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Why Scotty's Affair on "Brothers & Sisters" is Something to Cheer About
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on November 1, 2010
Scotty's a Cheater? Thanks, ABC! No, Seriously!
Gay fans of Brothers & Sisters are probably breathing a sigh of relief after the last two episodes of the ABC drama. Why? It’s not necessarily because beloved characters
Kevin Walker (
Matthew Rhys)and
Scotty Wandell (
Luke Macfarlane) are probably going to avoid an adultery-spurred break-up.
It’s because the rift has finally giving Scotty something to do, and thereby made the characters much more complex and interesting. (Actually, the same could be said of their relationship.)
As Scotty said in last night’s episode, “I’m just as lost and damaged and screwed up as the rest of you. I’m not perfect Kevin, I’m not perfect!”
He might as well have been speaking for fans who’ve been dying for the duo to get past the network television trope of the perfect gay couple.
There have been enough gay characters on television now for there to be a
serious competition over which ones are more nuanced and interesting than others. But while dozens of gay characters have flooded television since the 1990s, gay couples are rarer, gay married couples are rarer still, and gay married couples with serious problems, a weekly staple for straights that keep fans watching to see what happens next, are almost nonexistent.
Given this week's events on
B&S, it should seem obvious to anyone who has followed the progression of gays on television that Kevin and Scotty are poised to become the most interesting gay couple on our screens.
Network TV and the Will & Grace Problem
Why has it taken so long to get a gay “married” couple (or at least partnered, since same-sex marriage hasn’t been legal that long and is still allowed in only a handful of states) on network television who are dealing with a serious problem in their marriage?
Network television really only started using gay characters on television in the 1990s, mostly as a ploy to get the upscale, urban gay audiences that were increasingly turn to cable. Those cable channels, such as HBO and Showtime, had started to create original programming that rivaled the broadcast networks, forcing the Big Four to add greater diversity to their schedules while also still trying to please the rest of America.
For a long time, this meant there were more gay characters on broadcast, but none that stayed around for very long. Most merely popped in from time to time (
Frasier,
Northern Exposure) or were tangential to the main characters and storylines, like the lesbians on
Friends or
Jack on
Dawson’s Creek. And even when a character
was part of the main cast —
Matt on
Melrose Place — their gayness was so controversial, it basically had to be ignored. (Cue the gay kiss cutaway.)
Gil Chesterson from Frasier, Matt Fielding from Melrose Place, Ellen DeGeneres
Of course
Ellen had entire season as an out lesbian, but we all know how
that worked out. (In case you don't, the show was canceled at the end of the season.)
Then
Will & Grace changed the equation, giving us a gay character every episode, and America came along for the ride!
Still it took a long time for Will to kiss another man and even longer for him to have a steady boyfriend. NBC was scared of losing the mainstream audience, and only in Season Six did Will finally get Vince.
Sure, Will and Vince probably don’t get enough credit for having a fairly complicated relationship. Their break-up was sudden but interesting: Vince needed to find out who he is and Will didn’t respect his career – or something like that.
But Will and Vince were pretty bland compared to what was happening on much more daring pay-cable channels, on shows like
Six Feet Under where
David and
Keith dealt with infidelity, sexuality dissatisfaction and the fact both men had serious issues ranging from wild insecurity to anger control problems.
Meanwhile,
Queer as Folk, a show almost exclusively about gay and bisexual men, was able to explore relationships in even greater detail, delving into all the drugs, sex, infidelity, and HIV issues all gays have to deal with.
But most of America, not used to gay couples, needed a near-perfect one, NBC seemed to suggest.
After Will & Grace had been on a few years, viewers met more gay couples, but most still got little screentime and also lacked much in the way of complexity. Shows like
Ugly Betty and
The Class gave viewers some positive storylines but no real serious treatment of gay men as couples.
Today we have
Modern Family, with an interesting and believable, if not always serious, partnership between
Mitchell and
Cameron;
Bob and
Lee occasionally on
Desperate Housewives, who, we’re told, were in marriage counseling before their sudden break-up (though we never saw that); and lesbian couples like
Callie and
Arizona on
Grey’s Anatomy. Congrats, ABC!
What we still haven’t had on network TV until now is a gay male couple with real issues to sort through, a complicated history and a conflict that takes more than one episode to resolve.
What Makes Kevin and Scotty Special
So what makes Kevin and Scotty so special? What
Brothers & Sisters has done, perhaps a little bit late in the series run, is given us the first real representation of a married gay couple who are very much in love, but whose relationship is both not perfect and is even in doubt.
Most other gay long-term relationships on network television have suffered from a desire to prove to America that gays are people who are not the least bit threatening, deserve equality and are just like our straight counterparts: we buy houses, have kids and love each other. Yes we do!
David and Keith from Six Feet Under, Cameron and Mitchell from Modern Family
But we also fight and hurt each other as well. And few of these relationships have been “marriages,” especially the legal kind.
Cam and Mitchell are great, but, like the other two couples on
Modern Family, their relationship is solid. Bob and Lee broke up in a heartbeat and haven’t been heard from since. It even happens on cable where
Caprica’s couple had issues – you know, like how one husband massacred a rival gang with a robot – but their relationship too was mostly beyond reproach.
Brothers & Sisters fell into this trap – at first. Yes, Scotty started out pretty messed up: he needed a career and he lacked a home. Kevin was unsure if he wanted a real relationship, instead fooling around with the hot guy from
Sex and the City.
But once they got married, Kevin and Scotty settled into what appeared to be marital bliss. So eager were the writers to show that gay marriage can be great they forgot to put it in any real life issues.
Sure, their problems conceiving a child tested the relationship. They fought, they pulled away from each other, etc. But once again, they were mostly the picture of an exemplary couple: good people put under stress. Meanwhile, every other character on the show had gone through some kind of earth-shattering affair, break-up or divorce. This not only made them more interesting, but meant they were given more screentime to sort out their issues
But this week’s episode used last season’s car crash to open up old wounds for Kevin and Scotty: Kevin downplaying Scotty’s career and pulling away emotionally; Scotty feeling immature and devalued; and Kevin’s old demons – selfishness, short-sightedness – coming out.
It’s always been to the writer’s credit that they’ve been able to make Kevin occasionally unlikable. Scotty, meanwhile, has almost always been virtuous. “You were supposed to be better than this,” Kevin tells Scotty at the end of the episode.
So the writers really took a risk by making it Scotty who had the affair. It meant they had to psychologically explain how it happened: a bright young thing walks in, feeding Scotty’s weak self-esteem with cheap flattery (“With that face you should clearly have your own reality show.” Hilarious.
The A-List: New York, next season?)
Meanwhile Kevin is a bad boy too, missing Scotty’s opening night by going to a bar to sulk instead because nothing is going right for him. (After all, sulking is an integral part of Kevin’s character.)
It seems likely Kevin and Scotty’s marriage will be saved, if only because too many other (straight) marriages on the show have failed. Scotty’s still a good person, after all, having cheated only once and then confessed it, and offering statements of concern about Kevin (“Be discreet I don’t want Kevin hurt any more than he already is”).
But hopefully it will take a few episodes for Kevin to trust Scotty, and vice versa, because that’s what a marriage really is — even for gay people. You hurt each other and you have to regain trust, but that takes time. It’s always complicated and imperfect, and maybe soon enough network TV will show that gay marriages really are mostly like straight marriages — warts and all.
