The Rare Thing I’ll Sign Onto Sight Unseen

I have absolutely no idea what Russell T. Davies’ new project for Showtime is about other than that it’s called Cucumber and it’s about gay men, but I’m pretty much prepared to be excited about it on that basis alone. Davies can be wildly uneven, as I think Torchwood indicates (though tune in for Miracle Day, about which I will write much, much more tomorrow — it’s an astonishingly political show and very, very interesting). But Queer as Folk was a genuine accomplishment and a truly important creation, even if it became a more extensive franchise in the U.S. than the 10 episodes that aired in the U.K. Davies, of course, has gone on to create a lot of shows with gay and bisexual characters fairly seamlessly integrated into the mix, but if he’s planning to tackle a subsequent generation of gay life, Cucumber could be not just representationally useful, in that it’ll get more gay characters on screen, but important in a zeitgeisty kind of way, something that’s got a bit more pop than the portrayal of placid gay monogamy on Modern Family. And yeah, it’ll probably conflict with his Game of Thrones commitments, but man would I love to see some premium cable network find a great, juicy starring role to give Aidan Gillen — it’d be cool to see him reprise familiar territory more than a decade later.