QAF & 6 Ft. Under

Tonight was the final episode after 5 seasons of Queer as Folk, preceded by a half hour of interviews and goodbyes by the cast. I will miss this show tremendously. It was a ground-breaking series that showed gay people as having real lives--love lives, sex lives, emotional lives, work lives, family lives, relationships, friendships...you know--like straight people. There was graphic sex, which shocked people, but if put up against some daytime soap operas or evening sitcoms or dramas was no more or no less shocking--merely involving same, rather than opposite genders.

In the last 2 seasons, the show has gotten more pointedly political, laying it on rather heavily (for their straight audience, I suspect) about the groups that are trying to deprive the gay community of equal rights and remove from them all the hard-won rights they now have.

I was kind of afraid that they would wrap things up in a nice neat little package, with everyone living happily ever after, they way you would expect on a final episode of a straight drama, but the final episode kept you guessing to the end, and went out in a way that was 100% appropriate for a gay audience.

It was really a good show, and I will miss it.

Then I watched Six Feet Under, Nate's funeral. How many times does a major show kill off one of its lead characters (except on The Sopranos). There was one scene that did me in. Nate is laid out on the table in the morgue while his brother is washing the body and his mother comes in and approaches the body, gingerly beginning to stroke his hair. It was exactly what I did after Paul died and I said goodbye to him in the emergency room. The whole scene had me sobbing.