Over the past few weeks, I’ve been rewatching one of my all time favorite non-Star Trek shows, the British teen superhero dramedy Misfits. If you haven’t had the pleasure of watching Misfits (it’s available on Hulu in the US and… somewhere else in other countries, probably), it can roughly be summed up as “what if you gave a bunch of fuck ups superpowers?” A group of young adults get caught in a freak storm while doing community service, they develop superpowers, and hijinks ensue. It leans hard into the kind of offensive comedy that was extremely popular during its 20tweens run, and is very much my jam. (I will even defend the much maligned fourth and fifth seasons, which I actually think are good as long as you see them as a spin off with a different cast that takes place in the same universe rather than the same show as the first three seasons.)
(In a second I’m going to actually talk about queer shit, but I just need to get a little bit more Misfits hyping out of my system first: the show launched the career of a number of talented actors who you may find yourself recognizing! Klaus from The Umbrella Academy! Evie from Lovesick! Ramsay Bolton from Game of Thrones! Meera Reed from Game of Thrones! Some other people who were in Game of Thrones! Ruth Negga! Anyway lots of cool, talented people are in it and you should watch it.)
Watching Misfits now, over a decade after its final season, I steeled myself for a lot of comedy homophobia, a genre that was popular at the time. And it’s definitely there, especially in the first seasons when Nathan — a character who boils over with the kind of suppressed homoeroticism channeled into gay jokes that powered like ten Seth Rogen movies — is in the mix (though in later seasons, when a recurring character is gay, the show treats him and his sexuality respectfully, I’d say).
But what I had forgotten about was the relative chillness that the show exhibits towards bisexuality — despite the fact that I don’t think that anyone ever utters the B word at any point during the show’s five seasons.
There are a couple of instances of bisexuality that crop up throughout the run of Misfits. The first one that comes to mind is a season two episode where a magical tattoo renders Nathan helplessly in love with nerdy outcast Simon. This one is the roughest, because while you do get the impression from the show that Nathan’s probably bi on some level, this particular set up leans into the hilarity of him actually attempting to act on those urges, especially since the object of his affection is a nerdy straight boy who is… not into it.
But in season three we get our first of female bisexuality and it is… interesting how it’s handled, actually. The set up for this one is that one of the characters has gotten a power that allows him to swap his gender at will; after blowing things with a woman as the boy version of himself, he reconnects with her as the girl version — only to find that she’s interested in pursuing things with this version of him, too.
What’s fascinating to me is that while the show has an odd exchange where the gender swapping character gets weirded out when another character asks if his girl self is a lesbian (IIRC his answer is something like, “It’s not like that — it’s just that she’s me, and I’m into girls, so she is too”), there’s literally never any weirdness about the bi woman in the mix. It’s not clear whether she’s dated women in the past, or whether this is a first for her, and yet it’s also not treated as an area worth investigating, either. She is simply allowed to date a man, and then date a woman, and be free of any biphobic baggage as a result.
So there’s that. And then there’s also a season 5 plot point where another female character — one who’s been struck by amnesia and been having a lot of unsatisfying sex with men as she tries to figure out who she is — suddenly becomes obsessed with a woman she runs into at a bar. There’s a very convoluted (and spoilery) explanation for why she’s drawn to this woman that I won’t go into, but I will say that for about half an episode the character is convinced that she’s a lesbian, and then in later episodes falls in love with a man who’s been transformed into a turtle and this, too, is all kind of… fine?
While she’s not a lesbian — and it’s unclear if she’d actually be into women outside of this one specific girl — she’s still allowed to be obsessed with this one specific girl, and then decide she’s into men again, and it’s all just generally accepted. And to me, that, too, is bisexuality — even if no one ever names it.
And honestly, rewatching this show leaves me wondering if what I want is Bisexual Visibility™️ in the sense of having bisexuality named and claimed, or I simply want characters to be given the freedom to just explore connections with other characters as the story allows. I mean honestly, if two characters have chemistry, if it’s interesting to connect them with one another, why not just let it happen, you know? That’s basically how I feel about my own bisexuality. I don’t see why fictional representations of it should be any different.
Anyway.
I wasn’t originally intending to write about Misfits today, because do you really need an essay on how bisexuality figures into an obscure show that aired its final episode over a decade ago? (Yes.) But I wound up doing it any way because the other thing that was calling to me was a couple brief news items about how Aidy Bryant called the Film Independent Spirit Awards the “Bisexual Oscars,” and, ugh.
The joke itself just struck me as something dated and stupid, like, lol, being bisexual is so indie and edgy, and then I got doubly annoyed because Vulture said that there was bisexual lighting behind Bryant when she made the crack, which there was not (do they know what bisexual lighting is?), and I was going to write about how dated it all felt; but then I decided that if I were going to write about that I might as well write about something literally dated that still feels kind of fresh.
Anyway. Go watch Misfits. I want to be able to talk about it with more people.
PS I’m not sure if anyone aside from me and my OCD actually expects this to be a daily newsletter, but because I feel guilty that it hasn’t been, here’s an explanation of what’s up: I am no longer underemployed (yay!), but, oof, turns out working two part-time jobs plus doing development on a secret project I can’t talk about plus trying to write a proposal for a memoir plus doing lobbying for a parallel unemployment fund for excluded workers (I was in Albany on Monday!) plus dealing with some general life stuff is… a lot? I will continue to be here, probably multiple times a week even, but just don’t want to overcommit. So that’s the story on that.
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