I love this show, United States of Tara. It is one of the few shows on TV showing a Gay Teenager, openly accepted by his family and going through the trials of first love, sex and dating. It is a juxtaposition of modestly stylized fantasy, and moments that are so searingly real that it pulls your heart out through your throat.
Tonight, Marshall, the son, the brother, the Gay Teenager, found out in the least gentle way that his first love had been killed in a car accident. They had only just broken up weeks before, yet Marshall was still not done with Lionel.
Television has lost another gay character, but in such a touching and real way that I can't be mad about it. What I am mad about is that the whole show is cancelled effective on June 20, 2011. Infuriating.
In a particularly brilliant scene, Lionel tells Marshall that he expects in ten years that he will be living in a mansion in New York City, with marble floors and pool boys. Then a moment of clarity comes over him and he says, "...and you'll go to Manhattan and I'll go to Manhattan. Your Manhattan will be in New York and mine will be at Kansas State in Manhattan, Kansas. Maybe if I want the marble floors enough, I'll end up some place in the middle."
It's undeniably a good show, compared to most of the other ones you would normally see on American television. The script is captivating, and everyone's acting just superb. But the depiction of gay characters is a bit too cliché and, even though I can't quite call it judgemental, it does lean a bit on the negative side. Gay men are explicitly described as more promiscuous than straight men (see "Open House," Series 2, Ep. 10), which is just a false generalization. Then of course the more unrepressed and political gay character, Lionel, has to crash (quite literally), while the more tame and family-oriented one survives: just a bad case of "poetic justice." The show seems to shut moralism out the door, just to let it back in from the window.
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