse) and Steve (David Garrison).  They're like George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, except their tactic is criticizing wives and husbands, respectively, and it works!  The couple soon divorces, and Marcy hooks up with metrosexual boytoy Ted McGinley

 Other episodes involve problems with the kids, the promiscuous teenage Kelly (Christina Applegate) and the rowdy preteen Bud (David Faustino) -- soon a nerdy teenager.

No significant buddy-bonding, although Peggy and Marcy and Al and Boomererson come close.

Lots of beefcake -- Kelly had lots of shirtless, muscular boyfriends, such as Dan Gauthier, and in later seasons, Bud began to muscle-up big time.

Gay people appear only once.

Yet Married -- at least in its early years, before the downward spiral of Seasons 7-10 -- artfully revealed the flimsy foundation of the "fade out kiss," the myth of universal heterosexual destiny.  In the heart of the Reagan-Bush Era of conservative retrenchment, that was worth any number of "old friend visits and turns out to be gay" episodes.

Amanda Bearse came out in real life in 1993, and the rest of the cast are strong gay allies.




Katey Sagal and Christina Applegate have made public statements supporting gay marriage.

Ed O'Neill now stars in Modern Family, as the patriarch of a family that includes a gay son and son-in-law.

David Faustino played gay characters in Get Your Stuff (2000) and in Killer Bud (2001), and in Ten Attitudes (2001), he played "himself," not gay but on the gay dating circuit (for a sleazy reason). He also played "himself" in the webseries Star-Ving (along with buddy Corin Nemec). 

He's currently in talks with producers about a Married spin-off, with Bud as an adult, married...with children.

See also: David Faustino: Bud Bundy is star-ving, humiliated, butt-nekkid, and a gay ally

Mary Poppins Helps a Gay Dad

Remember Mary Poppins (1964), the classic Disney movie in which a strange magical governess sweeps down from the sky to introduce joie de vivre into the lives of two kids and their stuffy, negligent parents? 

To refresh your memory, the parents are stuffy George Banks, a banker (good name), and Winifred, who is ludicrously obsessed with women's suffrage (imagine, women having the right to vote!).  The two preteen children, Jane and Michael, needed saving from their nascent juvenile delinquency.

Well, now there's a sequel, Mary Poppins Returns (2018).

P. L. Travers actually wrote a sequel to her first book, with Mary Poppins returning a year or so later, dealing with the same family all over again.  But in the movie version, it's been 25 years.  The elder Banks are deceased.  Michael (Ben Whishaw, top photo) has abandoned his dream of becoming an artist and taken a job in banking, like his father, and Jane has grown into a shrill labor activist, like her mother.

Michael has three children (Georgie, John, and Annabel), but no wife, and a lot of financial trouble: he's in debt up to his eyeballs and may lose his house.  So Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) has a lot of fixing-up to do:

1. Find some way to make Jane less shrill.
2. Restore Michael's faith in art.
3. Rescue the children from a kidnapping animal gang that also happen to be the Bad Guys trying to destroy Michael's career.
4. Find the note that will allow them to save the house.
5. Reveal the corruption at the heart of the British banking industry.
6. Oh, yeah, teach them how to fly kites again.

Bert, the jack of all trades who knew Mary from many of her dysfunctional-family-saving expeditions, has long since retired (Dick Van Dyke appears as the president of the bank).  Mary's new chum is the lamplighter Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), who teaches the kids the joy of being working class.

Beefcake:  Not much.  I couldn't even find shirtless photos of most of the male cast in other productions.  This is Tarik Frimpong, who plays one of Jack's coworkers.

Gay subtexts: Lots.

Mary doesn't try to get Michael a girlfriend (or, horrors, become his girlfriend), which is usual in a show about a single parent.  Could it be because Michael is gay?  Ben Whishaw is, after all, and Michael never expresses a glimmer of heterosexual interest (Jane does start dating Jack; have to put the hetero-romance in there somewhere).

Also, Admiral Boom (David Warner), the navy captain from down the street who thinks he's still living on a ship, has a "first mate"/boy toy (actually they're the same age, but they've been living together without the company of women for a number of years, so....).

And Edward Hibbert, who played the swishy-but-straight Gil on Frasier, and is swishy-but-gay in real life, does the voice of Mary's talking umbrella.

Lucas Neff: Beefcake and Gay Characters after "Raising Hope"

Raising Hope (2010-2014)  was about a wacky working-class family whose son, Jimmy (Lucas Neff) became a single dad after a one-night stand with a serial killer.  There were no gay characters, except for an occasional walk-on, but there were ample buddy-bonding subtexts, including a father-son subtext so obvious it looks intentional.

Plus the beefcake was constant.

Jimmy has a surprisingly buffed, hirsute chest and nicely shaped biceps.

Lucas Neff grew up in Chicago and received a BFA in theater from the University of Illinois in 2008.




He moved to Hollywood almost immediately, with a role in the buddy-bonding war movie Angelo (2010), followed by Raising Hope. 

What has he been up to since 2014?  And more importantly, has he taken off his shirt for the camera since?

According to the imdb, he's been in some indie, horror, and comedy movies, including:

There are Ghosts (2015), about a "closeted homosexual with a death wish."

I Love You Both (2016), about a brother and a sister both dating the same guy.

Slash (2016), about a gay teen (slash means the pairing of heterosexual media characters).

Cock N Bull 2 (2017), about a gay couple who decide to have an open relationship.









That's a lot of gay content.

Plus he's dating Caitlin Stasey, who is an out lesbian (who says lesbians can't date men without having to classify themselves as bisexual?).

He's let his hair grow out just a bit.

See also: Axl in Underwear

The Real Gay Characters of "The Real O'Neals"

What happens when a "perfect" Irish Catholic family finds out that they're not perfect after all?
Mom and Dad are divorcing.
Oldest son has an eating disorder.
Daughter has some kind of psychological issue.
Youngest son is gay.

Got it, being gay is inferior, a "problem" like having an eating disorder or a psychological issues.  Can't be a "perfect" family with a gay kid.

With that intensely homophobic beginning, I gave the first season of The Real O'Neils a miss.  But it keeps getting praised by the Trevor Project, so I watched a couple of episodes.

Former teen idol Jay R. Ferguson plays the hapless dad.

Matt Shively, last seen on the Disney Channel, plays the dimwitted older brother.

His problem, and his sister's problem, are not mentioned.  The plotlines are about the parents living together and dating other people while divorced, and about the gay son.

His first gay coffee house.
Starting a gay club at school.
Hosting a Halloween party.
Joining a gym.

The flamboyant stereotype son is played by Noah Galvin.

Not too great.  Here's why his crush (Sean Grandillo) didn't come out:

"Do you like avocados?"
"Yeah..."
"Why didn't you tell me you like avocados?"

Liking dudes is not nearly the same thing as liking avocados.

People don't want to kill you because you like avocados.
Parents don't kick you out of the house because you like avocados.
You don't have to worry every moment if you will become the victim of a hate crime for liking avocados.

Here's a pic of Sean Grandillo.

But there haven't been that many cringe-inducing moments, and I like the lengths the conservative parents go through to try to welcome their son.

And there's substantial beefcake.  Matt Shively and  Noah Crawford (left) aren't averse to shirtless shots.

Neither is Chris Pipkin as one of his classmates.

Plus I've noticed an occasional bulge that no one remembered to censor.

See also: The Real Bulges of the Real O'Neals.

The Real Bulges of "The Real O'Neals"

Last night I watched the December 6th episode of The Real O'Neals: Kenny, the gay kid (Noah Galvin), goes out for wrestling, and turns out to be good at it, due to his expertise in the dance numbers from West Side Story.

He wins the adulation of his conservative Catholic high school, receiving cheers, gifts, and an invitation to sit at the jock table, but infringes upon the territory of his brother, Jimmy (Matt Shively).

At first I found it only mildly entertaining.  I was waiting for some beefcake shots of Matt Shively and his teammates.

But I never expected to see anything like this on a prime time comedy.

He's an extra; I don't have his name.  I wish I did.

Ok, time for Kenny's match.  He drops his gym trunks, revealing a singlet of his own.

Doesn't he notice that his singlet is a bit...um...snug?  Doesn't the director notice?

Noah Galvin is 22 years old, by the way, so it's ok to look.

It's impossible not to look.

It gets better.

And better.

Suddenly I'm a real fan of The Real O'Neals.

See also: The Real Gay Characters of "The Real O'Neals"