I hear that Looking has been canceled by HBO.  Items keep coming through my Facebook and Twitter feed.  Some are resigned.  Some are unsurprised.  Some are analytical in the way we liberals tend to be at times like this, ready to do post mortems on both sides of the topic du jour.  “Seven Reasons We Loved Looking.”  “Seven Reasons we Should Have Loved Looking.”  “Seven Reasons Looking Didn’t Work But Was Groundbreaking Anyway.”  

I tried to be a Looking lover.  Hell, I tried to be a Looking liker.  It should have been a cakewalk.  I’m a gay guy who lives in San Francisco.  I was totally primed to see other gay guys having adventures in my backyard.  (Come on, we all love to see shows that are filmed where we live – if only to scream about how they screw up the relative geography.)

I slogged through Season One.  Slogged.  Every episode made me hope that something would actually happen in the next.  I don’t think it did.  But I watched all 4,000 hours – or maybe it was only five.  It seemed like 4,000.  I almost gave up.  Then I tried again after I noticed my DVR had racked up the first four installments of Season Two.

I made it through three.

The problem?  It was BORING!  There have been plenty of times when I’ve envied the characters on a show I was watching.  (I was much younger then, of course.)  When I watched Looking I kept asking myself, “Are we really this dull?”  Even when there were plot points that should have been interesting, they weren’t.

Which brings me to the second problem:  I didn’t care about any of the characters!  There wasn’t one who had a story or a personality that I found compelling.  Well, there as Augustin (Frankie J. Alvarez), who I hated for being such a narcissistic prick.  Not an interesting one, but still.  The rest of the leading trio was even less fascinating.  Patrick (Jonathan Groff), the young, handsome, well-employed twenty-something who made consistently bad romantic choices.  Dom (Murray Bartlett), the aging stud who needed to find a direction now that he was slightly less able to bed anyone he wanted.

Yawn.

At its best, Looking seemed like something may have happened in the last scene.  (Sorry!  You missed it.)  At its worst, it seemed like nothing had happened in the lives of any of the characters ever.

Looking was not what I would call groundbreaking.  I can’t call the episode that focused on the practicalities of anal douching groundbreaking.  I would call it more of a nudge.  I’ll allow that it may have moved awareness of gay lives forward a bit.

Love it or hate it, Will & Grace was the groundbreaker.  It was the one that brought gay leads into American homes, made them popular and opened the door for shows like Looking.  Granted, the world of Will & Grace showed a sanitized and often unrealistic view of our lives.  (Seriously, no one as handsome and wealthy as Will who wanted a boyfriend would ever have been without one for more than twenty minutes.)  Conversely, Looking brought a little more of what we do – like anal douching – to the screen.  And if it weren’t so dull, it could have brought it to an even broader audience.

I would like to suggest a new show called Doing.  That might be something I’d want to watch.