COMING THIS FALL:
Designing Man,
Season 1:
Paint by Numbers: A Gay Affair, Friday nights at 9.
New episodes follow gay men through landscapes and interiors, living their best lives, free from discrimination, harassment, and religious intolerance. It is pop art about living rather than products. Warhol painted soup cans; this show paints the men in your feed.
Season 1 heads outdoors. Each episode is a digital collage that sets men from social media into vintage paint-by-number scenes found on Etsy, from mountain lakes and pine forests to desert mesas and the Golden Gate Bridge. They flex, rinse, stretch, and kiss in stages across the ground, just as they do on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and OnlyFans. Bing, bing, bing. Muybridge, bing, bing, bing.
A blue moon rises over every landscape for desire and transformation. The Jupiter 3, the next model of the Lost in Space ship, appears in every episode, ready for freedom and movement. A few classic film stars drop by along the way.
Pilot opens at the lake, where a swimmer in navy briefs strikes a Greek contrapposto as another man moves under the pines.
Creekside brings the bather, one of painting's oldest subjects, back to the woods, with one man rinsing his hair, another waist-deep in the creek with his shirt open, and a face in the corner looking straight at you.
Desert Flex stacks three men in sunglasses into one many-armed body, a nod to the Futurists, while Walter Pidgeon, captain of the Forbidden Planet saucer, watches the Jupiter 3 cross the mesa.
The Echo finds a man flexing in front of his own repeated image as a waterfall pours down behind him, phone tucked in his waistband, ready for the next post.
Cooldown follows a runner in blue shorts peeling off his shirt after a run, à la Muybridge.
In Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart is back in San Francisco and still cannot stop looking, and this time the view is one man in three poses beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
The season continues with The Cabin, the full paint-by-number vacation of lake, rowboat, woody wagon, and cabin, where the same two men kiss again and again.