"Beautiful People" Makes For Beautiful Television

All photos credit: Logo/BBC

For me, summer is not a season for television. It's a season for kicking back in the yard or the park with fizzy cocktails, eating meals composed entirely of various types of ice cream, and laughing so hard with your friends that your mother/landlord/neighbors yell at you or you lose control of a bodily function.

Enter Logo's (AfterElton.com's parent company) Beautiful People, the first series of the summer to allow you to do all of these things in the comfort of your air-conditioned living room.

Equal parts wistful remembrance and raucous, candy-colored fantasy, Beautiful People is sort of what The Wonder Years would look like were it directed by a relatively well-behaved John Waters. Loosely based on the memoirs of Simon Doonan (first released in the U.K. under the title Nasty), the series tells the story of an impossibly fabulous and wonderfully precocious gay kid growing up in working-class, small-town England.

Luke Ward-Wilkinson (Young Simon Doonan)

Most of the action takes place in and around the Doonan household, which is filled with impossibly entertaining and quirky characters. Mum likes her gin, supportive Dad busies himself with making potato wine and fixing things, sister Reba is the town slut (with a heart of gold!), and Auntie Hayley is a blind and aging hippie with a tendency for acid flashbacks and accidents at funerals.

Simon (played nicely and without a whiff of apology by Luke Ward-Wilkinson) spends most of his time with his best friend, budding partner-in-fabulousness Kylie (Layton Williams), who makes Ugly Betty's Justin Suarez look like Stanley Kowalski by comparison.

Over the series' six episodes (season two is on its way), Simon and Kylie busy themselves with typical teen endeavors like auditioning for musicals, dealing with visiting relatives, and of course perfecting dance routines in and out of their bedrooms (and their mothers' clothes).

(Pictured L-R): Olivia Colman (Debbie Doonan),
Layton Williams ("Kylie"/Kyle) and Ward-Wilkinson

In the hands of master executive producer Jon Plowman (Absolutely Fabulous, Extras, The Office), the ups and downs of the comings-of-age of Simon and Kylie are refreshingly free of angst, bullying, and sexuality-related trauma. It's an idealized vision of a gay kid's learning about life, but it's one so long overdue in its clear intent to celebrate the absurdity of it all that for me it hit home, and then some.

Is it patently unrealistic to think that Simon could have so much fun coming up a gay kid in working class England in the '90s? Probably. But let's face it, beyond haircuts and guest-stars, sitcoms have never exactly been accurate documents of the zeitgeist, have they?

Much like AbFab, Beautiful People celebrates the absurd and takes life's darker turns full-speed and without safety belts (the episode where Brenda Fricker appears as Simon's seriously unbalanced grandmother is the blackest comedy you'll likely see this summer).

People smack one another about, die horrible deaths, drink until they pass out and behave pretty terribly to one another. But the underlying optimism of the show somehow encourages us to laugh it all off as just part of the colossal mess we call life.