"Wellmania" Episode 1.5: Gaz cheats on his boyfriend, Chad shows his dick, and Liv has yet another meltdown

The 8-episode comedy/drama Wellmania, 2023, stars Celeste Barber as Liv Healy, a New York Times food writer who returns to her home town of Sydney to cover a food event and discovers that her dangerously high cholesterol level prevents her from getting a green card to return to the U.S.  She must lower it to continue her career.  

The premise and episode descriptions on Netflix give you no hint of gay representation, but according to Wikipedia, Liv's brother Gaz (Lachlan Buchanan) is gay, and appears with his fiancé Dalbert Tan  (Remy Hii) in every episode. 

Left: Remy Hii.

Episode 1.2 says that Liv iefuses to attend the wedding.  I checked the scene: it has nothing to do with homophobia.  She just doesn't like the family thinking of her as a joke.  I reviewed Episode 1.5, "Hall of Mirrors."

Scene 1: Mom is retiring, so Liv gives a depressed speech: "You can have your colon cleansed and do your 450,000 steps a day, but it doesn't matter, because we're all going to die."  Gaz and Dalbert tell her to shut up and stop ruining Mom's day.

So she takes a bite out of the cake before it's cut and asks for more booze.

Mom's dining companion has heard that Gaz is getting married, and asks who the "lucky lady" is.  Mom doesn't divulge much, does she.  "Me, because we're homosexuals."  "So are my favorite patients!  They have such fascinating sexual injuries." Jerk

Uh-oh, Gaz gets a text from someone named Sebastian, lies that he has a lot of clients to see, leaves.  Cheating on the boyfriend?  

Liz runs into the bathroom to throw up.  Mom wants to know why she keeps doing such unhealthy things.  "You can't have two perfect children."  Gaz is perfect?  Just wait...

Editor Valerie call.  Everyone loves her Camille article. "It was gutsy!  It was real!" She wants Liv in New York to "be the third judge in the show," but Liv is trapped in Australia. 

From here there are three plotlines.  I'll review each separately.

Liv's Story: Liv accosts Chad, Guy Edmonds,  the American counsul, while he's in the men's room. She needs a new doctor to bribe to say her cholesterol level is ok, so she can get her green card back and return to New York -- she sort of attacked the old one, Dr. Singh. Couldn't you go on a tourist visa if you just want to be the judge on the show?

"It's a once in a lifetime opportunity.  Haven't you ever had a dream?"  While she is begging, she accidentally scatters paper towels, and gets on her knees to pick them up just as another man comes in.  "It's not what it looks like."  "No, it's worse," Chad retorts.

Chad's penis after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Jamie McGuire: The Smiley Creature from "From," with Halifax hunks and a nude Dylan Sprouse

 

From, on MGM+, is set in the ruins of a small town, with a diner, a police station, a hotel, a farm, and some houses, where stranded travelers from various parts of the U.S. get stuck.  Every night humanoid creatures appear, dressed in 1950s costumes -- mechanic, nurse, librarian, tv cowboy.  They try to lure you outside, or trick you into letting them in, whereupon they turn into monsters and kill you.  

The Creatures are the main threat, and one of the biggest mysteries, in From. They are impervious to most weapons, but they don't have paranormal powers.  Their physiology is human, but dessicated, as if they've been mummified.  They were once regular humans: a creature named Jasmine says "I didn't ask to be this way."  My theory is that some sort of dark magic went wrong during the 1950s, zapping the town into a pocket universe and transforming some of the townsfolk into Creatures.

Jamie McGuire's Smiley Creature has become a fan favorite, due to his especially huge, creepy grin and his quirky personality: he  seems delighted to be part of the world again.  He feels furniture, picks up objects.  He climbs aboard a stalled bus and plays at driving it.  

He was killed in Season 2, but Creatures never really die, so chances are he'll be back in Season 3.

Without the creepy grin, Jamie is quite handsome, so I wanted to know more about him.  

He's been interviewed a dozen times, but mostly about the Smiley Creature -- and he doesn't know any more than we do.  He just puts on a creepy grin and follows the director's instructions.

Jamie McGuire turns out to be very diffcult to research.  A Google search yields 3,000 entries about a romance novelist named Jamie McGuire, mostly reviewing two of her books that have been made into movies, Beautiful Disaster and Beautiful Wedding.    Dylan Sprouse, top photo and left, stars as an inked bad boy boxer.

Dylan's butt for the road

More Jamie after the break

The top 15 hunks of "The Twilight Saga," with some nude vampires and werewolves

Twilight, a series of four young adult paranormal fantasy novels by Stephanie Meyer, was published between between 2005 and 2008, with sequels in 2015 and 2020. They have been translated into 49 languages, with worldwide sales of 140 million.  The movie series, which appeared between 2008 and 2012, grossed $3.36 billion worldwide.

The premise: teenager Bella moves to Forks, Washington with her parents, and falls in love with the vampire Edward.  When he leaves town, she falls in love with the werewolf Jacob.  Eventually she has to choose between them: she chooses Edward, and they get married and have a daughter. 

There were lots of sexy, tortured vampires before, on Dark Shadows and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the novels of Anne Rice, but never whole tribes of them.  And uber-muscular, macho vampires, not sophisticates and androgynes.  Perfect for erasing the gay symbolism from the vampire mythos and producing a totally gay-free world.

And it is.  There are dozens of vampire, werewolf, and human characters, but not a single gay one, in the books or any of the movies.

Are you really surprised?  The series is aimed at an audience of teens, who are never allowed to know that gay people exist.  It's fantasy, and gay people appear almost exclusively in comedies set in the real world.   Kristen Stewart, the actress who played Bella, claimed that the series had a "gay inclination...it's all about oppression."  

Big deal.  This was in 2012, not 1965.

But that doesn't mean that gay teens must be content to watch actors looking sullen with their shirts off.  There are always subtexts, either intentional or accidental, especially among the gay or gay-friendly members of the cast: 

The Vampires:

1. Robert Pattinson, left, as head vampire Edward.

2. Peter Facinelli as Carlisle, his Dad.

3. Kellan Lutz, left, as Emmett, his brother.

4. Jackson Rathbone, left, as Jasper, his younger brother.

5-6. Christopher Heyerdale and Cameron Bright as Marcus, leader of the Volturi vampires, who have lived in Italy since Etruscan times.

7. Xavier Samuel, left, as Riley, companion of the evil vampire Victoria, who is trying to kill Bella.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.