Cast Gay Actors in Gay Roles! (Unless It’s Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth.)

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.

This week:

• Chris Evans’ penis wants you to vote.
• The honorary Tucci gay pass.
• A very, very bad show.
• The stuff of Pandemmy nightmares.
• Take the No. 2 Express line.

Me: Cast gay actors in gay roles!!!

Also me: Unless it is Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth in this movie that will absolutely destroy me!!!

I can’t explain why the rules are such that The Tooch and Sir Firthy forever get a free pass in the debate over whether it matters that straight actors are constantly cast in gay romances while there is still no such thing as an out gay movie star or romantic lead (hint: it matters!). But it is an unimpeachable truth.

Tucci and Firth, who previously delivered iconic performances as gay men in Oscar-nominated films The Devil Wears Prada and A Single Man as well as the egregiously Oscar-snubbed masterpiece Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, can play gay all they want and I won’t be mad about it. Gays can be hypocrites, too; it’s called equal rights.

In any case, the trailer for a film called Supernova came out this week, in which a couple played by the duo take an RV trip across England to bond as Tucci’s character starts to succumb to dementia, becoming less lucid with each week.

“I want to be remembered for who I was, and not who I’m about to become,” Tucci says at some point in the trailer, specifically the point at which I let out an involuntary sharp yelp and spewed tears out of my eyeballs like someone ran a wrecking ball through the wall of the Hoover Dam.

(Grab your tissues and watch it here.)

I don’t particularly like to talk about things that are patently terrible, to desecrate something that many people ostensibly worked very hard on yet still ends up being a painfully convoluted and perhaps entirely meritless exercise in televised rancid garbage. And so it gives me no pleasure to talk about the new reality series I Can See Your Voice, which premiered this week on Fox.

It is a game show—in that I believe that is the closest thing to how this series can be described—hosted by Ken Jeong in which a contestant attempts to guess which of the singers standing before her are good singers and which are bad singers, without actually hearing them sing. Instead they must rely on context clues and advice chirped from the sidelines by, for some reason, celebrity advisers, including the likes of Nick Lachey, Kelly Osbourne, Arsenio Hall, and Cheryl Hines.

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Jeong, bless his heart, seemed to be confusing even himself as he contorted his brain through the explanation of the rules, which still never made sense. At first, the singers lip sync along to a song that is actually the good singers’ own voices but not the bad singers’ own voices, the goal of which is to trick the contestant into thinking that, either way, they are a good singer. Then the contestant has to decide who was a bad singer from those lip syncs.

As the rounds continue, the contestant gets more clues about the singers to gauge who is lying about their abilities, but the bad singers’ agenda is always to trick them. So there is essentially no strategy to invest in as the contestant attempts their way to $100,000, which they win if they happen to end the game having guessed the final good singer—essentially by random.

I have a headache from typing that.

Don’t get me wrong. I had a lovely time watching the show and screaming out loud about how it makes no sense. And now I am demanding credit for making it through the entire episode by sharing my frustrations with you.

Without a doubt, the most unhinged thing about the unprecedented virtual Emmy Awards was the army of interns wearing hazmat suits who showed up at the winners’ homes to hand them their trophy without possibly transmitting the coronavirus.

Answering a burning question I had after watching, Variety reported that there were, in fact, hazmat trophy bearers stationed outside every nominee’s home or hotel room, but generally only made their presence known if their assigned target won.

It’s a commitment to a bit that, as my friend, TV critic Caroline Framke noted, conjures a hilarious image: “Laughing hard at the idea of a person in a tuxedoed hazmat suit sitting outside, like, Jodie Comer’s London flat, in the middle of the gd night, before having to drag themselves and an Emmy away.”

Or, if you’d like an actual visual, cub entertainment reporter Ramy Youssef came through with an exclusive:

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Banned from taking a shit on the 2 train? This city really is dead.

What to watch this week:

The Great British Baking Show: It finally returns, a miracle for real soggy bottom times. (Friday on Netflix)

Fargo: Fargo was doing the big-deal limited series thing before it was cool, a real first for North Dakota-adjacent pop culture. (Sunday on FX)

The Boys in the Band: The rare gathering of white gays that actually has something important to say. (Wednesday on Netflix)

What to skip this week:

The Comey Rule: I truly do not know who this is for, except for maybe James Comey. (Sunday on Showtime)

Connecting…: I wish I had more information about this one, but I ran screaming out of the room when I read the description: “Covid-era, Zoom-style sitcom.” (Thursday on NBC)