Exclusive Interview
Kit Williamson Has Created the Top-Rated ‘Unconventional’ Rom-Com for the Queer Crowd
While Mid-Century Modern is busy over on Hulu scratching your queer content itch with a broad comedy about three gay pals sharing a house in Palm Springs, the most-watched original series on the LGBTQ+ service Revry has been serving up their own “chosen family” tale that is both filled with laughs, but also wildly, refreshingly different. It’s also sexy AF.
Unconventional, the latest project from Kit Williamson, who created the addictive Emmy-nominated series Eastsiders, looks at—among other things—how Palm Springs-dwelling couple Noah (Williamson) and Daniel (James Bland) navigate the nuances of something many folks may find, well, unconventional: Adding a third to their relationship. Ten years into their romance, things have gotten a bit meh for the two, and the attentions of the very hot Charmed alum Constantine Rousouli’s Adam are, at first glance, a sexy, welcome distraction from the widening gap between them.
“I think that it’s important to not end the story at ‘happily ever after,'” acknowledges Williamson (Mad Men). “In many ways, that’s where the story begins in a relationship. The moment when you’ve really committed to each other is sometimes when you’re getting ready to face the biggest challenges that you’ll face as a couple, as you make decisions that feel permanent.”
Unlike MCM, which has also had some fun with the friskiness of open relationships, the comedy here is a more grounded, wry humor, mined from the messiness of modern romance and the millennial mindset of fluidity.
“We’re not trying to approach the subject with any sort of agenda as far as telling people how they should feel or what they should do,” continues Williamson. “The show is really about forging your own unique path in the world, because as queer people, so many of the paths laid out for us by previous generations and our parents simply do not apply. We do not fit the mold. And that starts to become liberating when you start to think, ‘Well, what else might be true or what else might be untrue about the world?'”
Adding to the issues eternal grad student Noah and family-minded Daniel are desperate to ignore is the fact that Adam is more than just a go-go dancer down for a good time. “You’ll see Adam is a fully rounded three-dimensional character with his own backstory of wants, needs and desires,” says Williamson. “And the show I think goes some pretty unexpected places for the storyline.”
TBH, the whole show hangs out in unexpected places. In addition to the Adam of it all, Noah and Daniel have also agreed to be “donor dads” to Noah’s sister Margot (Aubrey Shae) and her Eliza (Briana Venskus). As the episodes play out, Daniel’s quiet apprehension, Margot’s mental health and the crippling intricacies of surrogate rights and adoption costs have driven storylines toward developments that have been comical, heartbreaking, and rarely explored on TV. This gives the series an air of alluring uncertainty. You never know what these people are going to choose to do or how they will react to challenges, given their innate disinterest in being clichés.
Williamson points out “that’s something that we did a lot with on Eastsiders as well. Not stereotyping, but digging into the behavior that might be considered stereotypical, be it threesomes, drinking, open relationships, mental-health struggles. What are the assumptions that an audience, in particular a queer audience, might come to the story with, and how can the story interact with an interplay with those assumptions? I think that’s a lot of where the surprises can come from…because in real life, people surprise themselves.”
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A Mississippi native, himself, Williamson had originally planned to set the show in New Orleans. Then COVID hit and he saw the chance to relocate the story to California desert (where he and husband John Halbach, an Unconventional guest, can frequently be found lounging in enviable Instagram posts) yet retain the expat nature of Texan transplants Noah and Margo searching for a home of their own. “Both Margo and Noah’s characters come from a deeply red, conservative Christian part of Texas,” explains Williamson. “I drew inspiration from my own upbringing in Mississippi to tell that story and my own journey of leaving home at 16 to go to art school, then New York, L.A. and meeting the love of my life.”
Admitting that the community Noah, Daniel, Margot, and Eliza have discovered—which includes guest stars William Belli, Kathy Griffin, Glee‘s Jenna Ushkowitz, full-zaddy Tuc Watkins, and Beth Grant)—in Palm Springs “to some viewers may seem like a queer utopia,” he’s OK to with that because he knows it’s not fiction.
“I think it’s important to put the message there that, for a lot of people, this queer utopia is reality. You can find these communities, these pockets of queerness and culture, and they have always existed dating back to Tennessee Williams.”
Unconventional, Streaming Now, Revry
