Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
When I watched the first episode of The Bisexual, Hulu’s new comedy debuting this weekend, something about it felt familiar. It could have been the setting, because it seems a lot of the shows I’m watching take place somewhere in the UK or Ireland. Or it could have been because it had the same dry sense of humor that many shows I’ve reviewed this year have had.
But then I saw a review in the LA Times which paired the show with HBO’s Sally4Ever and it clicked: The Bisexual felt like a companion piece to Sally4Ever, without all the extreme flossing and used tampons.
Both of the show’s main characters are exploring a side of their sexuality they never thought about before. Sally (Catherine Shepherd) breaks out of her boring life with fiance David (Alex Macqueen) when she meets the adventurous Emma (Julia Davis). In The Bisexual, Leila (Desiree Akhavan) breaks out of her stifling relationship with her business partner Sadie (Maxine Peake) and starts to have sex with men, first with a bouncer at a bar, then others, with the help of her new roomie Gabe (Brian Gleeson).
Just to be clear: I’m not suggesting that we’re in a “trend” period where it seems shows with the same premise air at the same time. What I’m suggesting is that these two shows are such flip sides of each other, that they could be edited together into a pretty damn good dramedy about sexual exploration. Heck, throw Netflix’s Wanderlust in the mix and it would be even better.
Back to Sally and Leila for a second: The fact that they complement each other goes even further than one person going into a same-sex relationship and the other going into an opposite-sex one. Sally is tired of being boring, being the “good” person who does what everyone else says she should, like settling down with David just because it felt like it was the right thing to do at the time. Leila, on the other hand, is the adventurous one, not wanting to be tied down to Sadie and wanting to explore what else is out there.
Then we arrive at Joy (Toni Collette), the main character in Wanderlust. She doesn’t feel stifled in her relationship with Alan (Steven Mackintosh); she’s just sexually dissatisfied. She doesn’t want to leave him, she just wants to sow her sexual oats while still being married. So does Alan, by the way.
So imagine a British dramedy where we explore the lives of three women, all dissatisfied with their sex lives and exploring different things. We can either dedicate a different episode to each woman or intercut back and forth (which I think is the more interesting way). Then at some point, perhaps Joy, Sally and Leila meet and become friends, getting together occasionally to talk commiserate about what they’ve found along their journeys. Think Sex In The City but without the cosmos and designer duds.
We think this can happen. So let’s see if the shows’ creators — Davis (Sally), Akhavan (Bisexual) and Nick Payne (Wanderlust) can get together and make a supercut of the three shows happen. I smell a Twitter campaign coming!
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.
