Having won fans around with world with four seasons of the intensely personal Please Like Me, Australian writer, actor and comedian Josh Thomas appears to have taken a different approach for his new series, Everything's Gonna Be Okay, which feels a little bit more like a US sitcom.
It tells the story of Nicholas (played by Thomas), an Australian entomologist who becomes the guardian of his two American half-sisters, teenagers Matilda and Genevieve, after their father dies unexpectedly. Along for the ride is Nicholas' boyfriend Alex, played by Adam Faison.
While this show has clearly been produced with an international audience in mind, Thomas has maintained his raw approach to exploring themes of sexuality, sexual consent, family and grief. Also thrown into the mix is a view on what it's like to cautiously stumble into life beyond your 20s.
Speaking to , Thomas explained that he knew the type of characters he wanted to write well before he wrote them.
"This show is just three characters, I wanted a character with autism, I wanted a teenage girl - I always think teenage girls are really interesting, and then I'm in it...because it's my job...If they let you be in your own TV show, of course you're there, yeah."
He continued, explaining that he "didn't really have that much more to say about my late 20s" after Please Like Me. He wanted to go younger,to look at the challenges of life as a high school student. This is where his character's half sisters, one of whom has autism, come in.
Josh Thomas has followed up on 'Please Like Me' with 'Everything's Gonna Be Okay'. Source: Stan
"Even though the show's not personal, it's definitely my experience of what it's like to be a teenager from those two girls," Thomas told . "Those two girls are like versions of me when I was a teenage girl, I guess."
Thomas was also open about the challenges of bringing explicitly queer content to screen, admitting it's common to get a little bit of push-back on depictions of gay sex.
"They queried it [an explicit gay sex scene] very gently," Thomas said. "I said, 'We absolutely need that... Gay sex is anal sex and if you don't let me have that you're telling me I can't put gay sex on television.'"
"And then they never brought it up again. I think they agreed."
Thomas isn't the only TV runner paving the way for honest depictions of gay sex. Last year, TV audiences celebrated a tenderly handled sex scene in Ryan O'Connell's Netflix comedy, Special, which examines life as a gay man with disability.
"That scene was really really important to me," O’Connell said in an interview with . "That sex scene was my baby."
He continued: "I have been really frustrated about the lack of representation of gay sex in film and TV [and] I don’t understand why anal sex has not been normalised or depicted for what it is."
Similarly, writer and producer Russell T Davies has been praised for championing realistic depictions of gay sex on screen, including a scene featuring UK actor Russell Tovey in Years and Years.
You can watch the trailer for Everything's Gonna Be Okay below:
