Falling for Angels

Once again, the typical LGBTQ+ viewer sees less and less relevant content available on television. Such are the stereotypical shows whose writers and producers sincerely believe they're doing something concrete and meaningful to help the hetero world understand what makes our community tick. In most instances, nothing could be further from the truth. 'Falling for Angels' is one such example.

Set in what is falsely described as the most culturally diverse city in our great country, LaLa Land, 'Falling for Angels' falls far short of providing anything significant that might bolster the importance and self realization of how wonderful and diverse our world is. The writing team, including David Millbern, are the typical gay men who believe the world rises and sets on the City of Angels. Guess what guys, you're wrong and that fact adversely affects the quality of your work and hence, this series. I'd have more respect for 'Falling for Angels, if it were more geographically balanced which clearly is not the case.

Get your behinds out of LA and see what you might discover in Fargo, or Des Moines, or Burlington Vermont.

By isolating yourselves in SOCAL, you do a great disservice to your writing and communicating skills, thus failing to show how very varied and wonderful the LGBTQ+ truly is. We don't see it here.

Out of the 6 episodes, I found:

• one to be really good & insightful
• two episodes were "OK" and somewhat enjoyable
• three were "so so" or not very good (esp. The last one).

The first five episodes of this series, which I missed when it came out, are wonderful. The writing in each, although from different writers, was beautifully related to the other episodes. Painfully honest and critical of the gay community as it was celebrating it, this should have been a longer series. The acting was uniformly wonderful and all the actors credible. I especially liked the Boyle Heights and the Asian episodes. They spoke with sincerity (and what seems like authenticity, but being an older white guy, I'm not going to claim to know if this is accurate) and made the characters realistic by showing us their weaknesses and strengths simultaneously and trusting the audience to make their own judgement call on them. I would love to see more from this team of writer-producers.

The episodes are well written and produced, but it's almost as if they were from 10 years ago when film-makers were striving to make gay people more mainstream. But then, the current culture in America has taken a few steps backwards. Regardless, this is "must-watch" material. I only hope that future episodes will expand beyond the Los Angeles area for a more global flavour.

Not sure why (and definitely no spoilers added) my previous review disappeared, but I'll do my best to recreate it. While I really liked several of the episodes in this series, the final "Malibu" was by far the worst...and not worst in that it was the worst of these episodes, but in that it was really, REALLY bad. It was almost as if all the characters from all the previous episodes suddenly shed their personalities and became one big gay, cutesie cliche'. In fact, it really seemed as someone completely different had written this episode not having seen/read the scripts of the previous, which is why all the characters here have no unique voice. I did find it interesting that the two protagonists came from the web series "What If..." but sadly I didn't know of the series at the time I watched this episode, and thus had no idea of the back story that was alluded to during the episode. Just a very sad and anticlimactic let-down to an otherwise great series.