Watching the Queer Eyes for the Straight Guys

Over the weekend I watched a couple episodes of the new Queer Eye for the Straight Guy reboot on Netflix. I first saw the original when I was young with my mom and my sister and I remember it being one of our favorite TV shows to watch together (along with American Idol, because the early 2000’s were the golden era of reality TV). I was surprised by the reboot and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, so I watched a couple episodes of the original (which you can find on YouTube), and I spoke to my sister who basically said: “the new queer eye is PC to the point of being an affront to the original”. If you watch the two pilot episodes of the original and the reboot, you can see what she means. In the original the “Fab 5” joke about sex (both gay and straight) almost constantly as well as showing the most intimate parts of the straight guy’s life (there is a lot of underwear to make fun of). The show is much more explicit in the way that it acknowledges sex as an important part of gay life, as well as the lives of the straight guys whose lives they improve (usually for the purpose of meeting a partner). In the reboot, these kinds of comments are rare, or at least sanitized, and the intimate look into the straight guy’s life is much less. The Netflix show claims to be “about acceptance” rather than “about tolerance” which they claim to be the purpose of the original. The original makes no such statement, but it is clear to see that it had less of a self-awareness of what the show could mean in a larger context of LGBTQ rights (at least in it’s pilot episode). Now, I acknowledge that a lot of this may have to do with the networks they were/are on. While Bravo as a niche network was not created necessarily for a mainstream audience, Netflix captures a much larger piece of a mainstream international audience, making its sanitization more essential, and thus the show less provoking than the original. I don’t know if this is true, but I present it as a point of discussion. I am not sure how much it could be said that Queer Eye sees the acceptance of the Fab 5 (and thus, for them, the larger gay community) as conditional on certain degree of sanitation or ‘political correctness’ both in its humor and the process it demonstrates.