I’m referring to moments, like a powerful scene in which a group of men lock arms around a squad car, full of their friends who are being beaten and arrested by police for being gay, and sing “God Save Us Nelly Queens” from the bottom of their hearts. I don’t mean specific events, of which this series is much more natural just hitting checkpoints or throwing in glaring cultural references.
The series wants to cover a lot of ground, and its fascinating most of all when it leads with history. In turn, these performances offer a sense of discovery, both in the story’s vivid world, and of the new actors’ strong range. While their characters are written to be a bit too glossy with their perfect words and their simple flaws, they're given raw embodiments by McKenzie, Skeggs and Majors. In this tense first episode (and in the second, which deals with the beginning of the AIDS epidemic killing gay men), t he three leads are all compelling. All the while, San Francisco is divided by homophobia, in which cops openly harass gay men and women, with the city even trying to push out the gay community thinking it will help their tourism. And coming from overseas is a young black man from New Jersey who joined the armed forces, Ken Jones (Jonathan Majors) who comes to San Francisco after being assigned to help with racial sensitivity training for other army and Navy men, while dealing with his own private sexuality. Streets away in San Francisco, a young gay woman named Roma Guy (Emily Skeggs) is making her place in the city, trying to start up a movement for lesbian feminists, after a group like NOW (National Organization for Women) excluded them because of their homosexuality.
McKenzie) who moves away from his suburban family to San Francisco in the early '70s, embracing his homosexuality and looking to connect with people who aren’t like his father ( David Hyde Pierce), who in particular says that Cleve has a disease. It's based off the previously unpublished manuscript by activist Cleve Jones, who later worked for Milk’s campaign and starts off here as a young man (played by Austin P. And along with this story making one want to revisit the 2008 biopic again (which I did directly because of this show), the series initially plays out like a spin-off of that film. “When We Rise” will play this week on ABC in four-episodes/six parts starting tonight, and the first episode is written by Dustin Lance Black and directed by the man who visualized “Milk,” Gus Van Sant.
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