After the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24, Quinta Bronson tweeted, “How many people have ordered a school shooting episode from the show I’m writing,” referring to her ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary. The obvious answer, he added, was “No.” Meanwhile, CBS pulled the season finale for “FBI” in response to the tragedy, while Netflix added a content warning for Season 4 of “Stranger Things” due to the show’s depiction of violence.
Stephen Dunn’s “Queer as Folk” reimagining of Peacock’s groundbreaking British TV series also announced that the show’s pilot episode will include a warning card. However, unlike its peers, “Queer as Folk” takes the issue of gun violence squarely, and centers its story on a mass shooting based on the 2016 massacre at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that left 50 people dead. . At the series premiere, which opened for Outfest’s OutFront TV Festival in the theater at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Dunn explained why he made the decision to include a warning card.
“Although over the past week, it feels like the people close to someone who has experienced gun violence is so loud that it seems like the right thing to do,” Dunn said. diverse. “But it’s also important to tell these stories because they happen so often that it’s so stressful and we move on to the next story. It’s important to tell the stories of people who can’t necessarily move forward and what that experience is.”
Kim Cattrall plays Brenda, a mother whose adopted son Brody survived the shooting. I told diverse She hopes the show can communicate “that we need to be each other’s allies … support each other and do what we can to make the world, for sure, a safer place.”
Dunn spent five years creating the new “Queer as Folk,” which now takes place in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and features a more diverse crew than the two iterations that preceded it. He consulted Pulse survivors while he was crafting a storyline for the show’s queer characters, all of whom are recovering from the accident that appeared in the first episode. Dunn said the survivor’s input “strongly influenced the stories that influenced the course of the season.”
Johnny Sibley, who plays a survivor named Noah, said he hopes the new series can communicate that experiencing such horrific violence is “not just a moment in time”, and leaves a “complete stain” on survivors and their loved ones.
“Your healing and trauma can manifest itself in many different ways,” Sibley said. “I’m really happy because the show talks about what happens next when people go through a tragedy. Because sometimes we forget about it because of this dramatic version of what happened.”
“I hate that the show is as relevant as it is now,” Dunn said during a panel discussion after watching the first two episodes, adding that he was inspired by the resilience of Orlando survivors and what that conveyed about the LGBTQ community as a whole. Writer and producer Jacqueline Moore has also made clear the narrative purpose of building “Queer as Folk” around an act of violence, as hard as it is to watch.
“It has always been the story of queer joy that gay joy comes from queer trauma,” Moore told the audience. “It’s impossible to be gay and trans in America in 2022 and go back in time and not go through a trauma. Yet we find joy, we find each other, we find love, we find moments of hope.”
“Queer as Folk” premieres on Peacock on June 9.
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