“Queer as Folk” is supposed to be a wild, fun, exhilarating peek into a tight-knit queer community in New Orleans. Then there’s a shooting at a gay nightclub.
The Peacock series, which premiered Thursday and is labeled as a “reimagining” of Russell T. Davies’ original British show, draws almost immediately from the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that left 49 people dead. For showrunner Stephen Dunn, showing the reality of this world was the only way to keep the authenticity he strove for.
“This isn’t a show about a shooting. This isn’t a show about a shooter,” Dunn told the Daily News.
“But what I learned from going to Orlando and meeting some of the survivors was seeing how the community came together, the support that happened after that. It was so inspiring and it gave me hope. I wanted to honor those experiences by making the show in an authentic way and figure out how to rebuild in a way that’s bigger, better, safer and more inclusive than the spaces that existed before it.”
“Queer as Folk’s” New Orleans rebuilds after the shooting in peaks and valleys. The almost daily funerals are turned into celebrations, because the alternative, the grief, is too overwhelming. If you don’t swim, you drown.
“So many times when tragedies occur, we just focus on the bad thing,” Devin Way, who plays the floundering medical school dropout Brodie, told The News. “We don’t focus on the people and their lives after the fact, in the aftermath. It was super important to me to focus on the healing and who these people become through their emergence.
None of that is to say that the show forgets about the shooting; the horrors of that night ripple out all season through the entire community, not just the survivors. But it doesn’t get mired in the misery. They go back to work and school. The reporters leave town. The crime scene tape disappears. The party starts again. Life goes on.
“In ‘Queer as Folk,’ we’re into all types of porn,” writer and co-executive producer Ryan O’Connell, who also stars as Julian, told The News, “except for trauma porn.”
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