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Leslie Jordan is at the ‘Cool Kids’ table


By Romeo San Vicente

The Golden Girls meets It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia in the pilot for Fox’s new retirement community comedy, Cool Kids. And we say Always Sunny because the show is being co-created by Sunny star Charlie Day and co-produced by fellow cast members Rob McElhenney and Glenn Howerton. The pilot stars Leslie Jordan (Will & Grace), David Alan Grier (In Living Color), Martin Mull (Roseanne) and Vicki Lawrence (The Carol Burnett Show) as four friends jockeying for position as top dogs at their retirement home. We’ll just assume that Jordan’s character is gay, because a specific sort of brash queerness is pretty much his trademark across all sorts of comedy media, and that’s also why we love him. And we could use a senior queer sitcom regular on TV these days, if for no other reason than LGBTQ Baby Boomers are entering their retirement years and about to fill up the nation’s senior facilities. Sitcoms help push these realities forward. Meanwhile, the idea of Vicki Lawrence back on network television brings joy to our hearts, and now she’s the right age to actually play a Mama-like character.

“WOW Presents Plus†is going to be extra

Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, the gays behind World of Wonder production company, have a streaming service that plans to answer the question, “What are Bob The Drag Queen and Jinkx Monsoon doing right now?†The service recently launched with a slate of original programming tailor made for fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race (translation: you). Shows will include Bobbin’ Around with Bob the Drag Queen, travelogue of sorts where Bob TDQ zooms around the globe being Bob; Marco Marco’s Models, which follows the adventures of the Los Angeles designer’s army of alt-models in their underwear; Detox’s Life Rehab, in which Detox helps you live your best life – and presumably lip sync better – and Cool Mom with Jinkx Monsoon, where Jinkx and her 29 year-old gay son talk about smoking weed and hooking up with guys. In other words, it’s an all-queer Viceland in the making and we’re here for it. Take our $3.99 a month, WOW.

GLAAD funds TransMilitary

GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is moving in a new direction. The organization’s Media Institute is giving a grant to finance its first feature film, a documentary called TransMilitary. The film will follow four service personnel, all transgender, as they perform their jobs and also join the fight against Donald Trump’s proposed ban on transgender soldiers. The film will be co-directed by Fiona Dawson and Gabriel Silverman, and produced by Jamie Coughlin. The three previously created the 2015 doc Transgender, At War and In Love. No word on when the project will be finished and ready to make the queer film festival rounds and make Republicans lose their minds, but its urgency and timeliness couldn’t be more real, so we’ll assume they’re working round the clock to get it on screens.

Eva Longoria’s Lucky Boy aims for cable fortune

Eva Longoria’s UnbeliEVAble Entertainment production company is currently developing a series based on the book Lucky Boy, based on Shanthi Sekaran’s book about two female immigrants who fight to protect an American child. David Schulner (Do No Harm), who worked with Longoria on Desperate Housewives, will write, and lesbian filmmaker Nisha Ganatra (Chutney Popcorn, Transparent) is signed on to direct. The story follows a woman named Soli, an undocumented immigrant, whose life intersects with an Indian-American woman named Kavya, who is trying to conceive a child. This is a pilot, of course, so nothing is certain, but when it’s finished it will be shopped to streaming channels as well as premium cable, where all the interesting stories seem to go these days. The topic of immigration is once again a political football (or sledgehammer if you’re on the xenophobic right), so let’s hope this one gets a shot.

Romeo San Vicente is partly cloudy in Los Angeles.

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