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Appointment Viewing: The shows you’ll always want to pencil in on your calendar and unpack in your group chat.
Scrolling through 12 streaming platforms but still can’t find something to watch? You’re not alone. Our television columnist, Michel Ghanem, a.k.a. @tvscholar, watches over 160 seasons of television each year, and he is here for you. Perhaps you’re in the mood for a hidden gem sitting undiscovered on a streamer, or a show with mysteries so tantalizing we can’t stop thinking about it. It’s all about carving out time for the shows that are actually worth your time, or “appointment viewing.” Fire up that group chat because we’ve got some unpacking to do.
So far this year, we’ve covered everything from Adult Swim’s Common Side Effects, a compelling animated thriller, to Netflix’s Forever, a charming teen drama. This Pride month, we’re rounding up our favorite queer shows from the last few months to add to your summer rotation — from Michelle Buteau’s excellent Netflix comedy Survival of the Thickest to Hulu’s Mid-Century Modern, an old-school sitcom with a contemporary spin.
Adults (FX/Hulu)
Remember shows about 20-something groups of friends navigating the misadventures of being broke college graduates? Well, they’re back. Prime Video’s Overcompensating is a recent highlight, but FX’s Adults may be kicking off the renaissance of a comedy subgenre that had quietly faded away after shows about millennials like Girls, Search Party, and Insecure went off the air. Adults follows five Gen-Z roommates freeloading at Samir’s (Malik Elassal) parents’ house while they navigate the ups and downs of funemployment, dating, and dinner parties with Julia Fox.
Adults is something like Friends for a new generation with a whole new set of inside jokes (“mind wipe?”). Anton (Owen Thiele) as the queer housemate is a definite highlight — one episode explores his ability to befriend literally anyone. The season ends on a very queer note, too, that sees a possible unlikely pairing hinted at throughout the show. We hope there are 12 seasons.
Mid-Century Modern (Hulu)
As the title suggests, Mid-Century Modern is a reimagining of a classic television format. Think Golden Girls but for the Grindr era, laugh track and all. Here we follow three older gay best friends (played by Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, and Nathan Lee Graham) as they navigate being “of a certain age” while living together in Palm Springs following the unexpected death of a mutual friend.
Expect many punch lines, but some of the best one-liners are delivered by Linda Lavin (as Lane’s mother), who passed away during filming. The three friends are also joined by Lane’s sister, played by Pamela Adlon. The 20-minute episodes are easy watching for a summer binge — and we’re hoping for a second-season renewal any day now.
Mr Loverman (Britbox)
After recently winning Royal Television Society and BAFTA awards, Mr. Loverman is finally streaming on Britbox Stateside. The half-hour drama is an adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s 2013 novel of the same name and stars Lennie James as Barrington, a 70-something Afro Caribbean immigrant living in Hackney, London, whose affair with his best friend, Morris (Ariyon Bakare), has been concealed for decades from his wife and daughter.
As his marriage unravels, Barrington is forced to confront his intersecting identities and beliefs within a religious community that isn’t the most tolerant to queer people and the truth he’s been keeping from his family. James is fantastic as always, playing Barrington with both flamboyance and a deep, wounded vulnerability we experience through his internal monologue voice-over. It’s a moving watch over eight episodes with a series of flashbacks to various points in Barrington and Morris’s relationship — I couldn’t look away.
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Settle Down (OutTV)
Settle Down is a hidden gem that follows Mason (Alexander Nunez, who wrote and stars), a gay Toronto-based relationship podcaster in a rocky marriage who moonlights as a queer matchmaker on the side. Naturally, his clients end up informing not only the themes he explores in his podcast, but the issues he’s grappling with in his relationship like infidelity, jealousy, and open relationships. Like Otis on Sex Education, he’s often better at dishing out advice than applying it to his own situation.
Mason’s misadventures are fun to watch, but the show is rounded out by his friends — Ben (Izad Etemadi), who’s trying to navigate an open relationship of his own, in addition to Devon (Nadine Bhabha) and Georgia (Tymika Tafari), who work at the podcast and strike up an unexpected flirtation. Settle Down is a promising six-episode comedy that has begun filling the Sort Of–shaped void in my heart, and it also establishes OutTV as a network to watch in its production of solid queer-scripted originals.
Survival of the Thickest (Netflix)
Survival of the Thickest is a tale of reinventions and self-discovery. Michelle Buteau’s underrated comedy finds Mavis Beaumont (Buteau) starting over in her late 30s after a rough breakup and a new inspiration to pursue styling and advocating for size diversity in the New York City fashion scene. Although Mavis is definitely the protagonist, her best friends are going through their own reinvention — namely Marley (Tasha Smith), who in therapy realizes the fluidity of her sexuality and begins exploring dating women through the first and second seasons.
It’s generally a show with a very queer sensibility: Drag icon Peppermint plays a fictionalized version of herself; Mavis and her crew spend most of their time hanging out at a gay bar; and ex–Real Housewife Garcelle Beauvais recurs as a retired supermodel. The comedy is set to return for a third and final season, but I would personally watch these characters figure out themselves and their lives for as long as they’d let me.
Lost Boys and Fairies (Britbox)
This may be the most touching show I’ve ever watched about a gay couple navigating the adoption of their first child. For Gabriel (Siôn Daniel Young) and Andy (Fra Free) in Wales, becoming parents is an unearthing of a whole past life of trauma rooted in their identities. With the gentle help of their social worker (Elizabeth Berrington), Gabriel revisits how his queerness was suppressed in his childhood and how it impacts his current relationship with his father, while simultaneously trying to carve out the idea of what kind of parent he hopes to become and what he has the capacity for after years fraught with addiction.
Lost Boys and Fairies is not an easy watch, and halfway through the three-episode miniseries sees a traumatic turn for the couple that doesn’t bode well for the history of gay trauma on television, but it’s a powerful and memorable watching experience with standout performances.
