It's sad when you discover that one of the icons of your childhood has died. Sadder when you discover that he died in 2021.
Peter Scolari was short, blond, muscular, handsome -- perfect. Born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1955, his tv career began in 1978, with some guest spots and a starring role in the short-lived Goodtime Girls, with such future stars as Annie Potts, Scott Baio, and Adrian Zmed. It was set during World War II, so the "good time" was just a gushy tagline, like the tv shows Happy Days and..um..Good Times.
In 1980, Peter hit television fame with
Bosom Buddies, pitched to the network as a "witty Billy Wilder-style buddy comedy, like
Some Like It Hot." The network only heard
Some Like it Hot, and put the buddies, Peter and then-unknown Tom Hanks, in drag. They explain in the intro that it's just so they can live in an all-female residential hotel; they're heterosexual, so "it's all perfectly normal."
In the second season, they minimized the "they're guys in dresses, har har!" jokes to concentrate on the buddy-bonding. The two became lifelong friends off-camera, too. Tom Hanks states that they were "connected at the molecular level." Today we would call it a bromance.
The theme song, Billy Joel's "This is My Life," was an anthem for all of the gay boys of the 1980s who fled homophobic small towns for the freedom of West Hollywood or New York:
I don't need you to worry for me, cause I'm all right,
I don't want you to tell me it's time to come home.
I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life.
Go ahead with your own life, and leave me alone.
Next came episodes of
Steambath, which was
Loveboat at the baths, with no gay characters;
Finder of Lost Loves, which was
Loveboat with private detectives, with no gay characters; and
Love Boat.The next tv show I saw Peter in was Newhart (1984- 90), with Bob Newhart as the proprietor of a rustic New England bed-and-breakfast, later the host of a tv show, Vermont Today. Peter played his producer, Michael Harris, who falls in love with heiress-turned-maid Stephanie. No beefcake -- in an interview, Peter said that he never takes his shirt off because Michael "doesn't have biceps like this"; no gay characters, and it ends horribly, when the whole series turns out to be the dream of the psychiatrist Bob Newhart in his old show.
Still, as it bounced around the schedule with Designing Women and Kate and Allie, it provided some glimpses of gay potential, like the three buddy-bonding brothers, Larry, Darryl, and Darryl.
I didn't see much of Peter after Newhart. I was living in West Hollywood, then New York, and not interacting much in the Straight World. He had some guest spots on Empty Nest and Burke's Law, voiced Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain, and had a starring role in Dweebs, another short-lived series about computer nerds. Future queer-friendly comedian Kathy Griffin also appeared.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Series sounds awful, but it won two Emmies, a review calls it "the best-written kids' show on television," and it lasted for 68 episodes. Peter played the guy who shrinks kids, and Thomas Dekker, who would grow up to have a chest, played the kid who gets shrunk.
Actually, the shrinking in the title was just to draw in audiences from the movies. Peter's character invents a lot of things: glasses that allow you to see the dead; a time machine; a brain-swapping device, a clone machine; a love drug.
More tv shows follow:
Touched by an Angel, Ally McBeal, Reba, The West Wing, Commissioner Loeb in
Gotham, Peter in
Madoff, and then his magnum opus,
Girls, 2012-17.The Girls are in their 20s, living in New York City, and, according to wikipedia, having "post-feminist conversations around the body politic and female sexual subjecthood."
There are various men in their lives, including Andrew Rannells, who dated Hannah in college before coming out as gay in Season 4, and Peter as Hannah's father Tad, who comes out as gay in Season 4 also, and starts dating Keith, played by Ethan Phillips.
More after the break
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