Looking: The Complete First Season

While it didn't pull in enough viewers for HBO to order a third season, Looking has garnered wide and rightful acclaim as a smart, sensitive, entertaining, and disarmingly authentic look at contemporary urban gay culture. The lifestyle, dreams, and ambitions of a trio of San Francisco friends are at the center of this series, which follows the mostly romantic adventures of Patrick (Jonathan Groff), Dom (Murray Bartlett), and Agustín (Frankie J. Alvarez). Each character leads a rich life full of work pressures, social largesse, and personal transformation, finding themselves in the midst of engaging tales of the city that are poignant, funny, and moving—honoring the quest of the human heart in a way that's only incidentally specific to male anatomy. Patrick is torn between finding Mr. Right and Mr. Right Now; Agustín grapples with the universal angst native to committed-relationship territory; and Dom faces a crisis related to the middle-age need for more permanent personal and professional attachments, which have eluded him. Looking's honesty extends to raw sexuality as well as raw emotion, but while the writing sometimes slips into glib half-hour sitcom territory, for the most part the show is entirely believable and uniformly engaging. Compiling all eight episodes from the 2014 debut season, extras include episode commentaries. Recommended. (T. Fry)