It shouldn’t take the popularity of Jordan Peterson or the presidency of Donald Trump to tell us masculinity has been in a bad place. Better evidence abounds. Look no further than long term demographic decline concurrent with the culturally ascendent denial of gender differences. Or consider the cringey helicopter-parent quality of that New York magazine cover story “How to Raise a Boy,” revisit James Damore’s infamous Google memo, and while you’re at it unpack your nagging worry that #MeToo is only making it harder for men and women to live and work in harmony—and you’ll see that it’s only getting weirder out there.
But whatever’s wrong with men, and I have few ideas, there’s no such thing as a collective identity crisis. Everyone’s is his alone. Forging a sense of self out of composite context clues, cultural expectations, and innate qualities is and always has been a human life’s defining journey. This psychic coming-of-age trial that Carl Jung called individuation is pretty much the subject of all great art, from at least the Epic of Gilgamesh onward. And that includes Netflix’s revival of the early 2000s makeover show Queer Eye, which was recently renewed for a second season.
The original show rode out four seasons on the amusing but by then already outdated premise that only gay guys—here, a team of lifestyle experts called “the Fab Five”—have the unique taste and talent in such matters as fashion, cooking, and home decorating required to rescue straight men still lost at the tail end of the grunge-era doldrums. Above all, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (the original show’s full name) taught us one thing: Watching guys with stringy long hair and ugly clothes get refashioned and forced to host elegant dinner parties will never not be fun.
Whether the gimmick still works 15 years later spurred debate before and after the reboot’s streaming debut last month. But throughout the first season, its every episode set in Georgia, the new complement of makeover artists—chef Antoni Porowski, decorator Bobby Berk, Jonathan Van Ness, Karamo Brown, and Tan France—charge past the surfacework of that old premise.
The first subject, 57-year-old retiree Tom Jackson, lived alone in a basement apartment drinking Mountain Dew and tequila, “redneck margaritas,” and he considered himself irredeemably ugly. And yet, after a single week of soul-searching and beard-trimming, he’d reunited with his ex. In a recent interview, Jackson, who’s worried daughter nominated him for the show, thanked the show hosts for helping him out of a hole. “They reminded me that I should have confidence in myself. I think that was a big issue for me, and I was so grateful for their advice,” he said, but even so, nothing’s really changed apart from his wardrobe: “I’m just a country boy from Kentucky, and I’m just me.”
Elsewhere in Atlanta, a makeover-ee who hid behind his overgrown facial hair hadn’t had friends to his apartment in years. Neal Reddy stubbornly deflected the advice he was given all week with bitter, meager quips—until in a soulful toast at the party he finally hosts while they watch remotely, he thanked the guys for forcing him out his fearful armor. There’s A.J. Brown, a man who ostensibly needs to clean his apartment, but even more so needs to come out to his stepmother so that he and his partner can get engaged. Another man, Remington Porter, vaguely aspires to start a business but has been stunted since his father’s death; he shuffles around an inherited house in a uniform of workout clothes, whether or not he’s been working out. In the end, he and his mother discuss their grief and the life his father would have wanted for him. Plus, an overworked father of six gets to give his harried wife the proper wedding they never really had. And a very stereotypical millennial who’s still living at home with his parents at age 31 gets a hard nudge.
It may sound like typical heartwarming reality TV fluff. But these men’s problems and the tender magic 2018’s Queer Eye uses to tackle them have no less to tell us about modern masculinity than any number of gloomier offerings. Speaking of which—Antoni Porowski, who teaches the men to cook and entertain, wears an A Little Life tee shirt with the names of the four friends from Hanya Yanagihara’s tragically realistic 2015 novel about torment and love and friendship’s necessary but perpetually imperfect redemption.
Every episode—except for the finale, in which they makeover not just a man but also the fire station where he works—finds a life in disarray. The Fab Five make it their mission to tune each subject’s external expression into fresh harmony with who he ought to be. They won’t have saved him or set right the world of men. All they can do is help him rehearse a few habits he might not, and probably won’t, keep. But, when it comes to a life’s lonely maintenance, that’s most of the work.
