When HBO's honchos decided to cancel Looking after the show's second season last year, they greenlit a wrap-up movie that would, fans were promised, tie up any loose ends. That film premiered on the network on July 23, offering a warm, if at times hurried, goodbye to the show and what has come to be acknowledged as its stridently post-gay sensibility.
As the film begins, we meet the show's protagonist, Patrick, played by Jonathan Groff, returning to San Francisco for the wedding of his friend Agustin (Frankie Alvarez) to Eddie (Daniel Franzese). For the past year, Patrick has been living in Denver, working, as he did back in the Bay Area, for a gaming company (the show has always tipped its hat to San Francisco's reigning sub-cultures). The move was occasioned by his breaking up with Kevin (Russell Tovey), his boss at the time. There is also his unsettled story with Richie (Raul Castillo), the gentle barber with whom Patrick was in a brief relationship before Kevin. The show, which had its first season run in 2014, centres on three friends, including, apart from Patrick and Agustin, Dom, a chef (Murray Bartlett). The three men go back a long way, and their friendship, with its shared secrets and come-what-may endurance, is the principal theme of Looking. Even in the San Francisco of today, homosexuality remains an essentially lonely enterprise. While sex is readily on offer, love - of the sort that lasts and gives strength - is in short supply. It is in friendship that these men have found a community.
The movie endorses the changes that were introduced in Season 2. Agustin has transformed from a foul-mouthed boy-man to a congenial advocate for commitment. Dom, the eldest and the most level-headed of the three, has opened his own restaurant. It is Patrick whose story is the most in need of resolution. Is he, as Kevin says, a coward who runs away from people and situations, or is he a dreamer who lives in hope that the love he so easily imagines will come to him with fewer troubles than has been his fate?
Groff, who is the most recognisable face in the cast, embodies Patrick perfectly. He exudes a radiance that infuses his character with a touch of everyday magic leavened with a pleasing vulnerability. Over the course of the show, Patrick has often behaved against his own best interests, but refracted through Groff's performance, those decisions come across not as blunders but as milestones to a wiser, more-evolved Patrick.
The film's embrace of wisdom goes beyond its characters' passage through time. For all the show's erstwhile slights at settling down and other orthodox notions, the concluding film revolves around a gay marriage. A pregnancy is announced, and for the three friends, a sort of coming to terms with this thing called life is finally reached. The heady excitement of younger certainties has transmuted into the sombre realisation that perhaps happiness is less a glorious destination than a bittersweet journey.
Andrew Haigh, who made the 2011 gay classic Weekend, helmed the show along with creator Michael Lannan. When the decision to cancel Looking was announced, opinion was divided even within the gay community. Some critics found the series lacking in action. Others took umbrage at its lack of sexual diversity - only G from the umbrella term LGBT finds representation.
Even so, the criticism directed at the show is unearned. Looking, like other works by Haigh, feels more like a book than a television show. It leaves a lot unsaid - often the spry, irony-filled conversations hide more than they reveal. Yet, the show's territory - both its West Coast setting and the interior lives of its characters - is rich and varied, enticing the viewer to lose himself in its unhurried universe. Its ability to simulate a literary quality, without possessing the author's advantage of explicitly enunciating his characters' motivations, is down both to the brilliance of the cast and to Haigh's unstinting vision.
It is true that Looking, like some other shows such as the New York-based Outs, situates itself in a zeitgeist that is instantly recognisable only to a certain demographic in the West. But that is no reason to call the show's authenticity into question. If anything, by presenting the after-effects of the battle for equality, Looking and its cohorts offer a peek into a future that the LGBT community has long dreamt for itself.
The film ends on the night of Agustin and Eddie's marriage. The gang meets at a nightclub, where they celebrate a union whose legality was denied to them not long ago. As Patrick, Agustin, Dom and the others dance and make merry, they revisit the promise of the nightclub to the gay man, a promise broken so tragically in Orlando recently.
Maybe Looking is not post-gay after all. How can any show, even one as comfortable in its skin as Looking, be in these violent times? Its place in the gay canon will be debated for a long time to come, but those arguments elide a more fundamental truth. The show's appeal is not ideological but aesthetic. By being fiercely apolitical, Looking gave us a peek into the splendidly ordinary lives that gay men and women can build for themselves when they are allowed the space to do so.
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