Queer as Folk: The Complete Third Season (5 Discs)

What I love about QAF is this: the writers are brilliant and their minds project from the first to the final episode. You only experience this fully by watching the entire season at one time. The gratuitous sex, violence, and drugs are grating, but at the end of each episode I'm left a little bewildered and enticed to want to know what will happen next. By the final episode I am floored.

I don't read the reviews that tell me the plot and subplots. This stuff is obvious. But I do want you to know how QAF makes me feel and think. I'm generally conservative, but by the end of each season I want to celebrate being human, and I want the next season right away. QAF is about failure and redemption and the whole of human experience on fast-forward and in technocolor. I laughed when one reviewer said that he skips through certain sequences but takes his time on the sex scenes.

The QAF experience is just the opposite, it requires some of life's experience and a certain maturity to understand - to work through the stubborn glamorization of what is excessive and infantile in gay life and to finally see the characters for what they are: humans with hearts of blood and stone. I especially love the references to prior seasons, bringing Blake back at the end of the final episode was outstanding in the context of what was happening to Ted. Wow.

Okay, another year until season four. I'll rent it all at once, watch it over a weekend, laugh out loud, shed a tear, clap, fume, and in the end be overjoyed. I know the formula and characters will be the same, but that the twists will more than make up for it. I wouldn't associate with any one of these characters in real life but in the end, they're all my friends. Now that, that is remarkable testament to why QAF is so damned brilliant.

Scott Lowell's performance as Ted addicted to crystal meth is outstanding. Peter Paige also does a spectacular job as Emmitt, Ted's boyfriend, trying to deal with the addition. This saga within the series is one of the best parts of season three.

That being said, I could have done without Hunter: was he added to the show simply to have a twink on hand now that Justin is maturing? Also, I would love to see just ONE episode where it isn't necessary for the cast to get their freak on at Babylon, the disco.

I cringe when I see the illicit, casual sex and casual drug use on the show. I will respect the writers' decision to include it, as it's part of gay life. But the writers could be more inclusive of the diversity of opinions in the community by adding a character that is opposed to casual sex and recreational drug use. They do exist!