The Setup
The kiss happened under unlikely circumstances: with Paul Baker's visa expiring, his casual situationship partner Issa proposes a green card marriage. When Issa gets cold feet, Anton steps in to save the day. Later, as the group celebrates, they egg the newlyweds to kiss, which they do. But the moment feels like far more than a friendly peck, and both characters seem surprised by the intensity. Now, two months into Season 2, nobody's really talking about it. Series creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw recognize they're handling delicate emotional territory. "We want to do justice to how Issa and Paul Baker are feeling, in addition to how Paul Baker and Anton are feeling," Shaw said in an interview ahead of the season's Tribeca Film Festival premiere on June 11. "And frankly, equally as important as those two is Anton and Issa. It's a true triangle, in that these are two best friends who love each other and really don't want to hurt each other."Why This Matters
The show has earned praise for how casually and authentically it portrays Paul Baker's sexual fluidity and Anton's confidence in his queer identity. Rather than making queerness a moral lesson or a plot device, the creators have simply woven these characters into the fabric of their friend group, no speeches, no stereotypes. "I'm so lucky that I get to play a queer character in probably the scariest time that I've ever lived through," actor Owen Thiele said. "Ben and Rebecca have done a brilliant job at not making it moralistic or making Anton feel like a talking point or a stereotype." In an era when LGBTQ+ representation on TV has declined, 'Adults' stands out for treating its queer characters as fully realized people with messy lives and complicated desires, not as tokens or lessons for straight audiences.Source: Queerty
Poster via The Movie Database (TMDB)
