"Odd Squad": Any Gay Texts, Subtexts, or Beefcake in the Long-Running PBS Kids Show?

 

I was asked to review Odd Squad, on PBS, about a group of little-kid secret agents assigned to "odd" cases like hiccups that make things explode, while teaching us math and science.  In the first episode, for instance, the agents handle a case about vanishing zeros: 1000 wads of gum turn into 1 wad, and hot chocolate goes for 5 cents, not 50 cents.  Agent Otto is turning 10 tomorrow; if they don't stop the vanishing, he'll turn 1!  This crisis allows us to learn about the use of 0 as a decimal marker.   

I already know about the use of 0 as a decimal marker, and the mystery was a bit elementary for an adult viewer, so I won't become a regular viewer.  But I was promised gay content.

1. Beefcake?  Not among the agents, of course, but the show has been around for eight years, so some of the kids have grown up.  Isaac Kragten (top photo), who played Agent Otis, is now a bona fide hunk.  Plus there are some adults around, such as Farid Yazdani (left) as the villainous Freeze Ray Ray.

2. Gay characters?  According to TV Tropes, Orla is presented as gay by a Oddtube episode where she has "rainbow-itis,"  She is also shown in an intro with "bisexual lighting," whatever that is.

In Season 3, Episode 22, we are introduced to the head of the Seattle Agency, the swishy, purple-eyelashed, show tune-loving Mr. O (Nico Cecci, who is gay in real life, according to TV Tropes).

A fan discussion claims that an agent named Zack has gay parents, as revealed in the episode "Parent Swap," but I find no other evidence.

There is also apparently a Season 3 episode set at a gay wedding.

3. Pre-teen gay subtexts?  The central characters in Season 1 are a male-female Muller and Scully, Olive and Otto.  Amazon Prime won't let me see the other seasons, but it looks like they are replaced by another male-female pair in Season #2.  Season #3 features four agents.  Maybe Omar and Oswald (Jayce Alexander, Gavin MacIver-Wright) have a gay-subtext buddy bond in spite of their obvious difference in age and maturity.  

4. Gay actors?  Veteran Kids in the Hall actor Scott Thompson plays a villain.   In a Season 3 episode, the agents encounter a shushing librarian, Octavius, played by the now-15 year old Keegan Hedley.  Keegan, best known for Paw Patrol and Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, is gay in real life.  But he only appears in Odd Squad for about 30 seconds.

Ghostwriter: Urban Teen Muscle

If you were a kid in the early 1990s -- or even if you were an adult -- you probably watched Ghostwriter (1992-95), the best PBS series of all time.  Instead of the raucous muppets of Sesame Street or the conflict-less Mr. Rogers, it had a group of multi-ethnic kids solving mysteries in a rather realistic Brooklyn,New York. Sort of like the 1990s version of The Electric Company, but here the problems were grittier: gangs, kidnappings, drugs, arsonists, corruption, and even divorce.

Their benefactor was Ghostwriter, a being who manifested to Jamal (Sheldon Turnipseed) one night.  Invisible, unable to speak, he communicated by rearranging letters on signs, in books, even in sentences the kids wrote down.

At first he didn't know who or what he was -- a ghost, an earthbound spirit, an alien -- but gradually he remembered a few things: he was the ghost of a man,  he lived over 100 years ago, and he didn't like the sound of dogs barking.

The Ghostwriter team consisted of  three boys and three girls, all in late childhood or early adolescence:

1. Jamal
2. Alex (David Lopez)
3. Rob (Todd Alexander Cohen), replaced by Hector (William Hernandez).
4. Lenni (Blaze Berdahl)
5. Gaby (Mayteana Morales, Melissa Gonzales)
6. Tina (Tram-Anh Trang)

Alex and Tina commence a hetero-romantic relationship, but none of the other characters express any heterosexual interest.

There is significant buddy-bonding between Jamal and Hector, however, and beefcake, as Jamal begins to noticeably bulk up, providing teenage muscle that is rare for children's programming.

William Hernandez is gay, and the only one of the boys still involved in acting. He appeared as himself on MTV's The Real World (2004-2005) and later appeared in the gay comedy A Four Letter Word (2007).

David Lopez attended Rutgers, and upon graduating moved back to Colombia.

Todd Alexander and Sheldon Turnipseed attended NYU together.  Both seem to have dropped off the map.

The biggest mystery -- who was Ghostwriter? -- was never revealed during the series.

But 20 years later, in a March 2013 article, writer Kermit Frazier tells us: he was a runaway slave who was teaching other slaves to read in the woods, when he was killed by slave catchers and their dogs.  His spirit was trapped in the book that Jamal found.