Aidan Micho: Unexpected beefcake in "Minimum Wage" leads to comedian brothers, a pizza place upstate, bondage, and a 12-incher

 

Minimum Wage (2026) just dropped on Netflix, a mockumentary about quirky teenage employees at a pizza place in central New York.  The surprisingly hunky Randall Park plays company CEO, who drops in to inform the the workers that he's planning to shut down their branch for under-performance, but changes his mind when they help restore his joie de vivre.  

 I was surprised that teenagers working part-time minimum wage jobs love the pizza place so much that they are devastated by the threat of closure.  Couldn't they get new jobs elsewhere?  And why doesn't the title have something t to do with pizza, to go along with premise: "Money doesn't buy happiness, but it buys pizza, which is almost the same thing."  Agreed.

No gay characters are immediately obvious; there are several mentions of girlfriends or the desire for girlfriends in the first episode.  But some of the guys are cute, such as Tommy Armstrong as an indie musican, and there's a shot of unexpected beefcake.

Here it was Aidan (Aidan Micho), pranked by his coworkers into thinking that if you spend ten minutes in the freezer, your penis will grow two inches. When he asks "How long?", they just make numbers up.  That's mean -- and dangerous -- but the reference to Aidan's penis is a plus.  And no one said he had to be shirtless.

I love it when guys take their shirts off for no reason but to give viewers something to gawk at.

1. Is the character Aiden gay?  

He wears a bracelet and an ostentatious ring, and sometimes flashes a limp wrist. When the drama club visits, Aidan becomes defensive about his knowledge of classic musicals: "It's not weird."  Does he mean "It doesn't make me gay?"

He tries to find some male strippers for the female manager's birthday party, and approaches two EMT guys outside a club. "Fun, an EMT theme!  How much do you guys cost?"  "Free, depending on your insurance." 

"Great, my friend is gonna die.  Come to 605 Water Street in ten minutes."  

When he worries about losing his hair, he notes that both of his dads have full heads of hair. "My surrogate mother must be bald!"  Har-har.

They're not going to make a guy with gay dads gay himself. 

Oh, well, at least he takes off his shirt again when they buy a hot tub, and cuddles with Hyde Healy, left.

Sorry Hyde, you're short, but not attractive enough for a profile.

But Aidan? 

Question #2: Has Aidan played any gay characters elsewhere?

Filmmaker and comedian Aidan Micho has 120,000 followers on Instagram and 51,000  on Tiktok, with 1.1 million likes. He and his brother Ryan have 616,000 Youtube subscribers for their comedy shorts.

They grew up in Baldwin, New York --- upstate, about a 20 minute drive from Syracuse - graduated from high school in 2019 and 2021, and attended Syracuse University.

Most of Aidan's on-screen roles have ben walk ons:

Banana Split (2018), about two girls chasing the same boy.  Dylan Sprouse appears.Aidan plays Locker Student.

Left: Dylan's dick, in case you haven't seen it lately.

Miguel Wants to Fight (2023): Miguel (Tyler Dean Flores) is moving to the big city, where he'll have to fight, so he asks his three friends to help him prepare.  Aidan plays a Bully's Friend.

Prom Dates (2024): Two girls break up with their romantic partners just before the big prom.  Now they need new dates in a hurry!  I seem to recall hearing that one of girls is a lesbian. Aidan plays "Cargo Shorts Bro"

More after the break

The Four Seasons: Elitist New Yorkers discuss True Love, with a gay couple, a lumberjack, Vivaldi, and a n*de Len Cariou

I lived in New York for four years while studying for my Ph.D.  One thing that bothered me was the parochialism, like that New Yorker cover come to life ("View of the World from 9th Avenue," by Saul Steinberg).  Literally everywhere else in the world was a cultural wasteland.

 Everyone always asked "Where are you from?", assuming that the answer would be "Scarsdale" or "Astoria."  I said Illinois:  "Oh, Chicago!  Now that's a second rate city!  Did you eat hot dogs at (snicker, snicker).baseball games?"

"No, my town was on the other side of the state, on the Iowa border."

"Iowa!  Ma and Pa Kettle chawing tobaccy!  How old were you (snicker, snicker) when you first saw one of those newfangled auto-mobiles?"

So I started saying "Los Angeles":   "How dreadfully superficial!  All about mindless movies and puerile television!  Do you watch (snicker, snicker) the A Team?"  

The Four Seasons, on Netflix, gave me a similar vibe: parochial, elitist, condescending, so I never made it through an episode.  But from what I can gather, it features three couples who leave the City (there's only one city) for a weekend getaway Upstate (there's only one state) four times a year.  There they talk in Woody Allen witicisms and discuss romantic love.

The main question is stated in the first episode:  Does each of us get a soulmate, someone chosen by the Universe to make our lives infinitely happy forever, or do we fall in love based on physical attraction and social compatibility, and then work to maintain the relationship?   Each couple will face a crisis that illustrates some aspect of the question.  

As the clickbait links say, the answer will surprise you.  Or not.  It's the theme of every romantic movie ever made.

But you may be surprised to find that one of the couples is gay.

Couple #1, Nick and Anne (Steve Carrell of The Office, left, Kerri Kenney):  What if you no longer love your soulmate?

Nick shocks everyone when he announces that he no longer loves his wife.  "Impossible!  You're soulmates!  You're destined to be together!"

When he dumps her anyway and starts dating the much younger Ginny ("The penis wants what the penis wants), his friends are all devastated.  If a married couple can break up, how does anything have meaning?

 His daughter, who attends an Ivy League College Upstate, maybe Vassar, writes a play in which her callous, unfeeling monster of a father announces: "I hate my daughter so much.  What could I do to cause her the most pain?  I know -- I'll leave my wife, thus destroying the family and making my daughter's life meaningless forever!"

The universe also disapproves of leaving your soulmate, and retaliates by killing Nick.  This leads to the discomfort of having the ex-wife and the horrible trollope he destroyed her life for showing up at the funeral.  Such a negative attitude toward divorce seems extremely retro.   

Couple #2, Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo from Fear the Walking Dead,  famous playwright Marco Calvani, left): What if your soulmate dies?

When Danny is diagnosed with heart disease, he leaves Claude to spare him the agony of seeing his decline and death, but Claude insists on getting back together: they're soulmates, in sickness and health. Someday one of them will die and leave the other alone, but the bereaved spouse will still find infinite happiness in the memory of their time together.

By the way, they have an open relationship, and have their "I'm leaving you so you won't feel pain" argument in the midst of a threesome with the Lumberjack (Jacob Buckenmyer).

Jacob Buckenmyer, seen here in Chippendales, is straight in real life.

More after the break.