What do Mad Men, The Good Wife, Gossip Girl, and Looking have in common?

Aside from being four of the best TV series of this century?

(I said what I said.)

On the surface, they look very different.

Mad Men is about advertising creatives in 1960s New York.

The Good Wife is about a Chicago lawyer rebuilding her career after years spent raising children.

Gossip Girl (the OG one) is Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth — if it were about teenagers with smartphones.

And Looking is about three gay friends in San Francisco trying to figure out adulthood.

But underneath it all, all four shows are asking some version of the same thing:

Is who we are privately the same as who we are publicly?

And is who we think we should be getting in the way of figuring out what we actually want?

(Questions I suspect most of us keep running into in one form or another.)

But we don’t usually talk about them in the same breath — even though, if you’ve loved one of these shows, there’s a good chance the others are closer to your taste than you might think.

We tend to sort shows into different categories — prestige drama, courtroom procedural, teen soap, a show about queer people — and decide what’s “for us” from there.

And sometimes, that means we miss something we would've loved.

Looking, especially, has slipped under the radar — HBO's first show centred on gay men, cancelled too soon, and still unlike almost anything that's come after it.

Not least because it's INCREDIBLY directed — half by co-showrunner Andrew Haigh, who went on to make All of Us Strangers — and features performances from generational talents like Jonathan Groff.

It's a show I wish more people had found.

Because it's pretty rare to find a show about wrestling with existential questions that is also this warm, funny, and easy to spend time with.

(For the record, I have never felt more seen by any TV show — even though I'm not a gay man in San Francisco — perhaps because Looking is about doing the hard work of looking inward and shaping your life to fit you.)

This summer, I’m opening a new program — The Long Arc — to watch and unpack the first season of Looking together, one episode each week, and dig into how the filmmaking shapes the story.

If that makes you curious...

👉 You can find all the details here​

Alex

PS I’d love to know which of these shows is your favourite.