janedavitt

I was interviewed on Tumblr about fandom and pro-writing: interview is here.

It was great getting to chat with Sika about fandom though it's a subject I could ramble on about for hours, contradicting myself often most likely, so she was probably wondering how to get me to shut up ;-))

It's amazing what you can find with the right combination of search words.

I found this 1999 essay on gay subtext on TV

You're Watching it Wrong! by Katherine Keller

and, naturally (inevitably) there was a section for The Sentinel. She gets a point knocked off for spelling both Garett's names wrong but I awarded ten for this bit:

The actors are aware of the subtext in the relationship. In an interview for TV Gen magazine when asked about Jim Ellison’s love life, Richard Burgi responded, “...Or maybe there could be a Sandburg/Ellison romance down the road....I’d be willing to explore that sort of thing.” (Wolf).

When Rachel Sabotini visited the set of The Sentinel, an important prop in the episode being filmed (which has not yet aired) involved a statue of a large man carrying a smaller man on his back. Garrett Maggert (Blair Sandburg) had plenty to say about the statue. Rachel’s e-mail reads:

At one point he caught sight of the fake whale-bone statue -- “Hey, you see that?” We looked, we nodded. “That’s a statue to Jim’s and my passionate love.” We tried not snort, and since reaction was good he riffed on it. “Yeah, we spent five hours posing for that -- I’m on top of course --” snort from the crowd.

Clearly the subtext in the show is a much a joke for the actors as it is to the fans. But joke or no, Burgi and Maggert do acknowledge that the subtext exists.

I'm at a loss as to which episode the statue is in; I thought of the narwhal tusk in Poachers but that seemed to be plain, not carved?

I also found a snippet in a different post which someone remarks that Blair 'might as well be living with Jim' which begs the question; if you hadn't seen The Debt which establishes that Blair does in fact live there, how many other episodes really stress this? Probably not as many as you'd think; five or six maybe? A casual viewer who catches the odd episode might think, like the Friends cast, that Jim's just got an open door.