Dame Margaret Endorses: Work in Progress

Hello, Dames Nationals! Margaret’s month of queer recommendations continues! Featured today: Showtime’s Work in Progress, one of my favorite TV shows of 2019 (though I did not discover it until 2020)

this gif is very pertinent to my life right now, and I imagine that’s true for… many of us

Fittingly enough, today is the one-year wedding anniversary of the couple who introduced me to the show— I do not subscribe to Showtime, but they do, and when I was looking after their exceptionally beautiful beagle they nearly insisted I take the weekend to watch the show. With only 8 half-hour episodes, it seemed attainable, so I figured I’d try it and, by episode three, I was completely in love. 

The premise of the show is deceptively sad— I am going to relate it, but you have to promise you won’t be like “Ugh, bummer” because even though it’s not NOT a bummer sometimes, it is primarily really warm and life-affirming and funny. Abby (played by the show’s star, creator, and writer, comic Abby McEnany) is a middle-aged lesbian struggling with OCD and depression. An overbearing coworker has given her a jar of almonds as a way to encourage weight loss via “healthy snacking” and Abby tells her therapist that she’s going to throw one almond away every day and, if things haven’t improved by the time she throws away the 180th, she is going to kill herself. At which point, Abby looks up and realizes her therapist has died, mid-session.

I KNOW. I KNOW. This all sounds extremely bleak. But that’s because you don’t know what happens next. The same day, Abby meets a staggeringly attractive trans man, Chris, and they begin to date. And fall very much in love. 

Nearly every gif on Tumblr from this show is of Theo Germaine as Chris and look, Tumblr has a point. The man has DANGEROUSLY HUGE amounts of swagger. 

And from there, the show becomes both a story about Chris and Abby, but also a story about the evolution of queer life over the last thirty years. The communities Abby and Chris occupy are ones I have never seen depicted as fully on TV before let alone in interaction with one another. Both Abby’s crowd of middle-aged but still rowdy lesbians and the kind of… multi-racial, gender-queer, polyamorous sexual puppy pile that is Chris’s friend group are immediately recognizeable to me and the interplay between them created by Abby and Chris’s relationship is absolutely fascinating. And, best of all, you don’t need wonderful friends with a Showtime subscription to watch this right now— through 6/30, the whole first season is streaming for free on YouTube, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. Give it a try up through episode 3— I think you will find it worth your while. I love it intensely. 

XO/Dame M.