Desperately seeking homoerotic subtext in NBC's new "Crusoe"

Philip Winchester and Tongayi Chirisa/All photos courtesy NBC Photo: Kelly Walsh

In these heady days of Survivor bromance and cheeky gay in-jokes on Supernatural, it's hard not to get excited about a new television retelling of Robinson Crusoe, the classic 1719 novel by Daniel Defoe that is rife with hilarious-in-retrospect homoerotic subtext between the shipwrecked main character and his distracting native "man-servant" Friday.

So what can we say about NBC's new Crusoe, which returns tonight (at 9/8c)? Can we say, "Damn, they actually went there!" Or "Finally a gay male version of Xena's famous lesbian subtext!"

Find out after the jump!

Alas, based on last week's premiere, Crusoe looks to be a thoroughly, almost willfully heterosexual retelling of the classic story.

There's not much else that makes it worth watching either.

There are two ways to tell the whole "lost on a desert island" story: the "serious," semi-realistic Lost or Cast Away route, or the campy Gilligan's Island one. Weirdly, Crusoe tries to do both, attempting to tell a serious storyline while junking up the island with all manner of contraptions and a tree-house straight from The Swiss Family Robinson. At any second, I fully expected Mary Ann to pop out with one of her coconut cream pies.

My partner Michael and I watched this show separately and, interestingly and unbeknownst to each other, we both lost all interest at exactly the same point: ten minutes in when Robinson started flying around the island with this system of ropes-and-pullies he'd rigged up. If he wants off the island so badly, why doesn't he just make a jet-pack out of bamboo and sea water a la the Professor on Gilligan's Island?

On the plus side, there's a fair a mount of shirtlessness, and Tongayi Chirisa as Friday is pretty easy on the eyes. That said, as a fair-skinned person, I know that, unless he also invented Coppertone, Philip Winchester's Robinson Crusoe would be bright red and blistering 24 hours after landing on that tropical island!