Hogan's Heroes: The Wackiest POW Camp in Germany

Our older brothers and fathers were in Vietnam, where casualties were mounting every day, but at home we watched wacky soldiers: McHale's Navy, No Time for Sergeants, F-Troop, Gomer Pyle USMC, The Wackiest Ship in the Army, and, the wackiest of all, Hogan's Heroes (1965-71), which also drew from the spy and "I've got a secret" craze.

It was set in a World War II prisoner of war camp, Stalag 13, where the "prisoners," deliberately captured, were all spies:

Back row: LeBeau, covert operations; Colonel Hogan (Bob Crane), the leader; Kinch (Ivan Dixon), communications.

Front row: Newkirk (Richard Dawson), impersonations and con games; Carter (Larry Hovis), explosives and all things scientific.

The commandant, Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer, right), was an incompetent bureaucrat. The only guard was Sergeant Schultz (John Banner, left), a sweet-tempered toymaker in civilian life, who turned a blind eye to the unusual activities ("I see nothing!").  Both were victims of circumstance, not actively evil; the  villains were the Nazi higher-ups, who might discover the secret operation and shut it down.

What was the attraction for gay kids, other than the fact that the only other choices on Saturday night were The Lawrence Welk Show and the first half of a movie?

1. Lack of displayed heterosexual interest. Other entries in the spy genre, such as I Spy and Wild Wild West, involved its heroes in endless leering at bikini-clad women, but the POW camp was an all-male world, with no women visible except for Colonel Klink's secretary and an occasional female resistance agent. Hogan occasionally smooched with a woman, but no episodes involved hetero-romance.

2. Dreamy guys in the cast, especially Robert Clary.  No beefcake, unfortunately -- no one as much as unbuttoned a button, even while lying around in the barracks. In fact, it's almost impossible to find nude shots of any of the cast members, even in other projects.

3. Hogan and Klink certainly weren't buddies. Klink was constantly annoyed by Hogan's  irreverence. Hogan found Klink stuffy and old-fashioned (another 1960s clash between the establishment and the counterculture).  Yet as they strategized against each other, or more often worked together toward some common goal, they developed a love-hate bond that one could easily see spinning into a forbidden romance.  It was a pleasure to watch them interact every week.

Bob Crane (1928-1978) became so famous as Colonel Hogan that it's hard to remember his many other roles.  He starred in the Disney movie Superdad (1973) and his own short-lived Bob Crane Show, guest starred on everything from Ellery Queen to Love Boat, and worked extensively in theater.

He was married twice and had five children (shown: his son Scotty), but he also had relationships with many women, and occasionally men.  He was reputedly a BDSM bottom; however, no BDSM scenes appear in the hundreds of tapes he made of his sexual encounters.

When he was murdered in 1978, people speculated that it was a BDSM scene gone wrong.The main suspect, his friend John Carpenter, was acquitted on lack of evidence.

Greg Kinnear played Bob Crane in the 2002 movie Auto-Focus.

A Man Like Mobeen

As America descends into hate-fueled, border-wall,  concentration camp fascism, the racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia that we thought espoused by only a few loonies suddenly supported by half the population, it's easy to forget that hate is rising elsewhere in the world.  Britain has its own alt-right, its own isolationism, its own "Make Britain Great Again!" slogans  A Man Like Mobeen reminds us.










Mobeen (Guz Khan, center ) is a young man of Pakistani ancestry living in the small Small Heath neighborhood of Birmingham, which has been described by racist Fox news as "a no-go zone for non-Muslims."

He and his two buds, Nate (Tolu Ogumenfun,right) and Eight (Tez Ilyas, left) were previously small-time drug dealers, but they are trying to go straight so that Mobeen can be a proper role model for his 15-year old sister, Aqsa (Duaa Karim).

In eight episodes, they encounter:
1. Police targeting.  Eight is arrested on description of an "Asian male in track suit bottoms" selling drugs to kids.

2. Bullying.  When Aqsa is suspended from school for fighting back against bullies, Mobeen wonders if she needs a mother's touch in her life.

3. An alt-right demonstration.  Mobeen is arrested and placed in the same paddy wagon as alt-right leader Robbie Worthington (Jason Maza, top photo).

4. Knife violence.  While trying to protect Aqsa from an upcoming knife fight at her school prom, Mobeen is arrested yet again.

5. Microaggressions.  During the interminable wait at A&E (Britain's health care system), Mobeen encounters an "I'm not a racist, but..."  chap. Actually, it stops being a microaggression very quickly.   Hint: Don't insult the doctor who is about to treat you.

Beefcake:  None to speak of.

Gay characters:  None specified, except for maybe a guy at A&E who is bidding in an online auction on a plaster cast of Daniel Radcliffe's penis.

But Mobeen expresses heterosexual interest in only two episodes, and his buds only refer to it vaguely, once.  They all can be read as gay.

Why We Watched "Amen" in West Hollywood

When I was living in West Hollywood, Saturday night was cruising night; at 9:30 pm, just after The Golden Girls, you headed out to Mugi (for Asian men), Catch One (Black men), Basgo's (Hispanic men), the Faultline (Bears), or the Gold Coast (Sleazoids).

In by 10:00 pm, out by midnight with a phone number or a hookup.

But the bars didn't get busy until 11:00, so you might stall after The Golden Girls, and watch Amen (1986-91) before heading out.

It starred Sherman Hemsley (left), formerly of The Jeffersons, as the deacon of a black church in Philadelphia, who uses sneaky, underhanded tricks to get ahead (woo a new singer for the choir and so on).

He butts heads with the straightlaced Reverend Gregory (Clifton Davis, right),who finds himself loosening up and even making up some schemes of his own. Clifton Davis was a real minister, affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventist Church (and later a Baptist), so he made sure the shenanigans never got too immoral.

Although they did involve alcoholism, gambling addiction, divorce, and suicide (no gay people or AIDS, of course).

Meanwhile the Deacon's man-hungry spinster daughter Thelma (Anna Marie Horsford) sets out to grab Reverend Gregory.  After a few seasons of "will they or won't they?" and a few false starts, like the Reverend passing out before he can say "I do," they finally get hitched in the spring of 1990.

There wasn't a lot of buddy-bonding between the Reverend and the Deacon. The main draw was Clifton Davis, his hunkiness intensified for those with a preacher fetish.  Unfortunately, he never appeared shirtless (the top photo is another Clifton Davis).

The rest of the cast was of limited beefcake interest. The gossippy Hetebrink sisters.  Ultra-elderly Rollie, who, true to tv tradition, has a very active love life.

Farther down the guest star list, we find Bumper Robinson as Clarence, a street kid who the Deacon takes under his wing (left); and guest spots by many recognizable black actors, including James Avery (Fresh Prince of Bel Air), Ron Glass (Barney Miller), LaWanda Page (Sanford and Son), Richard Roundtree (Shaft), Nell Carter (Give Me a Break), Darius McCrary (Family Matters, below), and Shavar Ross (Diff'rent Strokes).

In retrospect, the main impact of Amen was to revv our engines.

"Ok, Amen is over. Where do you want to go cruising?"

"No doubt: Catch One."

See also: The Jeffersons

"The Cool Kids": Old People Have Problems, Too

News flash: Patrick Duffy is 70 years old.

O tempora, o mores.

In many cultures older people are respected as fonts of wisdom. In our culture we think of them as screaming bigots or doddering fools, irrelevant to the world and unwelcome in it.  Dozens of tv programs, dating all the way back to December Bride in the 1950s, have had fun breaking our expectations by showing old people as active, competent, and...gasp.... sexual.

Remember the episode of Alice where Carrie (Martha Raye) and Alice (Linda Lavin) perform "If you think I'm sexy, and you want my body"?

Or the episode of Mama's Family where Thelma (Vicki Lawrence) starts dating her English professor?

Or the episode of The Golden Girls where  ...well, every episode of The Golden Girls.

The Cool Kids (2018-) are three male residents of a retirement community:
Hank (David Alan Grier of In Living Color)
Charlie (Martin Mull of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman)
Sid (Leslie Jordan) 

Not a nursing home, a retirement community where evereyone has their own apartment and there is no trace of declining physical health or mental acuity.

It's a high school without parents or curfews, and the Cool Kids rule.  Until new female resident Margaret (Vicki Lawrence of Mama's Family) starts to shake things up.

If these names bring back memories, just wait until you read the cast list: Jamie Farr, Max Gail, Julia Duffy, Ed Begley, Jr ,Stephen Tobolowski, Leslie Ann Warren, Jackee Harry, Charles Shaughnessy, Patrick Duffy, a full palette of 1970s and 1980s nostalgia casting.

But watching to see them again is a mixed blessing.  They look really old.  I don't know how or why, but apparently some years have passed since MASH, Barney Miller, Blossom, Newhart,  and Dallas

Is this show good for anything other than reminding viewers that they are home on Friday night, when they used to be out gyrating and hooking up?

Let's hear the viewer comments:

I just happened to see this for the first time while at the hospital with a relative. It was the episode about online dating. I was in tears laughing so hard!

My husband and I recently suffered the tragic loss of our oldest son.  I swore off TV and other things. The day I chose to turn it back on, I saw this, and. I thought WOW! "

Um...ok, first rule of the internet: never read the comments.

The first few episodes are about "you kids stay off my lawn!" crotchetyness.  Their old hangout is now a milennial joint called Club Twerk.  They visit anyway, face oldster-phobia, and agree that the millennial generation is the pits.

But then they go into Golden Girls territory: competitions for club president, competitions over new friends, visits from relatives, and dating.  Lots of dating.

The veteran actors have spot-on comedic timing.  It's nice to watch someone who doesn't struggle over lines, like some of the just-out-of-acting-school beefcake hunks who populate other sitcoms.

And it's nice to be able to understand what they are saying without asking a 20-year old to translate "Text me the deets of the next ish, lolz."

Gay characters:  Sid, of course.  It's nice to see a gay gay as one of the gang, in spite of his 1970s stereotypic fluttering (to be fair, Leslie Jordan flutters in real life, too).  He has a whole story arc in which he's not out to his son (really, how could the guy not know?).

And another where he admits that he's never had a gay romance before.  Margaret intervenes, and he starts dating John (Jere Burns of Dear John), who discovers that he hasn't actually divorced his wife (they are such good friends that a divorce might ruin things).

Beefcake: The Geritol set (our 1970s name for old people) isn't much for displaying biceps and bulges, and let's face it, these guys weren't really lookers back in their salad days.

Searching way down the cast list, I found this photo of Travis Schuldt, who plays Sid's clueless son.

Turn to the other channel (um...I mean, stream something else), and you can see all the milennial chests and butts you want.

Keep watching The Cool Kids to visit some old friends.

My grade: B+

The "Let's Get the Gay Stuff Over With" episode of "I'm Sorry"

I'm Sorry (2017-) stars comedian Andrea Savage as a comedy writer named Andrea, who, like most comedians gets ideas from her quirky family and friends: her partner Mike (Tom Everett Scott, who used to be cute), her clueless mother Sharon (Kathy Baker), her socially awkward brother David (Nelson Franklin). 

Most of Andrea and Mike's social life appears to revolve around the preschool group that their daughter Amelia is in.  For instance, in Episode 2, Amelia's stray remark about another girl makes Andrea believe that she is racist. 

Apparently sets of parents date each other, have relationships, get upset over "cheating," and break up, just like romantic couples. In Episode 8, Andrea and Mike court another couple of parents, only to find things getting "weird" during the playdate.

In the episode I watched, "Too Slow," Andrea and Mike court the only lesbian parents in the play group, hoping that they will help Amelia realize that there are different kinds of parents.

 On the playdate, the two turn out to be assholes, letting their son run wild and screaming at a hapless play park employee (Ben Cho, the only cute guy in the episode). 

Andrea and Mike decide to break up with them, but don't want to come across as homophobic.  Fellow parent Brian (Gary Anthony Williams) states that he knew they were assholes, but wasn't going to "talk trash about the only lesbian parents in the play group."

Meanwhile (might as well get all of the gay stuff out of the way in one episode), Andrea suspects that her brother David is gay because he's over 30, never had a girlfriend, and constantly talks about how much fun he has with his roommate. 

Wait -- what is this, 1985?  No gay guy introduces his boyfriend as his "roommate" anymore. 

Andrea tells her mother about the lesbian parents at play group and David being gay, all in the same conversation.  Mom is perplexed -- how did everyone suddenly become gay?  there weren't any gays when she was a girl.  And how do lesbians have a child? She is also worried about David facing a "hard life" of homophobic bakeries and...well, that's all she's heard about.

When Andrea encourages David to come out, he states that he's not gay, and in alarm asks her for the names of everyone she's told.  Homebound, socially awkward software engineers have to be careful about their reputations, right, David? 

 "How do you know you're straight?"  Andrea asks, implying that he really should give man-on-man sex a try before making a firm decision to be heterosexual.  She's been down in vagina country a few times, but didn't find anything there appealing enough to make it a habit.

Mom is relieved to discover that David is, in fact, straight.  But she feels guilty for being relieved.

Thus we have a glimpse into the contradictory life of the modern heterosexual, who isn't quite sure what being gay is all about, but thinks that she should be sure, who feels guilty about the homophobic thoughts that pop into her mind and keeps telling herself "There's nothing wrong with it."  Until the episode is over, and she never has to see or talk about gay people again.

In Bed with Mason Cook

In Speechless, the sitcom about a nonverbal special needs kid and his crazy family, gay people generally do not exist.  I guess you can have only one Special Thing per series.  The only reference to LGBT identities I have seen is, admittedly, a good one:

In a Halloween episode, operator-in-training Ray (Mason Cook) and his sarcastic younger sister Dylan (Kyla Kenedy) change bodies.

Ray in Dylan's body experiences not a hint of macho panic  ("Gross!  I'm a girl!), nor does he spend his time heterosexualizing ("I can see all the boobs I want).  Instead, he enjoys being brainy and popular, and refuses to switch back.

Dylan in Ray's body doesn't enjoy being considered stupid and an outcast, so she seeks advice from their father:  "What do you do when you're trapped in the wrong body?"

Dad, naturally, assumes that "Ray" is coming out as transgender.  "I don't know enough about this to comment," he says, "But your mother and I will always love you no matter..."

Later he tells his wife "I think I'm woke."

The juxtaposition of the old fashioned "trapped in the wrong body" and the contemporary "woke" is jarring, but otherwise the sequence perfectly avoids all of the homophobic and heterosexist jokes one usually finds in "boy turns into a girl" stories.

Naturally, I wanted to know more about Mason Cook, who plays Ray.

18 years old, born in Oklahoma City although he says he's from Arkansas, acting since age 9.    He played the young Jimmy on Raising Hope and Eddie Munster in the Munsters reboot Mockingbird Lane,  guested on a lot of Disney and Nickelodeon teencoms, and had recurring roles on Legends and The Goldbergs.  His movie credits include Spy Kids 4, The Lone Ranger, Spy, and some tv-movie tearjerkers. 

Quite a full resume for someone of his age.

Extremely progressive in his politics, anxious to take back the country from the alt-right.

Quick to call out homophobia.  Didn't go to see The Ender's Game because the author of the original novel, Orson Scott Card, hates gay people.






Uploads lots of selfies to his twitter and instagram accounts.

















In this picture, he is in bed.  But it doesn't look like  a selfie -- the arms are positioned wrong. Someone else took it.

I wonder who was in bed with Mason Cook?

See also: Speechless, Season 2


 

Sick Note: Gay Subtexts in the Most Unpleasant Sitcom on TV

Daniel Glass (Rupert Grint, left) is having a bad day.  His girlfriend has kicked him out, his boss is planning to fire him, and to add to his woes, he's diagnosed with cancer.

Suddenly everyone starts being very nice to him. His girlfriend lets him move back in, he won't be fired, he can get out of anything by claiming that he's not feeling well.

Then Daniel finds out that his incompetent physician, Dr. Glennis (Nick Frost of Shaun of the Dead) has misdiagnosed him.  No cancer.  But he decides to play the sick card awhile longer.... and things start to go downhill fast.

His best friend, Ash (Togu Ogunmefun), who is sleeping with his girlfriend, overhears everything, then falls out of a window to his death.  To avoid being charged with murder, Daniel asks Dr. Glennis to make it look like an anonymous hit and run accident.  But Ash isn't actually dead, just in a coma.  But Dr. Glennis accidentally switched cell phones. A police office (Daniel Rigby, left) starts snooping around.  And Daniel's online gaming friend, Will (Dustin Demri-Burns) shows up with dark secrets of his own.

The complications are humorous -- I actually laughed out loud several times in each episode, and I almost never laugh at a tv show.  There are gay subtexts everywhere, especially Daniel-Dr. Glennis,but Will also seems to be in love with Daniel, and Daniel flirts with Officer Hayward.  There are also a lot of jokes involving same-sex behavior.

Will (to Daniel): "Take off your clothes.  We're going to take a bath together...just kidding."

Daniel's disgustingly sexist boss, Kenny West (Don Johnson), drops his pants in front of him.  Daniel assumes that he wants a blow job, but actually he is demonstrating that he is a cancer survivor.

I'm not sure about Daniel's panicked reactions.  Is he horrified because he hates these two guys, or because the idea of same-sex intimacy is disgusting?

But my main problem with Sick Note is the characters.

Kenny West is an over-acted, over-the-top caricature of a sexist boss circa 1955.  He discusses his penis during business meetings, litters his speech with the crudest profanity imaginable, and openly propositions his employees.  Um...hostile workplace? Sexual harassment?

Daniel is a complete jerk, utterly amoral.  His best friend falls to his death because Daniel startled him.  No grief, no guilt -- how can I dispose of the body?  He kills his girlfriend's cat (it takes several tries).  He discusses whether he would go back in time and have sex with Marilyn Monroe's corpse.

Dr. Glennis is also utterly amoral, but more importantly, he's too stupid to live.  He doesn't know what ASAP means.  He mispronounces easy medical terms.  He doesn't know how to take a pulse (wherever did he go to medical school?).  There is no one on Earth that clueless.

Officer Hayward is also too stupid to live, but more importantly, he's too prudish to be a police officer.  A woman in a low-cut blouse sends him into a tizzy of embarrassment.

The characters are simply unpleasant to watch.  And unpleasant to look at.  Rupert Grint has a pasty, doughy body and a face out of a disease-of-the-week movie.  Nick Frost is a bit too chubby even for chasers.  And no one else unbuttons a button.

My verdict: rewatch Shaun of the Dead instead.  More buddy-bonding, and the characters are pleasant.

The Hunks of the Millennium's Worst TV Series, 2010-2018

And now on to the clickbait list of the worst tv series of 2010-2018, and the mega-hunks who (almost) made them worth a look:

2010.  Mental: A psychiatrist (Chris Vance) can see into his patients' heads, but is worried about becoming schizophrenic himself.  Vance isn't bad, I suppose, but he pales in comparison to Nicholas Gonzalez as his horndog coworker.

2011.  S*** My Dad Says.  Star Trek fans tuned in to see William Shatner playing a crotchety, conservative Archie Bunker clone, head-butting with his liberal, middle aged sons (Jonathan Sadowski, Will Sasso).  Sasso is a little chunky (he played the chubby one of the Three Stooges), but Sadowski is rather hunky.

2012. Charlie's Angels.  Did anyone really want a retread of that 1970s show about female private detectives being told by an unseen voice to go undercover at bikini ranches?  The main cast consisted only of the angels, the voice of Victor Garber, and Ramon Rodriguez as the assistant Bosley.  The original Bosley was asexual, but this one was hetero-horny, and partied with the angels.  Not a bad physique.










2013. Guys with Kids.  Three guys raising their babies.  None are gay; in fact, they all have wives or ex-wives.  So the hilarity comes from the bizarre spectacle of men actually being fathers?  The three are played by former teen idol Jesse Bradford, Anthony Anderson of Black-ish, and comedian Zach Cregger.  I've seen a hundred pics of Bradford, and Anderson is a bit homophobic, so here's Cregger.

2014. Dads.  Two guys living together (one married, one single) are befuddled when their dads (not gay) both move in . Talk about strained premise.  The two guys are played by the cute but homophobic Seth Green, and the formerly cut but now sort of mousy Giovanni Ribisi.  Which to choose?

Ribisi has better abs.

More after the break

Grown-Ish: Black-ish Goes to College, and Meets Bisexuals

The sitcom Grown-ish (2018-) a spinoff of Black-ish, sends Zoe (Yara Shahidi) off to the mostly black-ish Cal University (shades of A Different World), where she makes an ethnically diverse group of friends, or as she calls them, "six losers who I normally never would have even spoke to."

1. The "woke" Aaron Jackson (Trevor Jackson)

2. The bisexual Jewish Nomi.

3. The Gujarati drug-dealing hunk-ish Vivek (Jordan Buhat)

4. The femme-ish stoner Luca (Luka Sabbat).

5-6. Sky and Jazz, twin track stars.


Zoe also bonds with her roommate, a conservative-ish Republican Catholic (but not homophobic) who feels harassed on the liberal campus and wants a "safe space" like the gays get.

There are plenty of other hunks around, like Diggy Simmons as Jazz's boyfriend.

And Deon Cole (left) as a business-ish professor of drones.

Episodes involve the standard classes, career aspirations, and romantic entanglements of the main characters, and of course especially Zoey, who juggles several guys before finally trying to decide between Aaron and Luca.

No gay characters, but an interesting story arc deals with biphobia, Nomi is with a female date when Big Dave (Barrett Carnahan) approaches to act flirt-ish with her.  She rebuffs him, but tells her date that she is bisexual, whereupon the woman becomes angry-ish, says she is not interested in being an "experiment," and tells her to call when she is over her "bisexual phase."

Nomi points out that it's not a phase, but the date still storms off in anger.

Cut to the righteous indignation. Nomi and her friends decide to hang out with Big Dave after all.

He states it's no big deal.  He's fooled around with guys, but that doesn't make him gay, right?

Um..double-takes.  Shock.

"I'm bi," he concludes.  Shock.  Everyone is uncomfortable-ish.  Even Nomi.

They get that bisexuality is not a phase -- with women.  But bisexual men?  Aren't they just fooling themselves?  Aren't they really just...gay?

Nomi starts to date him anyway, but by the next episode they've broken up.  She couldn't take it.  "I can't help feel it's different for guys and girls."

Even bisexuals can be biphobic-ish.

Herman's Head

Herman's Head (1991-94) was a Fox Sunday night show that aired after Married..with Children, so who was going to skip it?

Besides, it starred the amazingly cute William Ragsdale from Fright Night.  Coincidentally or not, his costar on Fright Night, Amanda Bearse, the most visible lesbian on tv before Ellen, was on Married...with Children.  And the cast included two of the voice actors from another Fox show, The Simpsons.

Besides, the phrase "Herman's Head" sounds dirty.

There were even some queer elements.

The premise: a young man negotiates the various crises of his job, his friends, and his hetero-romances.

The gimmick: we can see inside his mind, a room stocked with various memories, anxieties, and hopes, where four aspects of his personality argue over his various schemes.  Each is trying to one-up the other and steer Herman toward their preferred outcome.

1. Angel (Molly Hagan, right), his sensitive, emotional, feminine side, concerned with being a loving, caring human being.  And getting a girlfriend.

2. Animal (Ken Hudson Campbell, center), his drinking, belching, crude-joke-making side, concerned with partying.  And getting laid.

3. Genius (Peter Mackenzie, left), his logical, intellectual side, concerned with career advancement.

4. Wimp (Rick Lawless), his anxieties, concerned with hiding.

One wonders if the components of Herman's psyche also have sentient components in  their psyches, so it's little rooms full of arguing beings all the way down.

Occasionally other components appear, such as Jealousy (Bobcat Goldthwait).

God appears in the guise of Leslie Nielsen (well, what does your image of God look like?)

In the final episode, Herman is dying (1990s sitcoms often had tragic endings) and his soul makes an appearance to say goodbye to the components, as he is the only one who will live on.

Outside in the physical world, Herman's Head is a standard workplace sitcom.  There's his best buddy Jay (Hank Azaria), his crush Heddy (Jane Siebert), office drone Louise (Yeardley Smith), who is dating Jay, Mr. Bracken (Jason Bernard), the officious boss, and Mr. Crawford (Edward Winter).

A lot -- A LOT of attention is paid to Herman's love life.  He screws around more than Jerry Seinfeld, over on NBC: his amours include Heddy, Louise, Mr. Bracken's daughter, Mr. Bracken's niece, Crawford's girlfriend, two supermodels, a Playboy playmate, a rock star,  a female executive at the company, a female senator, a visiting princess, guest star Maureen McCormick, Eve (as in the Biblical Adam and Eve), and about a dozen regular girlfriends.

Come on, William Ragsdale isn't that cute.  But neither was Seinfeld.

No beefcake, no gay characters except for one of Herman's exes, now a lesbian who wants him to be a sperm donor.

But the fastidious Genius is gay-coded, and having a woman play part of Herman's psyche gave the show a queer feel.  It was rather fun to listen to Angel promoting various dating shenanigans:  "I want that woman.  I want that woman bad."

Not a bad way to spend the half hour of downtime between Married..with Children and bed.

See also: Married..with Children.

"Play by Play": Girls are the Meaning of Life, Yet Again

We've had nostalgia-trip tv series about the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, so I guess it's about time for a "coming of age" tv series about a heterosexual guy looking back on his childhood in the wonder years of the 1990s.

Play by Play (2017-), available on go90sports and the Complex Network, follows the adventures of  ESPN sportscaster Pete Hickey (voiced by series creator Kevin Jakubowski) as he looks back on his adolescent self (Reid Miller), a freshman at St. Roman High School in Des Moines, Iowa.

  He's got a former athletic superstar big brother (Tyler Emerson Crim), a doltish dad (Jonathan Bray), a best bud (Max Amor), The Girl of His Dreams (Elle Jo Trowbridge), and various friends, enemies, and teammates.

Plots include trying to get on the team, being bullied, getting his own room, joining crazy clubs to impress girls, trying to draw girls away from the crude jocks they're dating, first date, first kiss, girls! girls! girls!.  Which, as you know, is all every adolescent boy thinks of, every minute of every day.

The series shouts, loudly, that heterosexual desire and behavior is universal human experience, a boy's "coming of age" means becoming interested in girls, gay people absolutely, emphatically do not exist.



Pete enters his freshman year at a previously all-boy school, but now it admits girls.  So, according to a synopsis, "every sophomore, junior and senior at his school — all dudes — are gunning for the girls in his grade."

Every one, with no exceptions.  Not one boy in a hundred, not one in a thousand, not one in a million is gay.

In an interview, Jakubowski states that he had a similar experience when attending Fenwick High School, a selective Catholic school in ritzy Oak Park, Illinois:  the freshman class was the first to admit girls, so "every" older boy in the school was trying to date the freshmen girls, leaving "all" of the freshman boys in the dust.

Not one of them was gay.

Um...Kevin, your heterosexism is showing.  I know for a fact that there were gay people in Oak Park, Illinois in the 1990s.  And today Fenwick High School has an Equality Club, "empowering marginalized groups of people such as women, the LGBTQ community, African Americans, and other minorities."

For a show about sports, there's surprisingly little beefcake: no locker room scenes, everyone wears uniforms to class, big brother wears a bathrobe at all times. I could find beefcake photos of only two minor cast members, Aiden Alexander (above) and Ben Getz (left).

But I wasn't looking very hard. I was busy thinking back to my high school experience in the 1970s, where preachers, teachers, parents, and peers were constantly screaming at me "What girl do you like?  What girl do you like?  What girl?  What girl?  What girl?"

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même.