Queer as Folk US v Queer as Folk UK FITE

This gives me an idea for a laff-a-minute sitcom about the romantic entaglements of older, hairy guys with beer bellys.

well, it was a bit much coming from that twunt Callow wasn't it?

PA is the reason I had to stop watching American Idol. She is so saccharine and fake, the only reason she has nice things to say about everyone is because she knows even the worst singers in the competition have more ability than she did.

Vince=Michael=irritating

young boy in brit= hotter than Justin but now I'm watching the second US series and I'm becoming more charmed by his awesome smile.

Ted annoying, but when he's in this music video and being himself ( i.e. Better hair he is surprisingly hottt.

Emmett& UK Emmett ...BOTH GROUSE.

Debbie Roooooooools.

I don't often say this but the american is so much better, less realistic, way glamourererer.. and Babylon..

u r all gay.

NOT REALLY OF COURSE, the british version will still never happen.

is this the best place to discuss it's a sin

I have takes but I'd rather hear other people's takes

The mother is treated appallingly by RTD. It's simply not the case that Richie's death is her fault in any way. Not only that though, doesn't Jill go on to blame her for the deaths of all the young men, by proxy? I won't watch it again to confirm but this seems extremely unpleasant, to me. As for Jill, she has no sexual relationships, no desires - in a show about sexuality we don't even get to find out what hers is. I was going to write that she doesn't even have a family but I wrote that somewhere else and was corrected - apparently, her mother and father are in eps 5&6 but you only find that out if you've read about it, afaict, and only because the person Jill is based on acts in the role of Jill's mother. The one legitimately moving moment is the death of Colin at the end of episode three, which is powerful. Much of it seems so unreal that it's hard to get very emotionally invested in it.

i watched one episode and it was so boring. it didn't feel like it was about any of the things it was putatively about (being young, being gay, living in london). the sex scenes in particular are so dreary, the approach to costume is that people have stiff hair. everything looks like a set. the lighting is wrong. everyone is too clean. it looks like it was filmed literally anywhere. nobody seems like a real character, its about as relatable as a john lewis christmas ad. everyone sounds too modern. the older tailor in the episode i saw had a terrible english accent, i kept waiting for it to be a gag about how it was a made up accent but then he just died so i guess we were supposed to believe he was really a london tailor idk. i kept forgetting it was on and like getting up to empty the dishwasher etc.

also the depiction of the african family in the first episode was more racist than i expected from a bbc comedy and i dont expect much

I agree with most of that but still watched to the end ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ha, I was just saying how good it was, my favourite thing he's done for a long time, can see the truth in many of the criticisms above but felt it really painted such a vivid picture of time / place (however accurate that was, I wasn't there) and I thought the two set pieces, the aids-denial speech montage in E2 and the long scene with the mother in the hospital in E5 were excellent. I did think the mother was genuinely awful too.

The mother is treated appallingly by RTD. It's simply not the case that Richie's death is her fault in any way. Not only that though, doesn't Jill go on to blame her for the deaths of all the young men, by proxy? I won't watch it again to confirm but this seems extremely unpleasant, to me.

the really gnarly stuff like this was what I found most compelling. It made perfect sense to me that someone in Jill's position - someone who had just been viciously denied the opportunity to say goodbye to a loved one - would lash out in the cruelest terms possible. in general I felt like the last 2 episodes lingered in some quite difficult emotional dynamics that don't really have any resolution

re: Jill, her lack of a "life" beyond work, activism, and providing emotional support to the gay men in her life, seems in line with RTD's description of her real-life inspiration(s) and tbh it seemed credible to me that people genuinely lived that way. I did like that the mom threw it in her face in the last episode, because of course other people would try to use that as a cudgel.

and in general I really liked the sense that (aside from a few characters), we're just getting these tiny little glimpses into people's lives. (of course this was also a necessity of the short episode order, I imagine)

I liked how Ritchie was a bit homophobic, it was well signposted without ever being hammered at. There were fewer mawkish / melodramatic scenes than usual, the only one I remember was the protest.

oh I guess the Stephen Fry scenes were complete fanservice and not of the good sort.

"t felt it really painted such a vivid picture of time / place (however accurate that was, I wasn't there)" i am baffled by this, it feels like its shot on sets that could be anywhere. the saville row tailor for instance. you could guess where certain things were supposed to be, like i assume they lived in kings crosss and the pub they were always at was the bell and that the hospital in the first episode was the royal london. i know london is hard to get on film but i didn't get any sense of anyone attempting this.

also a big fan of shows where characters' behavior is sometimes not so great but we're permitted to note that and judge for ourselves like adults. (I do think including/depicting the scene of ritchie's mother hearing and purposely ignoring his request was one step too far perhaps)

xp I don't mean in terms of cinematography, which was nothing special, but the writing/performances

was collin played by steve coogan's son

The mother is treated appallingly by RTD.

Is this the first thing you have ever seen by RTD?

a necessity of the short episode order, I imagine

Yeah, he initially tried to sell it years ago as an ongoing series (and wanted a three-season commitment to plan for being able to cover the character arcs). Repitched it as eight this time and could only get a four-episode commission, and begged C4 up to a fifth by giving them a fake upbeat plot.

know london is hard to get on film but i didn't get any sense of anyone attempting this.

I assumed it was hard to get London looking like eg 1982 and they didn’t have the budget to dress locations as various changing years, so deliberately wrote mostly interiors

even so, just things like them all having hot water to have a shower one after another in the first episode. it just doesn't have a ring of truth or the feel of life.

at the least we can all agree the stephen root stuff was awful

was impressed that he managed to pull off an English accent so well

Agree with criticisms but enjoyed this a lot. I grew up in early 1980s London and it had the right impressionistic feel - I liked that, at the edges, you could tell everywhere was a grubby shithole, but you wouldn't expect the characters to notice.

The timeline didn't really ring true for me - they're living together, what, 7 or 8 years? That didn't seem plausible and the way the characters change over time (i.e. not at all) felt very, very underworked.

Desperately wanted Keeley Hawes off the screen in the last episode - Russell Davies seemed to be doing such a good job of keeping his usual cliches in check for the first four episodes, then we got charisma-free Jackie Tyler redux hogging the screen for half an hour - just awful.

I dug the energy of it all, though. Insanely watchable.

He said the other day that if he'd had eight episodes, there would have been a fifth flatmate to follow, and the final would have jumped ahead to the surviving characters in middle age. Jill still involved in mental and sexual health, with the suggestion that she inadvertently trapped herself by pouring so much of her young energy into the field on a personal level. On an unplanned return to the Isle Of Wight for work, Ritchie's mum would (now in a care home) open up about the implied-in-the-series abuse that shaped her adult attitude to sexuality.

And she'd meet up with Roscoe after a couple of decades, and find that he'd contracted the virus at 50.

The ratings have been good/great, right? I have to imagine it fared better than Cucumber, which I sort of loved but I imagine turned a lot of people off with its multiseries conections and bougie sourpuss protagonist.

Ratings have been v good, and HIV testing rates tripled in the weeks after broadcast.

that and once more proving how thickheaded UK broadcasters are makes the whole project worthwhile imo

I'm glad someone somewhere must be kicking themselves for not commissioning more episodes.

That said, as a viewer, a mini-series that's just 5 x 45 min episodes = ideal. Lack of bloat is good.

yup

Is this the first thing you have ever seen by RTD?

QAF twenty years ago, or whenever it was, is the only other thing I've seen, I think.

Most of the things that would have happened in the 8 episode version sic mentioned seem, potentially, terrible. It does make me wonder why, if he had that arc planned out for the mother in the lonher version he made her so cunty in the 5 episode version. Wouldn't you couch it a little, in a rewrite? I don't think I like RTD or the person who directed this. I'm also thinking about how bad the ageing makeup would have been in the longer version.

Who is Stephen Root?

sorry wrong Stephen, apologies to the excellent American comic and character actor

re: Jill, her lack of a "life" beyond work, activism, and providing emotional support to the gay men in her life, seems in line with RTD's description of her real-life inspiration(s)

Not buying this, Simon.

ok