“Looking” starring next big thing Jonathan Groff premieres on HBO tonight – I highly recommend!

I’ve already seen the first two episodes of HBO’s new series Looking which premieres tonight and I can highly recommend it to you.

It is not only entertaining, it also rings true to me as a gay man. I could get as hooked on this as I was on Sex and the City – in fact I already am!

The show’s stars and behind-the-scenes talent appeared recently at the TV Critics Association Press Tour. I’ll have more from the show’s creator, director and stars in the coming days but today I want to focus on Jonathan Groff who I think is going to become a superstar because of this show.

The show premieres tonight after Girls.

Groff is one of the the three leads – Frankie J. Alvarez and Murray Bartlett are the others – in this show about a trio of gay friends navigating life in modern-day San Francisco.
Groff, who was outstanding in his first leading film role in C.O.G., talked about how the actors bonded with each other and the city of San Francisco where the show is filmed.

“Our first night in San Francisco working on the show was actually Murray’s birthday, March 20th, and we sat in the back garden of his house and opened up a bottle of wine and stayed up all night sort of talking and getting to know each other, and it was a very kind of quintessential San Francisco experience, and that kind of set the tone for the whole show. We shot at a bar called The Stud, and while we were shooting there, we were like, this is so great, and that weekend, we went dancing at The Stud, so we really immersed ourselves into the San Francisco experience.”

The show isn’t about coming out – it’s about the lives these gay men lead – and Groff thinks it also has mainstream appeal.

He says: ‘The fact that this show is mostly characters in their 30s and 40s who aren’t grappling with the fact that they’re gay ‑‑ all the characters are gay, but that’s not the big issue in their lives. They’ve already gone through that time in their life, so it’s not like coming‑out stories of people dealing with the fact that they’re gay. They’re dealing with their relationships at work or with their friends or with their significant others, and so I think that maybe your 22‑year‑old daughter is responding to that because she goes to work and is in relationships and has friends, and when I showed the four episodes to my brother and his wife ‑‑ they’re the straight, married couple living in Amish country ‑‑ and when I was watching them watch the show, it was amazing to see how they connected to the scene between Murray and Scott Bakula in a diner when Scott sort of is like ‑‑ have you guys seen the show? Has everybody seen the show? I don’t want to spoil anything. I see a lot of nodding heads, so there’s a scene where Scott is like, I didn’t realize, is this not a date? And both my brother and his wife were like, Oh, no. Come on, Dom! And I was ‑‑ it was a revelation for me to watch them and think this is my straight brother and his wife in Amish country connecting to two gay men over the age of 40 living in San Francisco. And I think because they’re comfortable with their sexuality, it makes the issues of the characters more relatable because their problems are about everyday life.”