I’ll be honest, if I had known the concept of Almost Family before I watched the pilot, I might have been less keen to check it out. But the fact is, I watched it at PaleyFest NYC where you sit in a room and watch a ton of pilots all at once, so all I knew about Almost Family was what the subway posters told me: that Brittany Snow was in it.
The squicky concept is this: a man runs a fertility clinic and decided to use his own sperm to increase his success rate. But not unlike Jane the Virgin, if you can overlook the very awful circumstances that set up the show (that the show itself does not deny are horrible circumstances; in fact, the pilot ends with the man being charged with sexual assault, as he should be) you’ll find a heartfelt connection between a few lost souls for whom this discovery is the straw on the overburdened back of their messy lives. The pilot is full of drama and humor and Brittany Snow’s eyes, and also, much to my delight, Gay Content.
While the show itself is mostly about Julia (Brittany Snow, and whose dad is the perpetrator of the crimes), it’s also about a retired Olympic gymnast named Roxy (Emily Osment) and an attorney and frenemy of Julia’s, Edie (Megalyn Echikunwoke) who I believe will be most of interest to you, gentlereaders.
So cute. So tuff.
When we first meet Edie, she’s feeling very out of her element in some kind of tantric yoga/sex therapy situation with her husband, who feels like they’ve lost their spark. She tries to reassure him that everything is fine, but we get a little glimpse into what might be going on with her when she gets to work and sees Amanda Doherty and immediately gets flustered and worked up.
Edie and Amanda end up getting lunch together under the guise of shop talk, but Amanda soon starts flirting and asking if they’re on the “same team.” Edie stresses a bit and assures Amanda she got the wrong idea (which Amanda is respectful of and even though just the way she looks Edie makes it seem like she’s about to swallow her whole, she backs down when Amanda says she’s married) but Edie will later describe this moment as a thread being pulled at; feelings she thought she was keeping under wraps are starting to be unraveled.
I would panic if Amanda looked at me like that and I KNOW I’m gay.
In fact, later, when her husband casually mentions something about a team, Amanda snaps WHAT TEAM DO YOU THINK I’M ON?! and it’s clear there’s something (or someone) she can’t quite get off her mind. Edie doesn’t even make it until the end of the episode before these newfound urges take over and she meets up with Amanda again just to plant one on her.
Wastes! No! Time!
I love that Edie’s confusion isn’t going to be stretched out over the course of the entire season, and based on the previews for upcoming episodes, I think we’re about to go on a JOURNEY with Edie and Amanda. And I think we’re going to love it. Normally I’d feel a little weirder about a woman cheating on a man with another woman, because of the optics, but it seems like Edie’s husband isn’t really all in on the relationship either and is still harboring feelings for Julia, so maybe they’ll address that they were just friends who got too comfortable and avoid the ‘bisexual cheater’ trope. I personally have an extra layer of loving it already because I feel like Victoria Cartagena was always destined to give us a queer character to root for but Renee Montoya’s time on Gotham was cut devastatingly short, so this feels right in my bones.
Overall, I think this show is going to be largely about the friendships between Edie, Julia, and Roxy, which I love. They’ve all been victimized by one man’s crime, and that brought them together, but the fact is, they needed each other either way. They were all a bit untethered, and they all needed a hand to hold onto. And now, perhaps, they’ve found one or two.
I’m already pretty invested in this trio.
I think the show, so far, is doing a great job of villainizing Julia’s father. He displays classic abusive behavior when talking to her — telling her she’s special, convincing her to help him cover up his crimes by telling her that HER life will be ruined too if he goes down for this, etc – and I can only hope they won’t, at any point, try to redeem him. I hope Amanda only fights that much harder to take him down when she learns Edie and her mom are victims of this man’s crime, too. I hope they keep zooming in on Brittany Snow’s eyes and letting Emily Osment sing. And I hope they get as gay as it seems like they’re going to get.
Although I absolutely loved the pace of Edie’s coming out, at least to herself, I did find the sudden and bizarre plotline where Edie acts as though she is a victim in her marriage problematic. It was weird and unrealistic to see her jump when her HUSBAND touched her leg. Having said that, Edie and Amanda are a HOT couple and I am thoroughly interested in the show because of it. And redheads . . .
I have a feeling (that might be wrong) that Edie jumped when her husband touched her because she was daydreaming about Amanda. She seemed a little out of it, like she was focused on something else, so the “sudden” touch surprised her, instead of scaring her, is all.
The concept of this show makes me extremely uncomfortable. One one hand, as someone with children from a donor, I can’t even imagine something like this, and on the other hand I am interested in the found family dibling concept because we are close with our kids dibling families plus I like shows with mostly women main characters. I am interested to see the reception of this from other donor families.
Um, I don’t mean to alarm or scare you, but this is a thing that happens
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9193014/British-man-fathered-600-children-at-own-fertility-clinic.html
I swear that when Julia was skimming through the guys that she had hooked up with, that one of them was a woman.
I’m going to hold off on watching this until I get more info. The original Aussie show called “Sisters” was actually pretty good. Edie in that version was high strung and holding on by a thread at all times. She was both insufferable and relatable at least to me. She has some fantastic exchanges with her husband about her same sex attraction.
That said, and I don’t want to sound ungrateful for the content, but I really wished there were more queer black couples on my tv. Every time there is a black queer character she’s almost always (literally > 95% of the time) paired with a non-black character and that is often a white woman. This happens with Asians and Latin women as well. We POC do date within our race too and would like to see that represented.
oh i liked Sisters quite a bit!
I’m with you about queer black couples or queer poc being with other queer poc. I think it is important to show people in healthy relationships within their race.
Is Amanda not black/biracial?
Pretty sure Victoria Cartagena is Latinx, but your point stands, for sure
Just watched the pilot not realising it’s just a rip off of a series of ours in Australia, ‘Sisters’. While I’m always down for more queer relationships on TV, I have to say this version has lost a lot of the beautiful nuance from the original. Sisters is on netflix (not sure about in the US). Would highly recommend checking it out before watching this series. The acting in it is stellar with a lot of really high-profile aussie actors in it.
Sisters is on American Netflix as well!
@lily13 it isn’t a rip off. It is an adaptation. Big difference. Rip off makes it sound like they just copied the Australian show when what they did was actually by the license to make an American version just like The Good Doctor for the korean version.
fair! haha just encouraging people to go watch the really fab original :)
Being a lawyer and not even once having met someone like Amanda I feel that I got screwed and not in the way I wanted.