These are McLeod’s Daughters. They are all lesbians.

Pop CultureMarch 7, 2018

Theory: all of McLeod’s Daughters are gay as hell

Guest writer

These are McLeod’s Daughters. They are all lesbians.

Sam Rutledge is a die hard McLeod’s Daughters fan. Here she posits her (entirely canon and correct) theory that all the characters in the show are, in fact, gay.

If you somehow managed to miss every single episode of McLeod’s Daughters when it aired, because you didn’t have a television or you had better taste than me, let me describe it to you: it was an early-mid ’00s look at life on a sheep and beef farm in western Australia, rife with sexual tension and horse butts. And I don’t mean it was a soap opera set on a farm where a lot of extremely tangential things that could easily fit into an episode of Shortland Street happened. Nor was it an excuse for clothes to come off and the audience to witness several steamy rolls in the literal hay every episode. This show is about FARMS.

I mean, it’s about camp drafting and tomato chutney gone wrong, and losing sheep and feral bulls and horse breeding programmes. It’s about sibling relationships and land rivalries and ‘we didn’t have a good time at the sales this year’ drama. It’s surprisingly well-researched and feels authentic enough that I could actually believe some of the writers have set foot on a farm before.

McLeod’s was appointment TV for me for years; I watched the clock like a nerdy preteen hawk, desperate to kick the six people who lived in my house out of the living room. As a bona fide Horse Gal and, as I would slightly later discover, extremely gay, there was something so magical about watching a show that I felt had been made specifically for me. It was filled with horses and beautiful women and more women, who were beautiful, and they rode the horses and had beautiful hair and faces and I loved them. (Listen I know it seems obvious that I was gay now, but I swear that was my total thought process at the time and I never considered it weird at all.)

The first three seasons McLeod’s Daughters centred on Claire and Tess McLeod, two sisters who may have ended up being half-sisters, full sisters, cousins or all of the above by the end of the show. The McLeods were as numerous as hydra heads – every time one died or went to Argentina another two would pop up in their place, impossible to eradicate.

Tess and Claire had been estranged, but when their dad died and Tess saw the opportunity to make some hot dollar and buy a bunch of La-Z-Boys she called in to see her sis, a classic soft butch and perpetual bachelorette.

Oh right, sorry, did I also mention that everyone on this show is gay?

I guess it’s not ‘technically’ ‘canon’, but as an Official Gay Person, I can say with confidence: this show is absolutely rank with homos. It’s a degustation of gay. Even the theme song includes the cherished lyrics ‘you’re not alone, ‘cause I’ll be there, whooOOOAAA oooh OOHHHH’ – a gay refrain if I ever heard it – which segues into approximately 42 weekly minutes of distinctly gay behaviour by every character on screen. If you played a ‘spot the homoerotic subtext’ drinking game with this show you would be toasted within ten minutes. Just absolutely slaughtered.

Tess, the city hottie, arrives at the Drover’s Run ranch and spends the first episode running around in a dress with literally no bra, a bold choice given the wind and her classic early-2000s spaghetti straps. She’s the hard femme hero we need and deserve.

Now you might be saying, “Tess, a lesbian?” because I imagine you clicked into this to ask exactly that question for every character I mention here, but YES. Tess is immediately jealous of Becky, a straight up babe and title holder of Gungellan’s Baddest Influence. Being jealous of a girl who thinks it’s a great gag to flash her tits at all the male farm workers is an extremely lesbian move, Tess, because the jealousy is actually about attraction every time and I won’t hear a word against it.

Becky is maybe, I’ll admit, a little more bisexual than the others, but I still believe in my heart of hearts that after they left the show she and Jodi eventually found each other again because they realised they were in love and now they live happily ever after wherever it is in Australia that lesbians congregate and grow artisanal vegetables. Becky doesn’t care what people think about her and she kisses men so they’ll buy her drinks and it takes a lot of confidence to do that. Gay confidence? You read the title of this article so you better believe I think it’s gay confidence.

Becky is experimenting with the muscle tee look and it works for me.

Jodi is a late teen in the first season of McLeod’s, and easily influenced – when Becky turns up to help the shearers in a crop top and a denim skirt (why denim? Why a skirt? Because in 2001, we must), it doesn’t take long before Jodi is changing her clothes to something just as inappropriate for the situation. When Becky cuts her hair, Jodi immediately says “wow” and her mum Meg can see in her eyes that she’s already considering doing the same thing to her own hair and MAYBE MORE. I’m no expert, but I’m ready to believe that if she can so easily consider cutting off her hair it wouldn’t be that hard to also change her sexuality.

I don’t know why they had Meg go through enough cigarettes to smoke a fish but it’s hot.

Speaking of Meg Fountain, as I always want to be, she’s the resident Mom Friend of Drover’s Run and she just wants to provide delicious food and tomato chutney for her gay family.

When did we as a society stop tying our sweaters around our waists? When did we decide that was an unacceptable practice?

But by far the most textbook, the most classic eau de lesbiàn, wants to go to bonetown with a gal pal, gay-ass homosexual is… our favourite flannel-wearing, no-nonsense, almost always angry about something McLeod, Claire. Everything about her screams GAY CULTURE. What’s gayer than being mad all the time?

I’ll be honest with you – I feel a little weird going so ape on saying that Lisa Chappell is playing someone she thinks is gay but no one else on the show does but THAT’S WHAT IT FEELS LIKE.

Heteronormativity is a trip. Claire is like if you took the gayest person you could find and asked her to pretend to be straight, and everyone else also pretended she was straight and then in season three you ended up with a WHOLE BABY because of it. Like Lisa Chappell, call me. We can talk about this. Also, a lot of other things, please go on a date with me.

I mean, I know the synopses for this show like to mention the term ‘odd couple’ but I really don’t think they know how appropriate it is. Just two gay sisters watching some soft core porn before going online to cyber. Don’t believe me? It happened:

I don’t even know where to begin with the names of these chatrooms or with Claire having called herself ‘Farmgirl’, but I do appreciate that Tess gave her like a full crash course on how to use the internet for sex earlier in the episode. I’m not sure it helped – she almost immediately uses the words ‘big boy’ and ‘slow down’, classic heterosexual moves, and then manages to disconnect the internet accidentally.

She does not return to it.

Remember when Aaron Jeffrey was on Outrageous Fortune as a villain? This collar is more villainous than that.

On the male end of the gay spectrum, Alex Ryan goes to the rodeo and is ostensibly “showing Tess around” but the absolute king of the Unnecessarily Popped Collar spends at least ten minutes checking out all the (male) bronco riders with a sweet little smile on his dumb face.

I know he and Claire have some sort of ‘romance’ ‘plotline’ develop in season three, but they have the chemistry of two dudebro brothers obsessed with outdoing each other and I don’t buy them as a couple for one second. I reckon all Alex really wants in his life is a gentle and well-dressed rural boy who is good with his hands and wants to snuggle up on the couch at night. Outwardly butch, inwardly soft as hell. Maybe someone like… Dave the vet???

Alex is literally *more femme* than Claire.

Interestingly enough, the one canonical gay character on this show turns up in the second episode to solve a sheep-shearing crisis – I know, I know – and in a bizarre B plot, everyone thinks he’s a murderer but really he’s just hiding the fact that he’s gay and that’s why his wife left him. He would rather people believe he is a murderer than a regular boring gay person. A murderer.

A MURDERER.

There’s a guy just living his whole sheep shearing life with everyone certain he threw his wife and kids in a river because all these rural Aussies have the internet-intelligence level of Claire McLeod, and he’s just fine with it. Like, is he ever going to get a boyfriend? Is his boyfriend going to be into murder? Is he going to have to go on the East West Bisexual Network under a fake name to find true love???

I’m so concerned about what was going through the writers’ heads for this storyline. I mean, I get the ‘macho farm boys don’t like gays’ part even if it makes me feel uncomfortable and sad; I just wish there was a way that they could have handled it without the ‘we’re gonna pretend he killed his family’ part.

Anyway, don’t ever let anyone tell you we haven’t come a long way on TV. I know you all hate me for egregiously slapping gay labels on everyone in sight and ruining this show for you, but man. At least I can do that now without couching it as an article about a bunch of murderers.

Even without murdering homosexuals McLeod’s Daughters had its sticky moments, and at its end it had devolved completely into the thing it had detested at its beginning – a soap opera with no real defining features. After eight seasons it ended on a low note, only two of the original cast members (who had left and then come back) there to see it out.

When I recently started rewatching the show I assumed that plenty of its attitudes and plotlines had aged badly. But while some of the acting and dialogue is hokey and the clothing choices are ATROCIOUS (if anyone ever brings early 2000s clothing back into fashion I will come for them), this is a series made by women largely for women and there’s honestly not a lot of shows that have been made since that compare to it.

That’s not to say there aren’t several shows now that are specifically For The Ladies – some are even gay! But I do lament that we’ve never had a reboot of McLeod’s or at least a reunion-type miniseries that I could pretend I don’t want to watch but I end up finishing every episode like a damn gateau.

Where everyone is gay whether you like it or not.

Keep going!

How do we strongly link these tenuously linked women? Six Degrees of Separation.

Pop CultureMarch 6, 2018

From countess to future princess: playing six degrees of separation with Lightbox

Sam Brooks

Contributing writer

How do we strongly link these tenuously linked women? Six Degrees of Separation.

It takes a certain kind of obsessive mindset to want to play six degrees of separation – even more so to try and link fictional nobility to soon-to-be-actual royalty. Sam Brooks did it, and did it with Lightbox shows.

You know that game six degrees of separation? No? Well, you probably mostly know it as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which posits you can trace any performer – and potentially any person in the world – back to Kevin Bacon with only five people in between. It’s a fun game to play if you’re someone who has an encyclopedic, and largely useless, knowledge of film and TV credits.

It’s not often I’m afforded the opportunity to use my own encyclopedic and largely useless knowledge of film and TV credits in my day job, so I jumped at the chance to connect some dots. I’m also a secret royalist, so I not-so-secretly jumped at the chance to do one of my favourite things: Link royals together.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of actual royalty who do drama shows, because it would probably be frowned upon if Kate Middleton did a stint on Bates Motel or Homeland (but can you imagine that, though?). So I had to improvise.

Thus, I’m going to link TV’s favourite countess with TV’s favourite soon-to-be-princess. Maggie Smith –> Meghan Markle.

Let’s go. First up we’ve got…

Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley aka the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey

First up, we’ve got the iconic Dowager Countess. Coiner of immortal-in-my-eyes line “what is a weekend?” and winner of approximately three billion Emmys, Maggie Smith’s performance of the Countess became better known than the show itself. Even if you’ve never seen an episode, and why haven’t you, what do you have on that’s been so important, you know that Maggie Smith is on this show and she’s very good in it.

That’s where we’re starting.

From there we go to…

You got some Paul Giamatti in my Downton Abbey.

Paul Giamatti as Cora’s Brother in Downton Abbey and Ritchie in 30 Rock

Okay, it’s six degrees of separation. Some of these links are going to be tenuous – others are going to remind you that, hey! That guy/lady was on that show once. That’s cool. A worthwhile trade-off.

Thus, we’ve got Paul Giamatti, who played Cora’s playboy brother Harold on Downton Abbey, and even got nominated for an Emmy for it!

And we’ve also got Paul Giamatti, who played the bitter editor who lies to people about having slept with Liz Lemon, which is a bad thing to do! He’s sad and funny on 30 Rock, a show that’s often more funny than sad, thankfully. (However, if you’re finding yourself slowly turning into Liz Lemon like I am, you might find it more on the sad side than the fun side.)

Onwards and upwards though!

Dennis Duffy or The Vulture? (It’s The Vulture.)

Dean Winters as Dennis Duffy in 30 Rock and The Vulture in Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Dennis Duffy! The worst of Liz Lemon’s boyfriends, the one who adopted a black child because he could make the child go to college and be great at sports, the one who called Liz Lemon ‘dummy’ and the one she got together for a terrifying episode. He showed up at least once a season, and was always a reminder that even someone as smart and vaguely put-together as Liz Lemon could have legendarily terrible taste in men.

And from there, we’ve got The Vulture. A recurring villain on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and a reminder that even the NYPD can have bureaucratic nightmares in middle management that keep them from doing their jobs. What fun.

Is it Ron Swanson? It’s not, but it’s the same guy.

Nick Offerman as Frederick in Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation

There have been roles that Nick Offerman has done without facial hair. He looks terrifying and not quite right, like when you see a dog walk on its hind legs or a teacher outside of class. Thankfully, his guest starring role as Frederick, Holt’s petty ex-boyfriend on Brooklyn Nine-Nine is neither of these. He has a full beard, and he shows a completely different side of himself.

And then we’ve got Ron Swanson. If you don’t know who Ron Swanson is, or why Nick Offerman is so great, firstly you need to just go watch Parks and Recreation. It’s one of the best, most kind-hearted comedies out there, with a concrete-strong ensemble cast, and Offerman is one of the best things about it.

To display that, I give you this YouTube clip, which also links together this degree of separation and the next:

Lucy Lawless as Diane in Parks and Recreation and Three in Battlestar Galactica

New Zealand’s version own warrior princess, Lucy Lawless! Remember when she was on Parks and Recreation, with a surprisingly decent American accent and even more decent flair for the specific kind of sitcom humour that Parks and Rec thrives on? You know what to do if you don’t. (She’s from season five onwards.)

She also has a great role as one of the cylons (this isn’t a spoiler, this show is 15 years old) in Battlestar Galactica, which leads us right to…

Lucy Lawless and Tricia Helfer as Three and Six in Battlestar Galactica.

Tricia Helfer as Six in Battlestar Galactica and Evan Smith in Suits

To digress briefly for a bit: Tricia Helfer’s performance as Six on Battlestar Galactica is one of the best, most unheralded performances on television. It didn’t get the kudos it deserved when it was on (and really, none of the performances on Battlestar Galactica did), and what she does with Six is so key to a lot of the show working. She makes every individual Six both specific the same, playing variations on the same notes in really beautiful ways. This show sticks with me a lot, and one of the things that sticks with me most, even though I haven’t seen the show for ten years, if Helfer’s work on it.

And she also has a brief guest role in Suits, as one of the myriad opposing counsels that Harvey goes up against. Which leads us to the end of the six degrees…