Cynical Cinema

Exes and Ohs is another lesbian TV series, like The L Word, running on Showcase here in Canada and on Logo in the States. It’s a standard couples and young-people-looking-for-love TV show, except that it’s all about lesbians and not straight people. It’s well-written, well-acted, and has some good characters. But it doesn’t really delve too deeply into the actual world of gay women. The world of lesbians is treated the same way the straight world is treated on regular TV. Like, if you think a woman is hot, just ask her out! OK, great, but what if she’s straight? This is the kind of thing I’d like to see explored a little more. The world of Exes and Ohs is so insular that it becomes irritating. I want to see the way these women interact and co-exist with the world around them. They hang out at lesbian parties, lesbian bowling nights, lesbian bars. So all we see are other lesbians. We don’t see any bigotry or homophobia or, really, any straight people at all.

Which makes Exes and Ohs sort of like Friends, the whitest show in the history of television, where nothing existed outside their own little circle of six people, and guest stars appeared only in order to give the main characters something to crack jokes about. And Friends got really tired, really fast. In fact, I would go so far as to say Friends sucked. Exes and Ohs is a little better, in that it has solid writing and that Canadian feel that actually works, like in Rent-A-Goalie. It stars Michelle Paradise, who also directs. She plays a character that is clearly close to herself, a documentary filmmaker. She’s the neurotic one in the bunch, the Ross-from-Friends of the lesbian world. Marnie Alton is the Joey-from-Friends character, the dirty one who sleeps with all kinds of women all the time. Heather Matarazzo plays a weirdo wannabe musician.

The best comedy in the series comes from the only two who are a consistent couple, Kris and Chris, played by Megan Cavanagh and Angela Featherstone. (Angela Featherstone, by the way, for all you nerds out there, was the girl Bruce Campbell kissed in S-Mart at the end of Army of Darkness.) They are quite funny, as basically childish and innocent idiots who have this cute and funny yet fairly stupid relationship. Like…if Phoebe and Joey got together on Friends…OK. I really have to stop thinking about Friends and more about lesbians. There are not too many TV shows like this starring all-male casts. That, I firmly believe, is because gay-man shows have only one audience - gay men. Lesbian shows have a chance at two audiences. Lesbians and straight men. Because straight men are likely to watch at least once, in the hope that they will see some hot women making out with one another. And this review wouldn’t be complete, for those guys, without at least a small discussion on that subject.

Yes, there are sex scenes. And yes, they are almost always sex scenes involving hot women. In TV world, no matter how realistic a show attempts to be, attractive people get most of the roles. And so, unlike the real world, 90 percent of the lesbians here are hot. Which, while it is unlike the real world, it is very much like the TV world. Most of these hot babes, however, seem to be there mostly as guest stars. Like Seinfeld. Only lesbian Seinfeld. And, like Seinfeld, not all of the main characters are attractive. Which is nice. Like, watching The L Word is interesting for a while, but then it seems so unrealistic where everyone is supermodel hot, that it becomes irritating. At least in something like Sex And The City, they cast Sarah Jessica Parker in the lead role. And, as Peter Griffin once said, she looks like a foot.

There are a few scenes in later episodes in Season One that break the mold a little, like when the dirty chick confronts her parents about their uncomfortable attitude toward homosexuality, and when Kris and Chris start looking for a father to inseminate one of them. But really, it’s a show that is too insular to be really compelling, and too obvious to be ground-breaking. It needs to take ON the issues, rather than just middling along as a fairly decent, well-written show. It’s nice to see shows like this getting made, and getting air time, and Exes And Ohs is not a bad program. But it would sure be nice if it (metaphorically speaking, no pun intended) grew some balls. The first season comes out on DVD on Tuesday the 20th.