The legal war over Prop 8 is still fresh fodder for Sunday news snore fests, daily chat spat shows and late night laugh offs, so it was only a matter of time before California's controversial gay marriage initiative filtered its way into scripted television programming.
But the two shows that will roll the issue into storylines next season could not be more diverse.
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NBC's yet-to-debut spinoff Law & Order: Los Angeles will feature an episode based on the overturning of Prop 8 on constitutional grounds.
Meanwhile, the first two episodes of the new season of FX's screwball comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia will play off same-sex marriage.
Michael Jensen has the scoop on AfterElton.com (“The pop culture site that plays for your team”).
“[We] were sitting around talking about it and thought,
'Okay, we got the first six stories. What's the next seven?' And then
this came out,” Rene Balcer, executive producer of Law & Order: Los Angeles, explains to Jensen.
The story, Balcer says, is about “the money behind the
Prop 8 people and the hypocrisy of black churches supporting a proposition like that and also looking at the whole 'initiative
industry' and how these lobbyists make a lot of money.”
Asked to elaborate on the hypocrisy, Balcer asked, “How can
you as a black minister who has fought for civil rights now
fight to deny someone else their civil rights? I mean, it makes no
sense.”
Exposing hypocrisy is a goal of the
Law & Order franchise, whose newest spin-off premieres Sept. 29.
“I think there's an obvious hypocrisy [in Prop 8], and if anything
we're consistent,” Balcer tells Jensen. “We just try to go after hypocrites of whatever
stripe.”
JUHNT-JUHN!
(That is supposed to be the sound of Law & Order's ubiquitous end punctuation noise.)
Philly creator Rob McElhenney's character Mac will oppose the marriage of a transgender woman and another man because, Mac will claim, it's an illegal gay wedding. Actually, it's because he has feelings for the former man and is jealous.
Another thread in those episodes features the Frankie and Charlie characters entering a domestic partnership to get health-care benefits.
“It was
important to us to make an episode of television that you are
never going to see anywhere else which is something I've never seen,” McElhenney said.
“It's part of the national conversation.”
Though he was partly raised by his biological mother and her female partner and strongly supports marriage quality, McElhenney said he believes there are hypocrisies on both sides of the Prop 8 debate. His show is not taking sides, just striving to open the dialogue, he vowed.
“There
are so many people that I've found that are almost indifferent to it,” he tells Jensen. “And when you ask them about it and they say 'Well, I
don't know. It doesn't really affect me.' And they think they don't know
any gay people when they most likely do. And they say 'Um, I just don't
like to think about it.' I think the only wrong side to fall on that
particular issue is not to think about it, to not talk about it, to not
figure it out for yourself.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.