New Sitcom "The Other Two" - When a Straight Roommate Isn't So Straight
A new sitcom premiered in the winter of 2019 on Comedy Central, called The Other Two. Set in New York, it focuses on Cary and Brooke Dubek, the floundering twenty-something brother and sister of a 13-year-old YouTube singing sensation. I decided to give the show a view because of its SNL/Lorne Michaels pedigree and was pleasantly surprised to find that Cary is gay. What was even more surprising is that Cary's supposedly straight roommate, Matt, is always coming on to him. An All- American type, with washboard abs and a great smile, Matt is amusingly nonchalant after each fleeting encounter with Cary. While sitcoms with gay characters have become less of novelty, I can't recall one in which a straight character acts on his same-sex urges. And the show isn't shy about showing them in a lip-lock or jerking off.
From the premiere episode, here they are "innocently" watching TV (remember, this is a sitcom, not a XXX video):
The roommate is played by Andrew Ridings who in 2010 was in an off-Broadway play Over the Top where he played a closeted gay man (in the role of his boyfriend was Tanner Cohen, who starred in the 2008 gay-themed indie film Were the World Mine). Cary's co-worker, Curtis, is also gay. The actor who portrays him, Brandon Scott Jones, played a bitchy bookstore clerk in the Melissa McCarthy movie, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Of course, the show has more amusing gay-oriented stuff going on than just the furtive relationship between Cary and Matt (whose story arc appears to have ended after Episode 3). And while the show is funny, at the end of each episode I felt oddly diminished. Perhaps it's because of how it depicts the vacuous, social media-centric world that Millennials and Gen Xers live in. Also, Cary is somewhat of a "sad sack", who, despite being in his 20s, acts like someone much older in the way he cringes at his peers attachment to social media.
And although Cary's roomie may be gone, for the time being at least, you might catch Andrew Ridings, in a much more chaste role, appearing in a commercial for Dunkin' Donuts which began airing in May/June.
The Other Two airs at Thursday at 10:30 after Broad City.
Other posts I've written about gay characters in TV sitcoms:
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