After the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex. on May 24, Quinta Brunson tweeted that it was “wild how many people have asked for a school shooting episode of the show I write,” referring to her ABC sitcom “Abbott Elementary” and adding that the clear answer is “no.” Meanwhile, CBS pulled the season finale of “FBI” in response to the tragedy, while Netflix added a content warning for Season 4 of “Stranger Things” due to the show’s depiction of violence.
“Queer as Folk,” Stephen Dunn’s reimagining of the groundbreaking British television series for Peacock, also announced that the show’s pilot episode would include a warning card. Unlike its counterparts, however, “Queer as Folk” addresses the issue of gun violence head-on, centering its story on a mass shooting based on the 2016 massacre at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., that left 50 people dead. At the show’s premiere, which opened Outfest’s OutFront TV Festival at the Theatre at Ace Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles, Dunn explained why the decision to include a warning card was made.
“Even despite the past week, it feels like people who are in proximity to someone who has experienced gun violence are so high that it just feels like the right thing to do,” Dunn told Variety. “But it’s also really important to tell these stories because it happens so much that it’s so exhausting and we just move on to the next one. It’s important to tell the stories of people who don’t get to necessarily move on and what that experience is like.”
Kim Cattrall plays Brenda, a mother whose adopted son Brodie survives the shooting. She told Variety that she hopes the show can communicate “that we need to be allies for each other… support each other and do what we can to make the world, certainly, a safer place.”
Dunn spent five years creating the new “Queer as Folk,” which now takes place in New Orleans, La. and features a more diverse cast than the two iterations that have come before it. He consulted Pulse survivors as he crafted a storyline for the show’s queer characters, all of whom are recovering from the incident shown in the first episode. Dunn said the survivors’ input “heavily informed the stories that influenced the trajectory of the season.”
Johnny Sibilly, who plays a survivor named Noah, said he hopes the new series can communicate that experiencing such horrific violence is “not just a moment in time,” and leaves a “full life stain” on the survivors and their loved ones.
“Your healing and your trauma can show up in so many different ways,” Sibilly said. “I’m really happy that the show talks about what happens afterwards when people go through tragedy. Because we sometimes forget that for this sensational version of what happened.”
“I hate that the show is as relevant as it is right now,” Dunn said during a panel discussion after a viewing of the first two episodes, adding that he was inspired by the resilience of the survivors in Orlando and what that communicated about the LGBTQ community as a whole. Writer and producer Jaclyn Moore further explained the narrative purpose of building “Queer as Folk” around an act of violence, as hard to watch as it may be.
“The story of queer joy has always been that queer joy comes out of queer trauma,” Moore told the audience. “It’s impossible to be queer and trans in America in 2022 and all the way back in time and not go through trauma. And yet, we find joy, we find each other, we find love, we find moments of hopefulness.”
“Queer as Folk” premieres its first episodes on Peacock on June 9.
