Transcript for Episode 12: Fresh Off the Boat Outs the Girl Next Door

This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss the Fresh Off the Boat episode “A League of Her Own.” If you’d rather listen to Glen and Drew than read what they say, click here. The transcript was provided by Sarah Neal, whose skills we recommend wholeheartedly.

Jessica:  Good management is second nature to me. If I were managing this bar, I'd put up a football banner. Get some men in here. It's all ladies. 

Deb:  Yeah, by choice. 

Jessica:  See, that's why you're a bad manager, Deb. You're ignoring 50 percent of the population. How are these women going to meet anyone? 

["Fresh Off the Boat" by Danny Brown plays]

Drew:  You are listening to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast about episodes of classic sitcoms that feature LBGT themes. I'm Drew Mackie. 

Glen:  I'm Glen Lakin. 

Drew:  And today we are talking about Fresh Off the Boat, which is not a classic sitcom. It is still on the air. But this is the last of the bonus episodes before we go into season two of Gayest Episode Ever.

Glen:  Bonus episode!

Drew:  Bonus, yes. Yes! 

Glen:  Excitement!

Drew:  You scared me. I wanted to do something contemporary just to have a contrast, to see how a show being produced in this decade is dealing with the kind of stuff we've been talking about all of our first season. 

Glen:  Even though it's not set in this decade. 

Drew:  It's not. It is technically a period piece, but a lot of times you'd probably be forgiven for forgetting that it's supposed to take place in the '90s because it's not like That '70s Show where they just layer the decade references on top of each other. 

Glen:  It's not the main joke of the series. 

Drew:  Right. It's a better show than that. 

Glen:  Was that some That '70s Show hate? 

Drew:  [hesitates] That '70s Show is not a great show. 

Glen:  Okay. This is a conversation for off podcast. 

Drew:  They did a gay episode, too. 

Glen:  Oh. We'll do it. 

Drew:  With Joseph Gordon Levitt. 

Glen:  Was he gay? 

Drew:  He played a gay character. 

Glen:  Oh. 

Drew:  Yeah, who kissed Eric in the car. 

Glen:  I'm going to go watch that after we get done recording. 

Drew:  I'm sure you will. I was trying to decide between Blackish and Fresh Off the Boat as being the examples of modern sitcoms dealing with coming-out episodes, and Blackish has a pretty good one with Raven Simone, but I picked this one because I thought it was the more interesting of the two just because Blackish is a serious issues show—it's a sitcom that deals with  lot of serious issues, and they do it very well. Fresh Off the Boat is a much lighter-in-tone show, and they do social issues a lot less directly. So I was very surprised that four episodes in this show they had one of the fairly main characters come out, and that was not a change I would have expected from this show. 

Glen:  It was only four episodes in. 

Drew:  Four seasons in. Four seasons in, and six episodes into the fourth season. She's been around for three seasons. 

Glen:  I figured. 

Drew:  The episode we are talking about today is titled "A League of Her Own." It originally aired on November 7th, 2017. It was directed by Jay Chandrasekhar of Broken Lizard and Super Troopers fame and written by Amelie Gillette, who is a name I recognize as a byline on The A.V. Club, but apparently she's been writing TV as well. 

Glen:  Good for her. 

Drew:  Most importantly is the creator and showrunner on this show, which is Nahnatchka Khan, who was also the creator and showrunner of Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. She is a Persian lesbian. 

Glen:  She's a what now? 

Drew:  Persian lesbian. 

Glen:  Oh. I thought you said "a person lesbian." I'm like, "Well, yeah. Yeah. That's correct."

Drew:  Woman gay, as Jessica puts it. And a lot of the LGBT themes on this show are a reflection of her own perspective. Very interestingly, she also used to be a producer and writer for American Dad, and I tried to find out if—you remember Linda Memari, the woman that—

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  So Francine's Persian friend who has a secret lesbian crush on her, I cannot find if she is responsible for creating that character, but you'd think that would be noted if it were a fact that the Persian lesbian also writing for the show also helped create that character. Couldn't figure that out. But at least we got to talk about Francine, brief second. 

Glen:  Yeah. Things are getting too spicy for the pepper. 

Drew:  [laughs] You're going to make that catch on, I swear. Fresh Off the Boat, of course, is very important because it is the second-ever American sitcom to feature a majority Asian cast, the first one being All-American Girl. Did you watch All-American Girl when it was on? 

Glen:  I did, I say smiling. 

Drew:  I did, too, and had no idea that it was poorly received and problematic at the time. I was a dumb kid, so we can't really—

Glen:  No. 

Drew:  Yeah. That's fine. 

Glen:  You also appreciate her stand-up about the development process of that show. 

Drew:  What's very interesting about that in parallel with this is that just as All-American Girl started out as a pseudo-biographical sitcom about Margaret Cho, Fresh Off the Boat is a kind-of-biographical adaptation of the real Eddie Huang, who's a restaurateur and food person who wrote a book, and the book was adapted into this sitcom. Just as All-American Girl was a terrible experience for Margaret Cho, this was apparently not a great experience for him either, and he was very vocal about objecting to how it departed from what actually happened. 

Glen:  Whatever. Cash the check. 

Drew:  Yeah. I know. He still has a credit on this show. He's still making money. He left the show. He originally was doing the narration for the first season as Adult Eddie—much like The Wonder Years—reflecting back on what it was like in 1995, when the [show's story] originally took place, and then they completely kicked that out. And Eddie stopped being the main character, which is probably for the best because the actors who play Eddie's parents—Randall Park plays the dad Louis, and Constance Wu plays the mom Jessica—are really good comedic performers, and they have really good chemistry, and they kind of became the main character, which made it a better show but also makes me feel bad for the actor who played Eddie because he was supposed to be the main character on the show, and it stopped being his show specifically. 

Glen:  Whatever. Cash the check. 

Drew:  Okay. So Glen, you had no real experience with the show before I made you watch this. Is that correct? 

Glen:  That is correct. I'm a terrible person. 

Drew:  Yeah, because I'd been telling you for years that it's actually a really good sitcom. 

Glen:  I didn't not believe that it was a good sitcom. 

Drew:  I know. There's just a lot of stuff on. I understand. If you're like Glen and you have not watched this show—aside from what I've already told you, the things you have to know about the show is that it centers on a Taiwanese-American family who in the pilot episode relocates from Washington D.C. to suburban Florida—suburban Orlando, I think. And they go from being around a lot of other people of Taiwanese and Chinese descent to being the only ones in the neighborhood who are that, and there is a throughline about racial differences on this show. 

Glen:  But they did not take a boat to get to Florida. 

Drew:  No. They drove a car. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Glen:  There is no boat in the episode. 

Drew:  Very few of the episodes actually have a boat, so I'm sorry about that. It must be confusing for you. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah. For the purposes of this episode, it's important to know that the Huang family has neighbors who they are all very close with. The mom, Honey, is best friends with Jessica. They run a small real estate business together. The dad, Marvin, is a dentist and is very good friends with Louis. And they have a daughter—Honey's stepdaughter, Marvin's biological daughter who's a little bit older than Eddie—and since the first season of the show, she has basically been a Winnie Cooper figure where she's beautiful and cooler than the main boy character. 

Glen:  Oh, my gosh. Yes. 

Drew:  Oh, yes. And he's kind of always pining for her, but it's never going to happen, and he never seems to take the hint until the first episode of season four—she tells him that she's gay. And I thought this one was more interesting than that one because it's more about her, and I think that episode is more about Eddie's experience of her sexuality. 

Glen:  And we don't care what straight men think anymore.  

Drew:  He handles it very well. It's actually a fairly well-written episode where he's stunned [silent], and he just kind of—without saying a whole lot—walks away, and then comes back and is like, "Okay. Tell me everything. When did you turn gay?" And she has to explain it—like, she's not a werewolf. She's gay. 

Glen:  Why not both? 

Drew:  Write that—

Glen:  That is already several things—lesbian werewolves is a very established, popular thing.  

Drew:  Yeah. Ginger Snaps made a whole franchise out of that. Yeah. Aside from the fact that Eddie's two little brothers are coded as gay in the way that Rod and Todd Flanders are kind of coded as gay—where they're not gay, but there's something unusual about them that kind of reads as gay-ish. The other recurring gay element on the show is that Eddies' mother Jessica seems to have a blind spot towards homosexuality in that she forgets it exists and doesn't understand how it works and almost seems like she has a gay-specific learning disability, and that's interesting because there's an episode in season one where her ex-boyfriend visits and everyone's like, "Oh. He's obviously gay." And she just can't see it. 

Glen:  Oh, like Blanche and lesbians. 

Drew:  Oh, yeah. Yes. Yes. Sorry. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. We talked about this. 

Drew:  We don't have Tony to redo the voice. 

Glen:  No. Were you waiting for me to do the voice? I'm not going to. I don't do voices. 

Drew:  I don't think we should do the voices. And Louis actually points out to her, like, "Honey, you have no gaydar," and you see this montage of scenes where she's encountering gay culture and not recognizing it for what it is, and one of them is—they're at dinner, and she's like, "It's so nice to see brothers hanging out and getting along together," and the camera moves to this bear couple sitting at a table together and just full-on kissing, full on the mouth. Her interpretation of that is "Oh. They must be brothers who like each other." 

Glen:  That's sweet. 

Drew:  She wishes that for her own children. So this is an extension of that, and the episode opens up at the Denim Turtle, which is the local lesbian bar that has an amazing logo, which is a turtle wearing overalls and then also has a denim bow and she's holding a wrench. That's their logo for the lesbian bar. She does not know this is a lesbian bar, historically. She thinks people buy her drinks because everyone there is very nice. She doesn't understand the context. Honey does, but Jessica has never really put it together. 

Glen:  So they've gone to this bar before. 

Drew:  It's shown up—it's in season one, actually. Deb, the bartender, and then the other one who seems angry and passed out—

Glen:  Joan? 

Drew:  Joan. Something like that. Those are both—Bev. 

Glen:  Bev.

Drew:  Bev. They're both recurring characters. They are having drinks there, and they're talking to Deb, and Deb is played by an actress named Sonia Eddy who—I'm like, "I know that name from somewhere," and looked her up on IMDb. I know her from Seinfeld. She plays this weird recurring character named Rebecca DeMornay, who shows up and is angry and always introduces herself with her full name, like, "My name is Rebecca DeMornay, and blah, blah, blah." And I guess it's supposed to be a joke that she's a heavyset black woman who happens to have the name of an actress she doesn't look like. 

Glen:  Hilarious.

Drew:  Yeah. I think—I actually tweeted at the guy who wrote that character, introduced that character, like, "Why was that her thing?" And he's like, "Oh. I think it was a non-sequitur joke that Jerry Seinfeld made that just worked its way into the script." I'm like, "All right. Well, that settles nothing." 

Glen:  He can do what he wants. 

Drew:  But that's her. She's been in a ton of stuff. She's done a ton of character work on sitcoms. Deb offscreen says, "Hey. No minors in here," and you find out that Nicole has walked into the lesbian bar, and she's very surprised to see her stepmother Honey and Mrs. Huang. 

Nicole:  I—I just love alcohol. 

Jessica:  Honey, I saw a Lifetime movie about this. You got to put her in rehabilitation before she stabs you and your husband to get the key to the liquor cabinet. 

Drew:  "I love alcohol. I just love alcohol." And then she says that she's there to sign up for the softball team, which is kind of true. And then she's like, "Okay. Here's the thing. I need to tell you something." 

Honey:  How do you even know about this place? 

Nicole:  [sighs] I need to talk to you. 

Deb:  Christy, get that bottle of champagne. Barb, get that cot ready in the back. We've got to be prepared for this to go either way. Bev, you set? 

Bev:  It's either going to be B4 or C29. 

Nicole:  I've been wanting to tell you this for a while, but I can never find the right time. But maybe there's never a right time, so—I'm gay. 

Honey:  Nicole, come here. Come here. 

Lesbian barflies:  [applaud and cheer]

Bev:  C29, baby 

["Come to my Window by Melissa Ethridge plays]

Glen:  And the lesbian bar is well prepared for our coming out. 

Drew:  Or for either result of it.

Glen:  Yes. "Well prepared" means any outcome. 

Drew:  They have a bottle of champagne but also a cot ready in the back in case she gets kicked out of her house. And they have two songs ready on the jukebox to play no matter what happens, and we hear the good one, which is "Come to my Window," but I want to know what song they were going to play in case this didn't go well. But it goes well. Honey has had kind of a strange relationship with Nicole over the course of this show because she's Marvin's third wife, she's young, and she's put in the awkward position of having to be the law-enforcing parent a lot of the time—because to Marvin, Nicole is the little princess; and to her biological mother (played by Heather Locklear) she's the one that gets spoiled whenever she sees her, but she wants a good relationship with her daughter so she doesn't enforce any rules. So it falls on Honey. They've gotten a better relationship now. 

Glen:  See, I would have thought that Marvin was the strict parent knowing his past work on Twin Peaks. 

Drew:  Right. So that's the weird thing to talk about is that Ray Wise, who played Leland Palmer on Twin Peaks plays Nicole's dad. 

Glen:  Not known for his parenting skills. 

Drew:  No. And I guess it's a credit to him that he was able to transcend that role, but he's easily one of the worst fathers in the history of American television because—I guess this is a major spoiler if you haven't seen the original run of Twin Peaks, but Laura Palmer's dad both has sex with her and then murders her, and those are basically the two things that as a parent you're discouraged from doing. I think he's a good actor, and when he's interacting with her on screen, I buy their relationship. But I'm like, "Oh. It's Laura Palmer's dad." So I guess everyone else is able to move past that. Maybe that's why he was barely in the sequel series. 

Glen:  Maybe. 

Drew:  Yeah. Maybe he's making more money on an ABC sitcom and didn't want to do it. 

Glen:  Cash that check. 

Drew:  Yeah. Is that your motto now? 

Glen:  It can be. I got to get sponsorship for it—some sort of cash-checking business. 

Drew:  I think it's a bank. A cash-checking business is a bank, right? 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  So start a bank.

Glen:  No. Those are sort of—no one likes those anymore. 

Drew:  No. It's true. Honey and Nicole reached an understanding, and Jessica also—maybe for the first time—realizes that—

Glen:  Gay people are a thing. 

Drew:  At this point, I think she kind of understands that gay men are a thing, but I don't think she knew that there's a girl version of it. 

Jessica:  What do you mean you're gay? You're not a man! Oh—she's not a man. You mean it can go the girl way? 

Drew:  You go to credits and a commercial and you come back, and they're still in the bar talking about stuff, and Nicole has this amazing line. 

Nicole:  So far, I've only told Eddie. I sent a letter to Jodie Foster, but I haven't heard back. 

Drew:  Which is very subtly an amazing line that I'm sure went over a lot of people's heads. 

Glen:  The '90s was a very confusing time. 

Drew:  Uh-huh. Uh-huh. But also, we're supposed to interpret that as being she's too young to realize why Jodie Foster wouldn't reply to letters. 

Glen:  Maybe. 

Drew:  Okay. Maybe I overthought this joke a bit, but I assumed it was a joke about John Hinckley Jr., because he sent Jodie Foster a lot of letters before he shot Ronald Reagan to impress her, which is why writing a letter would be one of the least effective ways to get Jodie Foster's attention now because she'd be predispositioned to not like letters. 

Glen:  One bad experience, and everything's ruined. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. I mean, we can give her that much. 

Glen:  And then Nicole talks about the montage of all the times she tried to tell her dad that she was gay and got cold feet and couldn't go through with it. 

Honey:  Have you thought about telling your dad? 

Nicole:  Oh, I've tried to tell him—a few times. 

Nicole:  Dad, there's something I have to tell you. 

Marvin:  Hmm?

Nicole:  I—I want a bass guitar.

Nicole:  I—need a new tent. 

Nicole:  I'm a Wiccan. 

Nicole:  My dad thinks I'm a musical witch who loves to camp. 

Honey:  Oh. So that's why he keeps giving you all those Stevie Nicks CDs. 

Glen:  That's a cross-section. I would draw that Venn diagram. 

Drew:  So then we get a B-plot that seems like an intrusion for the moment, but it's all about Louis and the restaurant he owns, Cattleman's Ranch, which is a bad Golden Corral. 

Glen:  It doesn't seem like that big of an intrusion. Both scenes have talked about softball. 

Drew:  Yeah, but—as soon as that plot was introduced, I was like, "Okay. Tie it up. Tie it up. Get it together"—

Glen:  So is his boss/partner not played by Andy Dick? Who is this Andy Dick wannabee? 

Drew:  Matt Oberg. He is not Andy. He's more put together than Andy Dick is. He's new this season. 

Glen:  Well, that is a low bar. 

Drew:  His name is Matthew Chestnut, and they just call him Chestnut, and he is the representative of Kenny Rogers. So Louis's previous partner was Michael Bolton, the singer, and Michael-Bolton-the-singer sells his ownership share to Kenny Rogers, the singer, because Kenny Rogers felt that Cattleman's Ranch was competing with Kenny Rogers's Chicken Roasters, and it's a very weird meta-thing. And also, Michael Bolton doesn't have his trademark '90s mullet in the scenes he's in, so it's a very confusing time thing. But Kenny Rogers is now the silent partner in the business, and Chestnut is his representative in the actual kitchen. And that is why he's there to tell Louis, "No. You're spending too much money on your softball team. You can't do this. You spent more on your softball team than vinaigrette," I guess. 

Glen:  Is he gay? 

Drew:  He kind of—well, I thought so, too. But the only reason we think that is that he shows no aptitude for sports whatsoever. He's terrified of throwing a ball, which is something I think we both relate to on some level. 

Glen:  I mean, true. But I also thought that as soon as he walked on the scene. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Glen:  Because I thought he was Andy Dick. 

Drew:  Immediate escalation is Louis coming in and being like, "Well, if I can't think of a way to make this softball team a better advertisement for the restaurant, they're going to take it away. I got to think of something." And Jessica's response is—she's very competitive.

Glen:  I know. I love her. 

Louis:  I need to change it up. Develop more of a killer instinct. 

Jessica:  I'll stop you right there. I don't have time to manage your softball team to its first victory. 

Louis:  That's not what I meant. I'm the manager fo the Cattleman's team. 

Jessica:  Are you saying I can't manage your team to victory? 

Louis:  I haven't mentioned you at all. 

Jessica:  Managing is managing. 

Louis:  You don't know anything about softball. 

Jessica:  One person throws a big  ball. Another person runs to the squares. 

Louis:  Bases. 

Jessica:  Whatever. I don't care what you say. I can manage any team to victory. It doesn't even have to be yours. Challenge accepted. 

Drew:  Which of course turns out to be the lesbian bar team. 

Jessica:  I need to speak with the manager of the softball team. 

Deb:  I'm the team manager. 

Jessica:  I want to challenge you for control of the team. This is an academic history of the game of softball from 1887 to 1937. I got it at the library along with the newest James Patterson. I've read it cover to cover. Ask me anything. 

Deb:  [laughs] This is exactly how I took control of the team. Remember that, Bev? 

Bev:  Oh, I remember. 

Deb:  [laughs] Time to hand this over. She blows for you now. Also, remember to bring orange slices for everyone. 

Jessica:  I will be the best manager of a softball team since Walter Hakanson coined the term "softball" in 1927. Before that, it was called mush ball. 

Drew:  I'm trying to think of another example—I can think of one other example back in the day of this, but on this show, Jessica's the Homer and Louis is the Marge, where Jessica's the one that does something crazy and Louis is the one that tries to maintain some semblance of order. It's very similar to the way that on Bob's Burgers Linda is the Homer and Bob is the Marge.

Glen:  Mm-hmm. But Jessica seems very competent. 

Drew:  She's not always competent, though. Over the course of this season, there's this weird—she decides she's going to write a horror novel and become the new Stephen King. She does, but it's a very problematic process for her and she's riddled with a lack of confidence that almost seems like Peggy Hill, and I think Peggy Hill's the back-in-the-day example—Peggy Hill's the Homer and Hank is the Marge. I can't think of a live-action example where the father was the stable one and the mother was the nutcase. 

Glen:  I mean, kind of Married with Children, but they're all sort of crazy. 

Drew:  Right. Yeah. Maybe that. Peg is—

Glen:  I'm still thinking!

Drew:  Peg is more prone to a hairbrained scheme than Al is. Al just wants to do nothing because he hates effort. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. He just wants to flush the toilet 

Drew:  Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah. She's not a complete Jerkass Homer. I will say that a very interesting aspect of her relationship with Honey is that when they move to that neighborhood, all the other moms hate Honey because they think she's a gold digger and a bimbo, and Jessica's like, "I think I like her," and she gives up fitting in with all the moms to have one friend in Honey. And her friendship with Honey is actually one of the more interesting aspects of the entire show. 

Glen:  That's a good gamble. 

Drew:  Oh, totally. Yeah. So very quickly after that, we are off to baseball practice. Both the teams happen to be practicing on the diamond at the same time, which doesn't seem like a thin that would actually happen, but for the purposes—

Glen:  Maybe it's a small town. 

Drew:  It's Orlando. 

Glen:  Oh. Gross. 

Drew:  It's Orlando. Yeah. So for the purposes of this plot, I'll just assume that it's okay. But we finally see Marvin, played by Leland Palmer there. And—

Glen:  He was supposed to bring the ringer.

Drew:  Bobby Bonilla. Marvin allegedly knows Bobby Bonilla, who is an actual famous baseball player, and he's supposed to be the ringer for the Cattleman's Ranch team—doesn't show up, but it turns out Marvin wants to play anyway because he used to play what they call mush ball. I looked this up. When Jessica is trying to bone up on the history of softball, she says that it was originally called mush ball until the term "softball" was coined in 1927. That's almost correct. Softball was coined in 1926 by the man that she says by name, and it actually was called mush ball back in the day because the ball was actually soft and squishy. 

Glen:  Oh. I would like to play that sport. 

Drew:  Right. I've always actually wondered why the fuck it's called softball when if you get hit with that thing it still hurts. It's big and hard and it doesn't feel good to get hit with. It's not soft. 

Glen:  It sure isn't. No, it isn't. But it's a sport for soft people. I don't know. 

Drew:  No. Every girl I know who's been really into softball musters an aggro sports attitude that I'm just uncapable of, so I'm like, "All right. You guys go to it. You wake up early on a Saturday every Saturday for months and months to go play softball games?" I was like, "Yeah. I'm going to—I'm going to sleep. Pet my dog. Yeah." So Nicole is playing for the Denim Turtle team, and she's very surprised to see her dad there. She wasn't aware that her dad was going to be playing for the other team. And they have a really awkward interaction. 

Marvin:  Look who it is, huh? You didn't tell me you were playing softball, princess. 

Nicole:  Yeah. I'm on the Denim Turtle team. Look, Dad—

Marvin:  Oh, those Denim Turtle gals are great. You just make sure that's the only team of theirs you're playing on, huh? [laughs] So what were you going to tell me? 

Nicole:  Just that the tent you got me is too small for my bass guitar and witch stuff.

Drew:  She is very crestfallen. 

Glen:  Yeah. This moment devastated me because it's very close to my coming out story in that any time I would go home to want to come out—with the intention of coming out to my parents, there'd always be some weird, unintentional joke or comment that just would knock the wind out of me, and I would just second guess myself all the time. And it wasn't because of anything. My parents are not monsters. But sometimes people just don't think about what they say and don't think about the unintended consequences. So in this instance, when she is prepared to come out to her father and he just makes this dumb joke, I could see where it would derail her plans. 

Drew:  It was a very real moment for me as well. After I realized I was gay, I kind of reflected on my family's history of casual homophobia, which is a really fucked up thing to do because those kind of jokes are made without even considering the possibility that someone in the room might be the thing that you're—it's just beyond the realm of possibility, which makes it even harder to come out. And also, those jokes are thrown off so casually, because they wouldn't think twice about that. That's the smallest thing in the world. It's nothing. But to the kid hearing that, that's really, really painful. 

Glen:  Yeah. I hate the bad rap that microaggressions get now because they're a thing. And not to get political on our sitcom podcast, but when some people are treated as having thin skin just because they don't want their existence belittled casually just because you have nothing better to say—whatever. Go fuck yourself. 

Drew:  Literally, I wrote that—

Glen:  You wrote "go fuck yourself"? 

Drew:  Go fuck yourself—because it's such a fucked up thing, and I think the term "microaggression" might make some people think that it's not—it might make it sound less stressful than what it's actually like to experience that sort of thing, but everyone gets the concept of that. And it is uniquely hard for LGBTQ kids because at least if you are black or Jewish or Buddhist or something else that's not what the majority is, your family is probably also that thing. Very often those kids who are those letters will be the only one in their family who is that and they don't have anyone else they can talk to, so they just have to figure out how to make themselves not feel awful on their own. Yeah. 

Glen:  Happy National Coming Out Day. 

Drew:  We missed that by a few days. 

Glen:  Whatever. The podcast audience doesn't know that. 

Drew:  I mean, it'll be up a few days even after this, so—yeah. 

Glen:  Well, if you watched Prince of Darkness, you would understand that you can send radio waves back in time. 

Drew:  That's a different podcast. 

Glen:  Whatever. 

Drew:  Yeah. They cut to commercial, they come back, and you see Jessica, Honey, and Nicole sitting in the dugout together. And back to back, they do an example of what I think of more typical ABC-style sitcom joke where it's like, "Mm. Okay. Whatever," and then they do something a lot better than that. The thing that I think is very typical ABC sitcom, it's like when your father makes that joke about how Mexican train robbers have locomotives—it's like, "Ugh." I could hear that on Modern Family or something. You're just like, "Okay. Whatever." 

Honey:  I'm sure he didn't mean it any more than that one he tells about Mexican train killers having locomotives. 

Jessica:  Ha! Oh, I just got that. Loco-motives.

Nicole:  Honey, it's okay. I'll just never tell my dad and live my life in secret forever. No big deal. 

Honey:  That's a very big deal. 

Nicole:  A life in secret is no way to live. Trust me, I know. I didn't tell my parents I was dating Marvin for years. 

Jessica:  But you—you're white. 

Nicole:  Yeah. You know parents and their expectations. 

Drew:  And then no follow-up whatsoever, and we're just allowed to think that for some reason Honey was raised white in a white family with her parents expecting that she would not end up with a white guy. No reason why that's the case, but that's the joke. And they just leave it. And you're just like—that's a baffling thing. 

Glen:  It was baffling. 

Drew:  And I like it. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  So that is why in some ways, this is—for a modern sitcom, it's pretty typical. But every once in a while they get something that's a little further out, and that makes me happy. That makes me glad I've been watching this show literally since it was on, and I've been telling people "You should also please watch it." 

Glen:  And they have not been listening to you. 

Drew:  We'll get to that at the end when I talk about this show's future and how this might be the final season they're going into right now. So the plan is during movie night tonight, Nicole finally get a chance to tell her father that she's gay, and Jessica wants them to watch Crimson Tide because maybe she won't have anything to say after she watches that. Part of me thinks that I should be annoyed that they write Jessica to be that stupid about homosexuality, but maybe it's the way that Constance Wu just sells the lines that I think she's adorable. 

Glen:  Yeah—I mean, having not really watched this show, I feel like her first instance in this episode where she's mad at the lesbian bar for not having men because it's limiting their business, her ignorance is cast in the light of her—not exceptionalism, but in her myopic focus on success. And I guess being an Asian American trying to achieve the American dream, she's been so focused on the American dream that maybe her character was not allowed to even fathom the variations on the husband, the wife, the car, the job, the house, the 2.5 kids. And so it's a weird luxury for her to conceive of—

Drew:  Anything else. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Over the course of the show, she also has to come around to understanding the value of pursuing the arts and pursuing anything that's not going to get you into a good college and get you the best possible job that pays you the most money. So she does evolve just by moving to Florida over the course of the show. She actually evolves a great deal. 

Glen:  Yeah. I wish one of us was not just a white suburban kid to—

Drew:  Oh, I didn't grow up—I grew up in the country. 

Glen:  Whatever. Suburban enough. 

Drew:  No. Like—

Glen:  Fine! You had cows. Whatever. 

Drew:  Sheep. Yeah. Right, right. I understand what you mean. From my perspective, I feel like this show does a fairly good job of making her naivete about things like homosexuality not rooted in the fact that she is Asian American. They make it, like you say, that she's so focused on her specific view of the world that anything outside that is just unimportant and irrelevant to her. And I would probable credit the fact that the show is created and show-run by a woman who's Persian and is probably very sensitive about making the person of Asian descent seem oblivious or—

Glen:  Yeah. I don't think it's that these alternative lifestyles are unimportant to her. They're novel. I feel like she at least approaches—and maybe this is an acting decision. She at least approaches it with a smidge of surprise. 

Drew:  Yeah. Alternative lifestyle. What a surprise. What a cute thing! Yeah. She's not grossed out by it. She's just still learning. Before we see that movie scene, we cut away to Nicole and Eddie in her Saturn. The Saturn is the space where they talk about stuff that's not for anyone else's ears. 

Glen:  '90s joke!

Drew:  Do Saturns even—Saturns don't exist anymore, do they? 

Glen:  No, they do not. 

Drew:  Oh, that's so weird. They were advertised a lot. I don't know if people actually bought them 

Glen:  And the advertisement was like, "We'll always be there for you. Saturn. Buy a Saturn, and the dealership will always be there for you." 

Drew:  Nope. Didn't last. 

Glen:  Nope. 

Drew:  Weird. 

Eddie:  So I wanted to keep my Bootyman jersey fresh for school, but the dirt is red. How am I supposed to keep it clean? 

Nicole:  Dude. Just fake an injury, and then you'll get benched. 

Eddie:  Huh. Guess that's pretty simple. Sorry to call you to the Saturn. 

Nicole:  Okay. We need to set some ground rules about what's Saturn worthy. I chickened out and didn't tell my dad. 

Eddie:  Oh, man. I'm sorry. 

Nicole:  I think I'm scared because he sees me in a certain way. 

Eddie:  But you're the same person you've always been. I'm sure your dad will get that. 

Nicole:  I just told Honey. I don't need to tell my dad right now. 

Eddie:  Okay. Yeah. Whatever feels right. What's the status of this French fry on the floor mat? You know what? Don't tell me. 

Drew:  Just to show you how devalued Eddie as a character has been, his entire role in this episode is to have a special-made softball jersey that says "Bootyman" on the back, and the numbers are 00—so it looks like a butt—because he likes big booties—and he doesn't want it to get dirty. That's all he really gets to do in this episode. 

Glen:  C-plot. Hello. 

Drew:  A C-plot that actually gets given to someone else in about five seconds and then gives him even less to do. But that's all we really see of them together. He's supportive. He's supportive of her, but—he's not a bad actor. He's an absolutely good child actor. I just kind of wish they—

Glen:  Killed him off? 

Drew:  No, give him more to do!

Glen:  Oh. Okay. 

Drew:  Yeah. So then we see Nicole and her parents watching A League of Their Own, which they actually could just show footage of because ABC-Disney synergy. They didn't have to pay for the rights to use that. Honey steps away to make popcorn and give them a little privacy, and it's supposed to be Nicole's chance to come out, and she doesn't. 

Nicole:  Dad, I need to talk to you. 

Marvin:  Oh, the pause button. Must be big. 

Nicole:  Yeah. It is. I—I talked to Mrs. Huang, and I told her I prefer playing shortstop, but she made me first base. 

Marvin:  Well, that's good to know, Princess. But it's hardly pause worthy. Come on. I'm in the middle of a narrative here. 

Glen:  It's a setup for a classic sitcom misunderstanding later—but just a note: I feel like I would not want to sit on a couch that small that close to my father when coming out to him. Makes fine staging for a sitcom, but they were real close on that couch. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. It's barely more than a loveseat, and there's already three of them sitting on it. 

Glen:  Yeah. I just think if I'm coming out to someone, I want separate pieces of furniture, or one of us standing in case one of us needs to run. 

Drew:  What sort of furniture were you standing around when you came out to your parents, Glen? 

Glen:  Telephone. 

Drew:  Oh. How did that go? 

Glen:  Fine. 

Drew:  I did it at the kitchen table on St. Patrick's Day, 2005, and effectively ruined the St. Patrick's Day dinner. 

Glen:  I mean, what is at a St. Patrick's Day dinner? 

Drew:  Corned beef. Corned beef and wine. 

Glen:  Well, the wine explains. 

Drew:  I did not have any false starts as Nicole did. I just decided, "All right. I'm just going to go for this," and then regretted doing it in that way. They were very surprised. 

Glen:  Yeah. They just wanted to get drunk, Drew. 

Drew:  Yeah. They still probably wanted to drink after that, but just for different motivations. 

Glen:  You ruined their buzz. 

Drew:  I mean, corned beef is delicious. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  So the advice that Nicole gave to Eddie in the Saturn for preserving his jersey was "Just fake an injury, and then you don't have to run around the bases or slide on dirt, and your jersey will stay just fine." But the way that Eddie loses his entire C-plot is that his dad's solution is like, "All right, Chestnut. Take his jersey. You're filling in for him," because you need nine people to play softball. And Eddie doesn't even have his jersey anymore and is just left to sit there and watch him—

Glen:  Yeah. He has a beautiful scene with a homeless man. 

Eddie:  Let them slide all they want. I'm keeping you clean. 

Homeless Man:  You're in the wrong place if you want to stay clean. I bought this yesterday.

Drew:  It almost felt like a Simpsons cutaway, and it's weird seeing—I guess, maybe—

Glen:  Well, more of a Family Guy cutaway The Simpsons then adopted. 

Drew:  No. Family Guy took away the Simpsons cutaways. 

Glen:  Really? 

Drew:  So, that is an interesting thing where Simpsons did comedic cutaways a lot more in seasons three and four and five, and they were still doing them when Family Guy started, and then they became such a Family Guy thing that The Simpsons started doing them less because they didn't want to seem like they were imitating Family Guy. But the consensus, generally, [is] that they originated that sort of thing and then Family Guy ran with it and made it their own thing. 

Glen:  Yeah. I guess for me, the difference is The Simpsons cutaways are usually to characters or locations that we know or at least is relevant to the joke at hand—and maybe we know who this homeless man is. I have not seen this show before. 

Drew:  I don't think we have. 

Glen:  Oh. So the randomness of it just felt more like a Family Guy thing. 

Drew:  Okay. That's fair. Okay. I'm okay with that. 

Glen:  Fight me. 

Drew:  I'm not going to—did you say bite you or fight you? 

Glen:  I said fight me. If I want someone to bite me, your dog is right here. 

Drew:  He would never. He probably would. So, yeah. Chestnut is made to play for the team. He doesn't seem to want them to win, and then it turns into this weird plotline of him never having had a chance to play for Kenny Rogers's actual teams because he's so bad at sports that he hated the softball team and wanted it to go away because he thought it was something he could never be part of. But now that he's on the team, he's kind of excited about it. Eddie no longer gets anything to do, and it becomes a character development for this guy who's been a minor antagonist and brings him onto the Cattleman's team. And that's his transformation into a more positive character, which I guess I'm glad that happened for him, but we didn't really need character growth from this particular guy. I don't know. There's a lot going on in this episode, and it's weird that the person who's supposed to be the main character of the show gets so little to do. Anyway. The next thing that happens is that Marvin has a run-in with Jessica. How did you feel about this crazy sitcom misunderstanding? 

Glen:  It was a crazy sitcom misunderstanding. Jessica, when Marvin approaches her to be a good father and have a talking to her about why she's not letting Nicole—or as he says, Jessica doesn't approve of Nicole's preference, and so Jessica thinks he means the gay thing. 

Marvin:  Hey, Jessica? Nicole and I had a real good talk the other night. 

Jessica:  At movie night. I know. 

Marvin:  And she said that you weren't supportive of her preference. 

Jessica:  I was supportive. If Nicole wants to be gay, she should be gay. 

Marvin:  What? 

Glen:  That is the Three's Company-esque reveal—Nicole's sexuality. 

Drew:  Had the conversation be worded any other way, there's virtually no way she would have responded the way she did. It was just a very deliberate word choice. And I feel like if it was something that was—even a '90s sitcom, they'd be like, "Okay. Whatever." I feel like we generally hold our sitcoms to a higher standard. It gets the job done, though. This is still a light sitcom. 

Glen:  Yeah. It's fine. It's fine in a way that the longer version of it would have been anyone questioning why his daughter's playing for the lesbian bar's softball team, which no one ever seems to bring up. 

Drew:  So for all they know, Jessica's the one who convinced her to be on the team because they wanted to have an all-female team. 

Glen:  Which could have been a conversation in an earlier scene. 

Drew:  Probably. Yes. Marvin is shocked. Jessica tries to walk it back. She's unable to do that. You can't really do that. And Nicole walks by, and Marvin just asks her. He's like, "Are—are you gay?" 

Marvin:  Nicole, you're gay? 

[slightly trepidatious music plays]

Nicole:  Yeah. I am. I tried to tell you, but I didn't know how. 

Man:  Marvin, let's go!

Drew:  And he responds with no words and just a pained expression that is essentially inexplicable. There's no way anyone can read into exactly what that is, but he walks away. 

Glen:  He's being possessed by Bob. 

Drew:  That does occur to me. When he furrows his brow and seems distressed, it's hard not to see him be Laura Palmer's dad again. But he can have a career outside of that, right? 

Glen:  Yeah. Cash that check.

Drew:  Mm-hmm. Nicole is devastated because there's no other way for her to understand what has happened other than her dad has heard that she's gay and rejected her. And she's cool with Jessica. She's okay. She's like, "It's fine." She's not angry at Jessica, which—

Glen:  "You've robbed me of a seminal moment in my life, but whatever. It's cool." 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. Jessica's like, "Well, at least your dad knows," and she's like, "Yeah. I don't think he's taking it very well," because you just see him sitting in the dugout on his own, looking despondent. 

Glen:  He throws a ball at the fence. 

Drew:  Yeah. That's normal angry dad stuff. 

Glen:  Toxic masculinity. 

Drew:  For all we know,  yes. But that spreads to Jessica. Jessica feels like a failure because she's fucked up this one thing, and she tries to tell Deb that she's quitting. 

Deb:  The woman who came into the bar and demanded this whistle, she wouldn't give up. Is it easy? No! If it were, Bev would do it—because she had a late night last night. The VH1 awards were on. She wanted to see Jamiroquai close it out. Anyway, look. Go over there and make it right. And we will get out there and bring you back a W. W means "win." 

[referee whistle blows]

Jessica:  Take a pear, and get out there, woman gay. 

Drew:  She's going to try to find a way to fix this, which she actually kind of doesn't—it fixes itself. But as a reward for the pep talk, Jessica gives her a winner pear, which I like as a weird character quirk. Rather than giving everyone orange slices as she's instructed to do, she brings a box of pears and is only willing to give pears to people who are winners. If you do something good, you get a pear. 

Glen:  I get that it's just a B-plot, but we don't actually see her doing many coaching or managing things for this team. She steps into the manager position of the number one team in this softball league. They're always going to win. She didn't do anything to help them win. Spoiler alert: They do win. And so I like the character quirk, I just didn't see her actually being any sort of manager. 

Drew:  I'm okay with it. I don't really need to see the—they made a movie about that called Moneyball, and I didn't see it. I will never see that movie. That movie sounds boring. I'll just assume that she Peggy Hilled it and went in thinking that she was doing a great job but was actually completely ineffective and everyone had to balance out her suckiness, and she never realized that she fucked up. 

Glen:  Okay. 

Drew:  That is my take. 

Glen:  Speaking of Peggy Hill, when are we going to talk about a King of the Hill episode? 

Drew:  Definitely season two, and we're going to do the drag queen one? 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah. I think it'll be a great one to do. We have a really good list of shows that we want to do for season two. We just need to get final approval from both of us, and we'll move ahead. Yeah. But King of the Hill for sure. So this story is already very quickly wrapping up. It's Nicole's turn at bat. She slams the ball deep into left field and right to Chestnut, and he wants to help but he can't because he's so bad he literally can't throw the ball. So Louis is like, "Just roll the ball in." So he rolls the ball into the infield and makes it to Louis, who's waiting at home plate to tag Nicole out as soon as she gets there, but he gets knocked out of the way by Marvin.

Glen:  Who's in a Bob-like rage. 

Drew:  I mean—

Glen:  No. It's fine. 

Drew:  It's really hard to not think of it like that, but I want to not think of him as being Bob. And everyone's kind of standing there not sure what's going to happen, and he hugs her. 

Nicole:  I thought you were mad at me. 

Marvin:  No. I was mad at myself. I made that dumb joke about not wanting you to play on their team. I didn't even really mean that. It was just a pun. It was sitting right there. I couldn't not say it. But that pun in no way reflects my values. 

Glen:  It's a perfectly understandable motivation. My 20s was full of me saying jokes that I should not have said just because they were good jokes, and someone had to pluck them out of the ether or else they'd rot there and stink up everything. 

Drew:  Is that how you think about it? Really? 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Well, at least you didn't have Twitter back then. 

Glen:  No. 

Drew:  Yeah. That's probably for the best for all of us. 

Nicole:  I tried to tell you a bunch of times. I was just worried you'd see me differently. 

Marvin:  Oh. You'll always be my princess. You're out. 

Nicole:  Thanks, Dad. 

Marvin:  I mean it. You're out. I got the ball. You're out! Huh?

[crowd cheers]

Drew:  Which is so on the nose that I can't deal with it, but I love it so much. 

Glen:  It's fine. 

Drew:  I find it to be a very moving scene where he says, "You're out," and she's like, "I guess I am!" And he's like, "No. You're out. I have the ball." 

Glen:  And then he says, "No, you're out. I'm throwing you out of the house." 

Drew:  No. Tags her out. She doesn't get to make her homerun. 

Glen:  I know, but think of if he had squeezed a third meaning into it. 

Drew:  We'll talk about what happens to Nicole in a moment, but I think I would say this is schmaltz. I normally hate stuff like that, and the first time I saw this episode—I might have been a little drunk. But I was very moved by this scene. I was very surprised by the way it happened. I thought it was—what is the expression? Too clever by half? But it did hit me exactly the way it should have, and it made me feel very good. And every time I re-watch this episode, I still feel that same feeling, and it makes me very happy. This scene is essentially why I wanted to talk about this episode. It was just a nice way to handle it, a nice way to work the softball metaphor to its rightful end and resolve the conflict and make everyone move forward. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Cattleman's Ranch loses. The score is 19 to 1. Yeah. So that one—

Glen:  The jersey gets dirtied!

Drew:  Yeah. It gets Gatorade dumped on him—

Glen:  Red Gatorade—might have been Kool-Aid. 

Drew:  Seems like you could wash it out. 

Glen:  I don't think so. 

Drew:  And what does he say? "You're too beautiful for this world"?

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  And that's how the episode closes, which is a weird—I don't know why they closed it on that of all things, of—

Glen:  Because in my stretched metaphor corner, the jersey represents heterosexuality and it gets doused after losing to a bunch of lesbians. 

Drew:  Oh. I think it also would be turned pink by that. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Oh. Okay. I'm okay with that. That makes sense. 

Glen:  Okay. Great. My powers at work, once again. 

Drew:  The story would have been told just as easily if Eddie were not in it at all. I don't know if they're contractually obligated to put him in every episode. There are episodes where other family members do not appear. There's a grandma who doesn't appear in this episode at all. 

Glen:  Yeah. I saw her in the title sequence, and I was like, "Oh." 

Drew:  Yeah. My only real criticism for this episode is that the Eddie plots are so tacked on and jammed in there, and I kind of wish we got more of—like you say—Honey being a manager. 

Glen:  Jessica. 

Drew:  Jessica being a manager, or something more with Honey and Marvin's family because they kind of are the stars of this episode in a lot of ways. They're the emotional focus of the episode. 

Glen:  Yeah. Honey sort of disappears after the first act. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm, which is too bad. A lot of her episodes are my favorite. She has a great episode where her mom visits, and it's Cheryl Hines.

Glen:  [gasps]

Drew:  And you find out why Honey is as screwed up as she is because her mom is the most disapproving Southern woman ever. It's very good. What did you think? What did you think about your first chance with Fresh Off the Boat? 

Glen:  I liked it. I want to say toothless—but as a compliment. 

Drew:  It is, actually, and I think the reason I find this episode novel is for what you have just said, because it is more in the mold of a TGIF-style sitcom than anything else we've talked about. All the TGIF-style sitcoms from back in our day never did a gay episode. The family-friendly shows wouldn't touch this, and this is so non-controversial, and there's very little to object to about the coming-out narrative in this story. 

Glen:  Yeah. No, there's no real ulterior motives. No one's being sneaky. No one's being mean, no one uses her sexuality and potential coming out-slash-secrecy against her in any way. It is just a very straightforward earnest and believable attempt of a teenage girl trying to come out to her father who's not outwardly shown any reason why she should hesitate other than that's just the culture at the time, and the culture now. And even in the best of circumstances coming out is difficult, and I think we didn't talk about one of the things she says—or someone says—of Marvin: It's difficult to make someone see you differently than they see you. And any time you pull the curtain—for whatever reason whether it is you being gay or—

Drew:  A witch. 

Glen:  Yeah. People come to see you, and there's a comfort in that. It's why we oftentimes codeswitch when we go home or we're around our parents. Like—

Drew:  Don't pack your purple shirt. Wear something else. 

Glen:  Yeah. There are definitely things I change about myself when I'm around family and/or when I'm around high school friends. 

Drew:  Like when that vein throbs in your forehead when you're around your family? Is that something you change? 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. Oh, that's right. You just met my family. 

Drew:  Yeah. Yeah.

Glen:  It was a lovely experience, and Thurman did not bite them.

Drew:  Nope. Nope. Good boy, Thurman. Unless you wanted him to. 

Glen:  No. No, no. No, unless you want to be sued. 

Drew:  No, I don't want that. So, yeah. We started this project months and months ago because we wanted to talk about the ways that gay episodes of sitcoms back in our day could be super groundbreaking and change the way people thought about stuff, and it's crazy to think about how non-groundbreaking this version of it is. Perfectly entertaining, and I like that some family that was sitting down to watch a two-hour block of family appropriate sitcoms had to watch this story and would have had to try very hard to find a reason to object to it. I actually tried to see if there was any controversy about this episode, and I couldn't find a single article about people objecting. 

Glen:  No one boycotted Fresh Off the Boat because of a beautiful white lesbiand? 

Drew:  No. Mm-hmm.  

Glen:  Did I just put a D at the end of lesbian? 

Drew:  Lesbiand? 

Glen:  I said lesbiand. 

Drew:  Like as a verb, like "She was lesbianed"? 

Glen:  No. Just as a noun. Not even a gerund noun. 

Drew:  Hmm. Well, we'll wonder about that. So I would say please watch Fresh Off the Boat. I think it is a very good show. I think if you are someone like me who grew up watching sitcoms and want to see what a very good example of what a modern sitcom is doing, this would be the one to watch. Or Blackish. Blackish is also good. I'm worried about this show because ratings have been okay, but they haven't been great. 

Glen:  And it got moved to Friday. 

Drew:  Yeah. So this season we're talking about right now finished up early. It finished up in March because they had to make room for another show. Can you guess what show that was? 

Glen:  Roseanne!

Drew:  Roseanne, which is horrible optics of "Hey, show of Asian family. We have white people who are going to take your spot. So finish up real quick, and the white people are going to take over." And do you know what the number one sitcom was this past Nielsen season? 

Glen:  Roseanne!

Drew:  Roseanne—which sucks because this is a better show and can do more to make the country a better place than Roseanne can, I'm guessing. And they have the same timeslot this year. They actually put Fresh Off the Boat on Friday with the Minnie Driver one, Speechless. They're calling it TGIF again, so they're trying to bring it back. But I hope it works and it's not the Friday-night death slot that has killed off so many shows I like. Also, Constance Wu, I don't think is long for the sitcom world because she was just in one of the summer's biggest movies Crazy Rich Asians, and that was based on a book that's part of a series. So she's got more of those to make, and she might want to be the pretty romantic-lead lady [more] than the kind-of-mean mom who says funny things. Also, Luna Blaze, who plays Nicole, has I think left the show because she's on that NBC series Manifest. She's one of the leads on that now, which good for her. And so they wrote off Nicole as going to school and New York. 

Glen:  Because she's a lesbian. 

Drew:  I guess. I actually haven't seen the first episode of this new season yet, but maybe I'll watch it tonight. So, yeah. Please watch this show. If it goes away, at least it'll have gotten five great seasons in, and maybe it won't be another two decades before another all-Asian sitcom to take its place. The next time we have an episode up, it will be the first episode of season two. 

Glen:  Season two!

Drew:  I think we're agreeing it's going to be a Cheers episode? 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  So that'll be exciting. I think we should start with Cheers and work our way back to a Frasier episode. Is that what we talked about? 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  We just agreed on that already? Is that not my idea? 

Glen:  No. 

Drew:  Okay. It'll be more than 10 episodes. We hope you enjoy them. And as soon as we know when that's going to happen, we'll let you know. Glen, where can people find you on the internet? 

Glen:  Oh. Well, let me remember because it's been a while. 

Drew:  I can tell you if you'd like. 

Glen:  Yeah. That'd be great. 

Drew:  You're on Twitter @IWriteWrongs—W-R-I-T-E W-R-O-N-G-S. 

Glen:  That checks out. 

Drew:  And you're on Instagram at BrosQuartz—B-R-O-S Q-U-A-R-T-Z.

Glen:  Yeah. I need to post more drawings. I just haven't drawn a lot this summer. Sorry. 

Drew:  I mean, it's been a busy—busy, busy. You could take a picture of Thurman and post that. 

Glen:  No. That's your thing. I send you my Thurman pictures. 

Drew:  That's true. I posted one today that you sent. If you would like to listen to back episodes of Gayest Episode Ever, please do so at GayestEpisodeEver.com. If you want to follow us on Twitter, we are @GayestEpisode on Twitter, and we are on Facebook. Just search for "Gayest Episode Ever." 

Glen:  Drew, where can people find you on the internet? 

Drew:  Oh, that's right! I almost forgot. I'm KidIcarus222 on Instagram and @DrewGMackie—M-A-C-K-I-E—on Twitter. And I will give a shoutout to the other show that we have going on right now, for which Glen will soon be a guest for. It is called You Have to Watch this Movie. The co-host is Tony Rodriguez, who was on the first season of Gayest Episode Ever and will be on a second, and we're talking to people we like about the movies that they like, the movies that they're always recommending that people watch. If you want to listen to that, go to YouHaveToWatchThisMovie.com. Until then—do we say anything in the end? 

Glen:  Bye forever. 

Drew:  Yeah. I guess that's all we have to say, so bye forever. Bye forever. 

Glen:  Bye. 

Drew:  Bye. Podcast over!

["Seven Wonders" by Fleetwood Mac plays]