When she brings in Cary for a meeting at her pink-emblazoned office, she all but attacks him with the f-word as soon he shows up: “I am gagging for you, faggot!” In Berlant’s hands, Pitzi is a delightfully deranged version of that white girl at a bar who wants to have a gay best friend as an accessory. Take high-powered talent agent Pitzi Pyle (played with crazed zeal by Kate Berlant). He’s never quite confident enough in his looks, his demeanor, or his talent, and it’s this behavior that makes him such an unlikely poster boy for Chase’s gay anthem and such a refreshing gay character.īy making Cary a working actor, a rather niche slice of life, The Other Two also manages to comment not just on a very specific type of gay man, but also on the way Hollywood (mis)understands LGBTQ representation.
He’s the kind of fumbling, slightly insecure guy who gets his sister to shave his lower back hair before appearing shirtless on TV, and who pines for his super-hot straight roommate, and bumbles away any opportunity for deep connection with other gay men around him. But while Billy and Elijah prided themselves on their quick-witted sass, arguably a defense mechanism to survive the ruthlessness of the city and of their chosen careers, Cary is decidedly demure.
When we first meet him in the show’s pilot, he’s auditioning for “Man at Party Who Smells Fart,” a far cry from his high school heydays when he played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Like Difficult People’s Billy Epstein (Billy Eichner) and Girls’ Elijah Krantz (Andrew Rannells), Cary is a white actor living in New York who is still waiting for his big break. A biting satire about the state of fame and celebrity in 2019, The Other Two is also arguably one of the most astute television portrayals of what it’s like to be a gay man living in a big city.Īt first glance Cary Dubek looks like many other gay male characters who have graced the small screen this past decade. Or, at the very least, a camp joke: the kind of thing gays love but make fun of (“like Britney,” he’s told). Initially wary of the video’s effect on his career (and his relationship with his grandma), Cary eventually comes around to accepting that its success makes him a gay icon. The song, a fitting send-up of “love is love” rhetoric, and Cary’s conflicted reaction to it, captures what the show, created by former SNL head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, does so well.
“My brother’s brave / My brother’s wise / My brother doesn’t like girls / He likes guys.” So begins the hit single “My Brother's Gay” performed by fictional tween heartthrob Chase Dreams (played by TikTok star Case Walker), whose skyrocketing fame bewilders his two older siblings - newly single, self-involved Brooke and the song’s inspiration, struggling actor Cary - in Comedy Central’s new sitcom The Other Two.