Summer TV is slipping away, friends. Soon we’ll be back in the weird embrace of broadcast network television. I’ve got a preview coming for you next week. There’s still a few weeks left of this gloriously gay summer, though. Valerie Anne recapped Wynonna Earp this week and also the Orphan Black series finale (*sniffle*). Kayla recapped The Bold Type. And all of our staff writers weighed in on the lesbian sex scenes that changed their lives. Here’s what else!
Younger
Younger is so good this year, y’all. I usually don’t care about straight people’s romances on TV but I’m really into the whole Liza/Josh/Richard thing. They’re both excellent dudes. No man is good enough for Sutton Foster but Liza seems so monumentally un-queer I can’t begrudge them both being in love with her. I also think Younger’s done a much better job integrating Maggie into the larger story this season and I hope very much that if I keep saying she’s going to meet Diana that she’ll meet Diana.
This week Maggie and Liza get some new upstairs neighbors, a gay couple who keeps chickens on the roof for their new farm-to-table restaurant that’s taking Williamsburg by storm. To make up for the crowing noises they invite Maggie and Liza to dinner at their restaurant, fawning over them when they arrive and setting them up with whatever the chef recommends. In between their many courses, Maggie tells a story to Liza about gelato and pubic hair that I don’t really understand but maybe the point is you gotta take the good with the bad?
Because Jessica Stein is back and her book is really good but Richard doesn’t want to publish it. In fact, he wants to have some lawyers shut her down. Maggie convinces him to have dinner with Jessica Stein, which he does, while she babysits, and it’s fine; they work everything out. Liza agrees to edit Jessica Stein’s book and she’s happy about it and also happy that she thinks she has a chance to win back Richard. Even though Richard tells Liza he only has eyes for her.
The gay guys with the farm-to-table restaurant leave Maggie and Liza with a $500 bill so Maggie steals their chickens and cooks them. JK, she calls the health department and punks them with a chicken from Whole Foods. Liza flops against the counter and says, “Maggie, I love you.” And reader, I do too.
Doubt
Written by Natalie
When Doubt concluded its run on Saturday night, Sadie’s just discovered that her fiance—the man she loves, the man she risked everything for—has been lying to her and may have murdered his teenage girlfriend. Nick’s had happiness, in his career and personal life (a romance with his co-worker, Tiffany), slip right through his fingertips, when’s he’s arrested for, essentially, not snitching while in prison. Isaiah mortgaged his firm for Nick’s bail and Albert is forced to leave the firm in order to defend his colleague. Everyone’s future is in doubt (pun intended).
And then, there’s Cameron Wirth…who ends the season in a committed relationship with Peter, a man who affirms her and his love for her privately and publicly and a man who would walk away from his dream job because she is the dream that truly matters.
In the show’s final episodes, another assistant district attorney, Krista Reed (Trisha LaFache), fills Peter in on some office rumors. His chances of becoming Interim District Attorney have dwindled because people in the office—people who were having fun with Cameron just the night before—think that Peter’s relationship with Cam is a liability in an election. He doesn’t have to stop dating her, Krista advises, just be more discreet. She even volunteers to spread the rumor that he and Cameron are just friends.
To his credit, Peter refuses. He plays it off during dinner with Cameron, saying that he’d rather spend his time in the courtroom, than deal with the politics of a DA appointment, but she sees through him. Cameron urges Peter to rethink his decision—”There’s nothing going on here except you backing down from a fight”—but he, again, refuses.
“Maybe I’m not backing down from a fight, okay? Maybe this is me, happier than I’ve ever been, realizing that I don’t want a life of compromise and backroom politics. Because that’s what a district attorney is,” Peter says, in an effort to convince himself and Cameron that giving up is the right choice. “I got a great job that I love, I got a hot girlfriend, and I got a bowl of pasta. I’m good.”
Later, Cameron urges Peter to think about the future…if at some point down the road, after they’ve broken up, he’ll regret not having taken a shot at the DA’s office because of her. He rejects the premise of her question because they’re not going to break-up. He’s in this relationship because he wants to build a life with her.
The look that flashes on Cameron’s face when Peter says he wants to build a life with her is priceless. It’s brief and it goes unacknowledged in the episode, but it spoke volumes. Ever the lawyer, Cameron pivots to the possibility that he might one day resent her for standing in the way of his dream job and to avoid that, maybe breaking up is the better option. Peter admits that he wants to be DA and that he has been running from the fight but he still refuses to let Cameron go. Instead, he walks over and kisses her in front of a group of gossipy paralegals.
“Now, I hope I don’t have to choose between the job and my relationship, but if I do, it’s you,” Peter confesses. “I told you, I’d always choose you. I meant it.”
There aren’t fairy tales written about black trans women. There’s no fairy godmother transforming pumpkins into chariots and tattered clothing into ball gowns. There are a lot of evil stepsisters—both real and imagined—but no one’s telling the story about the Prince Charming who sweeps a black trans woman off her feet and into the happily ever after. No one writes that fairytale.
But Doubt did.
Two years passed between the announcement that Laverne Cox would join the cast of Doubt and when the show finally made it into the CBS lineup. I’m not sure the writers of this show could’ve fathomed the world that they’d be injecting Cameron Wirth into; that two years feels like a two lifetimes ago.
Two years ago, hope felt possible; today, it’s in short supply.
But it’s in these moments that fairy tales mean the most. At their core, fairy tales are messages of hope. Or, as Neil Gaiman put it in the epigraph to Coraline, “Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”
It’s important that there are shows that reveal that the dragons that trans women face—mainly because cis people often can’t see those dragons for themselves—but there’s also a need for a reminder to trans women that those dragons can be beaten.
For one season, over 13 episodes, Doubt did that.
Stitchers
Written by Valerie Anne
I don’t want to brag y’all but when I said I didn’t think Stitchers was done with the Camille/Amanda storyline, I was right.
After a near-death experience leaves Camille a little shaken, she decides that she’s had enough of this break-up with Amanda, and she goes to the club where she works and SINGS FOR HER. Guess what song she sings! I’ll tell you! It’s the same song they played for each other on the guitar on the couch that one night. It’s also the same song that was playing in the club the first time they kissed. My favorite line for it/proof it’s the perfect “Camanda” song:
I’m finding cracks in all the walls I made
Little breakthroughs letting in some light
How perfectly Camille.
And I love that they have a song that’s canonically theirs and they know it. Anyway, the song works, because of course it does, who wouldn’t it work on, and Camille runs off the stage, and her and Amanda kiss and make up.
The next day/episode, they wake up together, and even though it’s sandwiched between two very aggressively heterosexual scenes, I don’t care that much because they’re adorable.
Amanda does ask Camille to move in, which I thought was a terrifying move, because we haven’t seen them together all that much, but Camille happily agrees (after expressing mild concern that they’d be walking stereotypes if they U-Hauled.) Later, when Camille tells Kirsten she’s moving out, Kirsten expresses my same worries, but Camille insists that she knows what her heart wants, and frankly could use a good thing happening to her. If she’s happy, I’m happy, so I’m on board.
That’s where they left it, which is great because while I suppose it’s possible they come back next season like “jk nevermind Amanda moved Out of Town so forget that moving out thing,” more likely they’ll have Camille moving in with her girlfriend be part of her emotional arc if the show gets picked up for a fourth season. Either way, we ended season three with a happy couple between two women, including one woman of color, and I’m going to file that one as a “win” for 2017. (This particular file drawer is pretty empty so it feels nice to put something in it.)
