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By Bradford Nordeen

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Print September 2024

Green is the Brattest Color

LA Fairs Itself

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Photo: Patrick McPheron

Los Angeles–based writer and curator Bradford Nordeen is the founder of Dirty Looks Inc. He is the author of Blessed Western, a forthcoming novel, and Check Your Vernacular (Dirty Looks Press, 2014). He is also the editor of the “Dirty Looks Volume” series (Dirty Looks Press, 2016–) and cowrote Because Horror with Johnny Ray Huston (Dirty Looks Press, Semiotext[e], 2020). In 2018, he was the recipient of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

VERY DELTA (2022–)

One could argue that this weekly “luxury public access podcast and YouTube talk show,” as characterized by its hostess, Delta Work, shouldn’t be included on a best-of-TV list. But it’s 2024, baby—this is broadcasting! I tune in religiously to watch the sundry tantrums tossed across the desk of this Emmy-winning hairstylist for (and season-three contestant on) RuPaul’s Drag Race. The show’s gauzy studio aesthetics and 4:3 framing wink knowingly at the bygone days of cable access and its egalitarian tomfoolery. Her extemporaneous rants (via the “Go Off Delta” segment) range in topic, from air travel, corporate accountability during Pride, and soup to ASMR vocality and TikTok trend-hopping. Homing in on the small things in life allows for Delta to mother us all with sturdy etiquette lessons that never smother as she spews queeny dish and shares her working knowledge of Los Angeles drag history. Former Drag Race contestants who come on as guests get the show more clicks. But the best banter occurs with those who’ve shared LA stages with this twenty-six-year veteran of drag. If anyone will keep the children decorous, it’s Delta.
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (2022–)

AMC’s well-reviewed but criminally under-watched adaptation of Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles” (1976–2001) was created by theater professionals. This comes to light in the slow, epic build of the show’s second gut-wrenching “Claudia” season, which examines the breakdown of social niceties through strained relationships and assorted deceptions, bringing viewers to a bodice-ripping finale that eviscerates any amorous and familial bonds. The season’s quiet storm is fomented by the fragile form of stage actor Assad Zaman, who plays Armand, the villainous 514-year-old former Delhi slave and vampiric love interest to Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), with a hushed guile. I sided with him all season and was as devastated as our lead, Louis, by the depths and duration of his duplicity. Alas, I always crushed out on the Disney villains.
VESTIDAS DE AZUL (DRESSED IN BLUE, 2023–24)

While Veneno (2020)—produced by media sensations Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (often referred to collectively as “Los Javis”)—dramatizes the extraordinary life of Spanish trans personality Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez and was the best queer television of the past twenty years, Max (fka HBO) opted to pass on its second season. So that means you’ll have to do some online digging for Vestidas de azul, which adapts a 1983 Spanish-language trans documentary of the same name to give us more episodic, telenovela-style divinity.
SORT OF (2021–24)

Sure, the CBC Television–produced program, which centered on the experience of transgender Pakistani millennial Sabi Mehboob (played by Bilal Baig, who cocreated the show with actor Fab Filippo), is officially over. But I savored every last kitchen-sink moment of this pertinent and ironic melodrama.
ABBOTT ELEMENTARY (2021–)

Accepting the joy torch from Schitt’s Creek (2015–20), this mock-doc ABC sitcom—a pop-juggernaut created by and starring Quinta Brunson—returns for season four, which tackles the impact of gentrification on a public grade school in southwest Philly. The ensemble cast is an embarrassment of riches, but the scene-stealing Janelle James reigns supreme on account of her razor-sharp comic timing playing Ava Coleman, Abbott’s inept and low-key-villainous principal.
FANTASMAS (2024–)

A gay leather bar for hamsters? He’s so Julio! The perfect visual for Brat Summer came hot on the heels of writer and director Julio Torres’s stellar art-world melodrama/immigration film, Problemista (2023). Airing on Max, Fantasmas is a sprawling New York fairy tale about the search for a missing oyster earring—and arrived after the network canceled Torres’s previous production, Los Espookys (2019–22).
HOW TO DIE ALONE (2024–)

The chemistry between Natasha Rothwell, the breakout star of Max’s Insecure (2016–21), and Conrad Ricamora, who plays Abe Lincoln on Broadway in Oh, Mary!, transcends the formulaic writing on this new Onyx series about a JFK airport worker who has a near-death experience on her thirty-fifth birthday. It’s awkward and tender in all the right places.
THE REGIME (2024)

In this Max miniseries, Kate Winslet played the messy and miserable Elena Vernham, the fictitious potentate of a nameless country in Middle Europe—a role the actress may have chosen on a lark and purely for her own amusement. While Winslet’s camp scenery-chewing is delectable, we end up buckling in for a ride that is, ultimately, rather tepid. The show’s true plot seems to be about boardroom transparency—a staging of just how far corporate will go to keep a star in their stable.
LEE DANIELS, THE DELIVERANCE (2024)

Initially, this one wasn’t on my list. But if watercooler moments are spread through television, Glenn Close certainly made waves (“I can smell your nappy . . . ”) with her turn in this Netflix-produced film. Wisely dropped at the beginning of Labor Day weekend, this wild-fired potboiler, in true TV-movie fashion, allowed Daniels an auteurist mic-drop invisible to those who busy themselves with auteur studies. His take on The Exorcist yielded emotional realism for Black audiences, solidifying him as the heir apparent to not just director Douglas Sirk, but also Ross Hunter, Sirk’s famously homosexual producer.
FOR THE LOVE OF DILFS (2023–)

This low-budget gay reality-TV dating show, hosted by Stormy Daniels for OUTtv, keeps up the homo hegemonyby pairing daddies with himbos (broadcast loves a binary!). This show truly has no right to be on anyone’s year-end list, but the casting for season two is remarkable. Daniel and Derrick Hart, who compete individually as himbos, are identical, Brooklyn-raised twins with toned pecs, flowing weaves, and the most attention-grabbing vocal fry to purr across any form of media this year. The show blissfully is what it is, but anytime the “Hart Twinz” finished each other’s sentences during the confessionals and elimination ceremonies, I found myself paralyzed, like a cat pulled up by its scruff, powerless to the melodic siren-call of their nasal, distended delivery. Cast these boys in EVERYTHING. They’re twenty-four-karat (fool’s) gold.

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Sofía Córdova, Green is A Solace,
A Promise of Peace (where small birds hide and dodge and lift their plaintive rallying cries) (detail), 2022, taxidermied doves, parakeets, and canaries, hair dye, brass, birch wood,
dimensions variable. — Sofía Córdova, Green is A Solace, A Promise of Peace (where small birds hide and dodge and lift their plaintive rallying cries) (detail), 2022, taxidermied doves, parakeets, and canaries, hair dye, brass, birch wood. Installation view, JOAN, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo: Evan Walsh.

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