Let’s be real: it’s almost too easy to hate on The Real Friends of WeHo.
The new reality series premiered last Friday on MTV in the plum post-Drag Race time slot to much chatter from online gays. The series follows the lives of several (supposed) friends, among them Canada’s Drag Race judge and stylist Brad Goreski and musician Todrick Hall, as they brunch and party and gaggle in the eponymous West Hollywood.
It’s chock full of overproduced drama and nonsense that viewers of The Real Housewives will be intimately familiar with (and the series does share several producers with Housewives). From its trailer and marketing, the promises of the series are clear: drinks will be thrown, insults will be lobbed and accusations of friendship betrayal will be plentiful. Someone’s going to be mad they weren’t invited to a party, and drama is going to be communicated with suspicious music drops. Celeb “friends” will make awkward appearances. At first look, it seems like it’s trying to be just classic Bravo-esque reality TV.
But a unique cocktail—dare I say, a bottomless mimosa—of influences have led The Real Friends to be not just any old trashy gay reality show, but a discourse flashpoint, a moral litmus test and a yardstick for queer progress.
What is the end goal of queer representation in popular media? It sounds like a heavy question for something of the quality of The Real Friends, but considering Hall’s accusatory defensiveness around the show, you’d think that someone threw the first brick at Stonewall so that after Drag Race we could watch rich gays fake argue over brunch in WeHo.
Sentiments toward The Real Friends were already down due to its perceived cutting into precious Drag Race time. For the first time in years, the franchise series of Drag Race shortened episodes to one hour after several seasons of hour-and-a-half outings—not directly tied to The Real Friends. MTV also broke up the Drag Race viewing block of the main show and Untucked, usually one after another, but now with The Real Friends sandwiched in between for its six-week run, in what is a pretty blatant attempt to get Drag Race eyes on something else.
Don’t get me wrong, I edit the culture section of an LGBTQ2S+ culture site—I’m constantly thinking about how to get Drag Race fans to look at literally anything else. But fans are not going to be keen when it’s that obvious that they’re being dragged through something new with the promise of Untucked at the end of the tunnel. On top of that is the show’s pretty heavy pandering in marketing to the thriving queer Real Housewives fan base. The baiting question was pretty clear: do you like rich women bitching at each other? How about rich GAYS bitching at each other?
After a string of social media reactions, skepticism and concern over the shortened Drag Race time (including a petition to MTV) rolled out ahead of the show’s premiere—and that’s par for the course fan overreaction—Hall overreacted in turn. The musician penned a 10-page handwritten open letter on Instagram essentially calling on gays to support the show as a moral obligation.
“When our LGBTQ+ show was announced, you’d think any pushback would’ve come from the church or conservatives upset with three hours of queer programming on a major network,” he wrote. “But a closer look would show you that the call was coming from inside the house. We fight for acceptance, yet we don’t accept our own. We fight for representation and then fight against it.”
It’s quite a treatise, and Hall doubled down with another handwritten Instagram message two days after the show dropped, specifically defending the show’s platforming of rich gay men (one of the aspects it had been criticized for). He ends by pointing to a statistic that gay men make more money on average than straight men as some sort of justification for the show being groundbreaking representation.
“We are successful, we work hard and we deserve to see ourselves thriving on TV,” Hall wrote.
In summary: rich people have rights too, so stop being mean to them!
I’m not going to fight with Todrick Hall about whether or not The Real Friends of WeHo is a good show. But I do think it’s worth considering why Hall is so defensive of this fluffy piece of media and what we talk about when we talk about “good representation” or “important” pop culture for queer folks.
Hall’s defensiveness echoes that of Billy Eichner last year when his big-budget studio rom-com Bros flopped at the box office, and many Twitter gays have been rightfully quick to make that comparison. Bros had a pile of studio money and marketing behind it as the first gay rom-com from a major studio. Eichner bombarded the talk-show circuit and various red carpets in the leadup to the film, positioning Bros as this groundbreaking thing and a must-see for gay and straight audiences alike.
In reality the movie is … fine! Not great, not terrible, just fine. It has some good jokes, but sort of drags under the weight of trying to please everyone. It’s a great movie to watch on a plane, or something to put on while getting drunk with your besties.
But Eichner positioned viewing his film as some sort of moral duty for both gay and straight people. If we didn’t watch—or god forbid, didn’t like—it, that was a failing on us as the audience, not on the thing being presented to us or the people who made it. We didn’t care enough to support the gay thing, and shame on us for not doing so.
Hall’s messaging echoes that the problem with The Real Friends is not the quality of the show itself, but rather that, much like Bros before it, it was shoved down our throats as a representation win—a perception Hall and other defenders have only added to by positioning the show as somehow groundbreaking. When in reality, it’s just a bad trashy gay reality TV show, like Tampa Baes and The Real L Word—two imperfect, arguably outright problematic, properties that have breezed past the collective consciousness.
There have been representational moments in TV and film that have changed things and have been capital-I Important. Think of Ellen DeGeneres coming out and what that meant for queer stars being open about their identities, or Laverne Cox on Orange Is the New Black as a vital step that paved the way for Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and Yasmin Finney after her. And as a teen in the early 2010s, I (somewhat regretfully) owe a lot of my own development of self and identity to Glee and its highlighting of a spectrum of queer experiences.
These trailblazers and media properties are rightfully championed for making a difference. But just because something has queer people in it doesn’t mean it’s breaking new ground—or that it has to. Yet the problem Hall, Eichner and other famous gays still are grappling with is that just because they made a thing or are in a thing, doesn’t mean it’s an important step in the gay representation timeline.
We should celebrate the fact that queer representation has gotten to the point that there’s enough stuff out there that not all of it has to be good or important. That we aren’t fighting for scraps anymore, but can actually call out trashy TV for what it is, and enjoy it (or not) instead of hoisting it up as trailblazing.
In 2023, is the first gay reality TV show with rich stars really a milestone we need to embrace and celebrate? Sometimes a trashy gay reality TV show is just a trashy gay reality TV show. Sometimes a gay rom-com is just a gay rom-com. Let’s move on and look forward to the next one—because luckily enough for us, there will definitely be a next one.
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