When they try to talk about what happened, Eric is very defensive about Buddy assuming he was gay.
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When we return, we’re greeted by this unnerved expression as Buddy drives Eric home. How wacky that less-than-macho Eric is assumed to be gay! How funny that he doesn’t know a kiss is coming, but we do thanks to the foreshadowing laughing track! When he is kissed, Eric literally flails, screams and stammers, “Woah! You-you are-you’re-you’re gay!?” It’s cartoonish gay panic that leads us into the commercial break. Watching “Eric’s Buddy,” I was appalled by how Eric and his friends responded to Buddy being gay, beginning with that kiss.įor starters, the kiss is played for laughs. Achieving this television landmark has won “Eric’s Buddy” retroactive love online, with several sites remembering the episode as “normalizing” a gay kiss, commending Eric for not reacting with gay panic, and crowing that Buddy was “always shown as a complete person and not a stereotype.” Frankly, I’m astounded over all this slobbering. But That ’70s Show beat Dawson’s Creek’s passionate liplock between Jack McPhee (Kerr Smith) and Ethan (Adam Kauffman) by 5 months. This is the first man-on-man kiss to air on North American prime time television. “And I feel like I’m playing this part, right? And it’s not me…”īuddy agrees, and then moves in, and kisses Eric on the mouth.
Fez that 70s show movie#
“Sometimes, you know, like, we’re in a movie (theatre), and I’m nervous around her,” Eric confesses. Their scripted reaction will become an increasingly important indicator of how the show expects the audience to respond to Buddy.) (The laugh track audience begins to chuckle. “It’s okay to be confused,” Buddy counsels. Buddy asks if she’s his girlfriend, and Eric sighs, “I don’t know.” The big scene begins with Eric realizing he forgot to call Donna. Something must be amiss! And we learn exactly what that is when Buddy kisses Eric. (A chipper montage shows them jump high-five over playing pinball, sucking at basketball, and buying weed.) Meanwhile, Jackie is disturbed because someone as uncool as Eric shouldn’t be able to make a clique jump this grand.
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When he starts buddying up to his lab partner Buddy Morgan (Gordon-Levitt), Hyde and Kelso are pissed, mostly because instead of driving them home from school in his station wagon, he’s riding around with his cooler, richer, more popular doppelganger with the matching floppy haircut.
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Before long though, I was revolted at how low the bar was not so long ago.Īiring on December 6th, 1998, the episode titled “Eric’s Buddy” centered on Eric Foreman (Grace) making a friend outside his basement-dwelling clique. Wilmer says that he’s less appreciative of reboots that don’t include the original cast members – although he singles out Hawaii 5-0, MacGyver, and Magnum PI as exceptions, saying he does enjoy watching them.Īmid reboot mania, That 70s Show is approaching its twentieth anniversary, leading to fevered speculation of a reunion.Hanging out, channel surfing, I stumbled across a That ’70s Show rerun that caught my eye, because hey! Isn’t that teenaged Joseph Gordon-Levitt showing off his rad car to Topher Grace? I didn’t remember the ep, so I settled in over my cereal, not realizing I was revisiting a groundbreaking moment in gay representation on television. ‘I think cable and I think streaming are gambling on more original ideas, and I love that because that’s where most real performers and actors and producers and directors are actually ending up at.’ All these reboots are the safe bet for most of these big networks, because they don’t want to invest in something that hasn’t really been done. ‘To me, there’s very little originality, and there’s very few original ideas that are given a shot. 'It’s lazy for networks to not create new content, it’s lazy for studios to continue to acquire titles and reboot them with a new direction, a new tone, a new face, a new cast, or whatever it is. ‘On the other side of the coin, I feel like it’s lazy,’ he says. While Wilmer admits to enjoying having his ‘nostalgia thirst’ quenched by the return of some of his own personal favourites, he sees the current trends in television as being destructive to the art form, as networks desperately grasp at the past to get shows noticed in what he calls ‘a sea of content’.