After the commercial success of LOVE SIMON in 2018 ( it grossed $66 million worldwide) Disney’s ears pricked up thinking that the world was ready for their take on a gay teen romance /drama. This feel-good crowd-pleaser of a movie was directed by (openly gay) GREG BERLANTI (BROKEN HEARTS CLUB) from a script based on a teen novel by (openly straight) BECKY ALBERTELLI.
It was a sort of gay Romeo and Juliet. young coming-of-age tale about Simon a teenage boy who has a love connection with a boy, Blue, by email, but the only problem is that Simon has no idea who he’s talking to. Simon must discover who that boy is–who Blue is. Along the way, he tries to find himself as well. And happily for us all unlike Shakespeare’s story, no-one died in the end,
So someone (at Disney) had the idea of developing almost a sequel into a TV series with a new protagonist called Victor who is now a pupil at Simon’s own school and is sort of following in his footsteps.
We are already into episode 4 and the story line is developing into a classic boy meets girl but keeps one eye on another boy : girl eventually dumps boy ; boy meets boy.
Love Victor is efficiently helmed by Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger who were the writers on ‘Simon’ but is lacks the queer sure-footedness of the more experienced Berlanti. With a real charmer in Michael Cimino playing the title role, and narration by the original Simon (Nick Robinson) this drama may lack some of the edge of its predecessor, but it was still evidently scary enough for Disney to get cold-feet and pass it on to their more adult subsidiary Hulu.
The real joy of both Love Simon and Victor which we all really need to applaud is finally LGBT kids and other teens coming to terms with their sexuality finally have role models to look up too. It may use sentiment and schmaltz than serious drama to get it over, but that’s a tad irrelevant in this case if it gets the message through.
The importance of this simply cannot be overstated as suicide is still the 2nd leading cause of death among young people ages 10 to 24, and the vast majority of these are LGBTQ youth.
Love Victor may be slightly damned in the end for the way it tries to hard, but we have the feeling that its target audience will happily lap it all up.
P.S. LOVE VICTOR debuts on HULU on June 19th + Plus you can read our full review of Love Simon http://c3f.ab6.myftpupload.com/love-simon/
Labels: 2020, coming out, TV series
