This week, I'm looking back at a 2011 interview with the folks behind the webseries Husbands: Jane Espenson, Brad Bell, and Sean Hemeon. When it was created, the world in which Husbands took place was kind of a fantasy realm: marriage equality was just a fact of life. It's just five years later now, and it's a bit strange to think how recently that had to be speculative fiction.
Husbands is a sweet funny love story that skips over all of the activism of the last few years and gets to the heart of what it is to be a gay couple: falling in love, taking a chance on someone you love, and watching your life change together. It's where we are today -- reality finally catching up with something that could only be a dream a few years ago.
And now, here's my 2011 interview.
Did you notice how Jane referred to Husbands as the show that networks might do 3 years from now? Well, that's happened, in fits and starts. There's Modern Family, which includes a gay couple. There's New Normal, which featured married gays much more prominently, and ultimately, briefly. There was Looking, which was also with us for only a short time. And then there are shows like Vicious and Faking It, which are strongly focused on gay coupling and seem to have some actual longevity. And of course, it's worth nothing that the third season of Husbands was picked up by the CW network to stream online.
So, there've been some successes, and some ... let's call them learning opportunities. Obviously, having a gay couple on your show is no guarantee of success. But it's at least possible, and increasingly, unremarkable. And that's thanks, in part, to pioneers who imagined the world as it should be, even when it seemed like a far-away dream.
Music:
In Your Arms Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/