Seeing your home city portrayed on screen is kinda like watching a boyfriend's new band get on stage. You hope for the best, but you're pretty much prepared to be mortified. So far, I've been mortified (see: Betas, Amazon's startup "comedy" so unlikeable and unbelievable I could only cringe my way through one full episode). But HBO's Looking, which premieres this Sunday, Jan. 19, makes me want to howl my applause. It's the first show I've seen about San Francisco that really gets this city, and delivers our 20- and 30-something culture to the world like a rockstar. It's about a city – and romantic partnerships – in transition, and feels very much of this moment.
The jokes are right on. Looking centers on three main characters – Patrick, Agustin, and Dom – all gay men, who work in the tech, art, and service industry, respectively. Their frustrations with and wisecracks about their lives are impressively timely. In the opening episode, Dom, a waiter at Zuni, gets attitude about the wine being served from a bossy tech exec. He bitches to a coworker about "tech guys," adding that he's had to deal with their shit since the first dot-com bubble. (But it's not all tech-bashing: Looking also shows a non-obnoxious side of the industry through Patrick, who works for a gaming company, when he's not surfing OkCupid for dates).
Moving to Oakland is another plot line, as Agustin, an artist, decides to shack up with his musician boyfriend Frank, who lives on the other side of the Bay. As Dom and Patrick move him out of SF, Agustin playfully rails on San Francisco (basically our fancy street eats and how hard it has been to get stuff done here compared to Oakland) as justification for leaving the place he loves. Then Dom stops him: "Oh, so the whole city is to blame for your laziness?" Touche.
On a more serious note, Looking is unafraid of addressing race issues. Unlike HBO's other hip dramedy about dating, Girls, Looking offers a diverse cast from the start. Although there could be more lesbian and transgender people on the show – characters that co-executive producer Michael Lannan hinted could be in future episodes during Looking's world premiere last night at the Castro Theatre. But this show presents more than a white guy's take on the city, and the awkwardness of meeting, dating, and understanding people of different backgrounds is a big theme here. When Patrick gets picked up by a cutie Latino dude, his belief in rampant Internet stereotypes about Latinos becomes a total boner kill. Lannan told the Castro crowd that Looking will continue addressing generalizations about race, economic status, and cultural backgrounds as a running plot theme.
Speaking of stereotypes, Looking avoids them. I'm getting tired of shows about dating and friendship where the characters are batshit neurotic. It happened with Sex and the City, and it happens with Girls, as much as I've liked those shows. I've watched the first four episodes of Looking, and the hangups these men have feel very real rather than hyper-anxious versions of the single people we know. These guys are working their way through dating, purging exes, and figuring out monogamy in very real ways. They feel like people you'd want to be friends with, or who you already know, rather than guys whose personality traits have been ballooned out too far.
The city details are right on. When you're watching your city through a Hollywood lens, it's easy to pick on what's missing. But with Looking, I'm excited about what's been included. The characters drink at Esta Noche and El Rio and Doc's Clock. They go to the Folsom Street Fair. They have a FasTrak transponder on their car. (They even sport a shirt from my friend's StudioNico line, which you can see a 1:08 mins into the trailer). Patrick lives in the Lower Haight and they walk past the sign for the Peacock Lounge. You see the characters on Muni, both the buses and underground. Even the camerawork has the right San Francisco look – Looking has a very cinematic feel, a very Instagram-like sheen.
Age means nothing here. The main characters are between 29 and 39, but those numbers mean little when it comes to sex and friendship. That also feels very San Francisco to me, a city where, through either arrested development or staying forever young, our birth years all meld together. We end up hanging out with and sleeping with people a decade older or younger than ourselves without so much as an afterthought.
So yeah, if you couldn't tell already, I love Looking from the four episodes I've seen already. I love seeing current San Francisco themes portrayed so well, watching characters so likable and so funny, and noting my haunts captured on camera. And from all the praise being given during the Q&A with the cast last night, it looks like I'm not the only one with warm feelings for the show.
One big thing missing, though: In a program about gay men, where are the full frontal scenes? As one audience member put it, HBO has no problem with full frontal when it comes to women. Lannan answered that question by smiling gamely and answering that we'll just have to watch Looking and see.
Looking's Dom (Murray Bartlett), Patrick (Jonathan Groff), and Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez); photo courtesy of HBO