Doris Highlight of the Week: Miming fellatio to suggest it should be one of Murray’s Kickstarter incentives.
No Actual Gay Guy Would Say That: Richie calls Patrick a “homewrecker” for having sex with Kevin while the latter is still in a relationship. Why not call him a “harlot” or “wicked Jezebel!?"
Best Gratuitous Pectorals: When Dom stops by Lynn’s house unannounced while Lynn just so happens to be in the hot tub and just so happens to send his smoking hot friend Matthew to answer the door.
Wink-Wink Meta Moment: “All these people posting about Esta Noche. They’re so right. San Francisco is so over.” — Patrick
Best Hyper-Real Location: The late Esta Noche once more, bursting with drag queens and a nerdy writer with a ginger beard who writes “gay stuff” for SF Weekly.
After taking a week off out of respect for Katy Perry's concert, Looking picked up right where the last episode ended. Beyond all the labored angst surrounding Patrick and Kevin’s burgeoning relationship (and Dom and Lynn’s too), this episode is full of dialogue meant to telegraph that the characters really get San Francisco, hype and all. Naturally, Patrick makes fun of the 45-minute line at Bi-Rite. Suck on that, salted caramel.
Locations are, as ever, paramount. A shot of the F-Market passing the Noe Street Farmers Market is very nice. Besides that valediction to the late Esta Noche, we see that Eddie lives in the Tendernob and Lynn lives near Buena Vista Park — impressive for a florist, especially since he has that swank house in Guerneville too.
While the characters seem to sit on countertops an awful lot, the real problem with the show’s feverish verisimilitude (and it’s hardly unique to Looking) is the lack of everyday tech use. Patrick wouldn’t attempt a painful “let’s be friends” chat on a bench in Dolores Park; he’d send Richie a friend request and agonize over how long it took to be accepted. He wouldn’t call Agustin to whine; they’d be texting emoji. Nobody calls their friends before noon, under any circumstances, ever. Phone calls are the new letter writing.
Really, if you want to make a show about the travails of being gay in San Francisco, it should be all about the non-committal answers, dating profile bullshit, and generalized anxiety that online interactions instill in us. But then viewers would be staring at screens onscreen, and Looking’s cinematography is too beautiful to sacrifice to that.
Then it’s over, another 28 interstitial minutes that would be better suited as two episodes combined into an hour. For a show with no opening credits whatsoever, they do a consistently bang-up job of finding exactly the right moody electronica to close on though. Just hurry up with the chicken place already, Murray.
Photo courtesy of HBO
Peter recaps Looking every Monday. Find his episode 3 recap here.
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