Hal stretches his arms out and leads the camera away from a particular set. "Don't look at that one, because that will give away a story point. Follow me." He approaches a door, and raps on it three times. "Always knock before entering the bedroom of the lesbians," he warns.
"It's not normally this dark," he explains, as the camera pans the room (none of the sets are lit). "This place is usually very active. Oh, and of course there's fake underwear hanging on the door..." he picks up the cotton briefs, then chastises himself for doing so, saying he must be respectful!
Next we move to the loft. "This is where Brian's magic happens. It's a very active area," Hal jokes, walking past the kitchen/dining area and up the steps to the platform at the back of the set. "The infamous Brian bedroom, and Gale will sometimes bring his 'inflato-ball' in here and work out -- that's true."
"This is Gale's big shower," Hal says, opening the glass door. "This is basically everyone in the world's dream apartment. This is our sonically sound ... this is like the soundproof booth on a game show." Hal steps inside the shower and closes the door.
Moving to the front door of the loft, Hal says, "This is the door to the apartment which you see opening and closing, and invariably when we're shooting will slide off the end..." he pulls the door too far, and it drops down off the track. "...like that, and break, and it takes us five minutes to get it back on."
Hal enters another set nearby. "So, not only is the lesbian bedroom right next to Brian's apartment, but across, over here, you'll find Michael's bedroom which is in a state of disarray right now because we had a scene we had to shoot where [...] everything's kind of pulled aside so we could move furniture in here so that we could shoot a big, wider scene in here, trying to make the apartment look bigger."
Hal moves into the main room. "This is Michael and Emmett's apartment." He moves a few pieces around, and makes a comment about paper maché. "You'll remember from last year Emmett didn't really have a place to sleep, he just sort of disappeared out this door, and you never saw it? Well, here's your first look at Emmett's bedroom, and it looks.... exactly like you thought it would! [ed. Didn't we see it when Emmett and Heather from "See the Light" had sex that one time?]
"This is the other cool part, my favorite part of our apartment... if you go into the bathroom..." Hal leads the way to a door with the back of a gold mannequin sporting a white feather boa, into a tiny space. "Come on into the bathroom... cram over into that corner... shut the door." Hal moves the pink curtain aside. "The shower actually takes you out into a hallway." LOL!! "It's an escape route!"
Across the hall now... "Over here is Ted's condo, he lives so close to Michael and Emmett, we could just lean out the window and yell at his front door. Then we go through into Ted's bedroom, which looks like a bigger, kind of IKEA version of Emmett's, in a lot of ways. You come over here and open up Ted's closet, it's amazing what you find."
"A Craft [food services] table.. now talk about your walk-in closets! That's great... there's candy, and crab, and hard boiled eggs; we eat like kings over here." Over the next few minutes, in between clips of Hal showing the sets, StarTV kept switching back to clips of Hal trying to fix the loft door, with no luck! LOL "I'll fix that later," he says laughing, then calls for "sets."
"This is the diner." Hal points to the panels behind the booths. "All these walls come out, which takes a long time, and gives us a lot of time to spend in our trailers."
Hal pulls on the handle of the door at the back of the diner, through which (supposedly) is the kitchen. He can't open it. "What is in here?" he asks. "I've been here for a year and a half and... let me in!" he pretends to be frantic, pulling on the door with great effort. "I don't know what this door does, it won't..."
Hal notices Randy sneaking some food in the background. "Look, there's Randy!" he yells at the cameraman, and points. "Randy! Get Randy!" The camera turns, and you see Randy quickly exiting the diner, laughing and saying, "No! No!" but he gives a little turn and waves at the camera. (Too cute!) "Randy's getting food out of the kitchen again in the diner!" accuses Sparks with a laugh.
Hal and the cameraman run into Scott, who says, "Did you meet my friend Hal?" and Hal informs him that he's giving StarTV a tour of the set. Scott covers his mouth. "Oh, I'm sorry!" he says.
"No, it's okay," says Hal. "I just showed them your room... you should be ashamed of yourself." We see Gale walking by, checking out the camera.
Walking behind a row of sets, Hal points out the two-tiered wall with the window openings, and says, "By the way, most people don't know that we do Children's shows from here too. This is the set of the land of make-believe from Mr. Rogers." Then, Hal runs into a bit of a 'roadblock' where some sets are in the way... "Oh, we can't even get in," he says, then decides they can climb over the stuff, so he says, "Yes we can... hand me the camera."
They make their way to the other side of the sets, and enter... Babylon!
"This is where we shoot Babylon." The camera pans up to the second level and the lights overhead. "This huge, enormous club you see every week is actually about this big. Disappointed? By god, I would be," He says with a laugh.
"The thing you'll find on Queer As Folk is a lot of staircases that go nowhere." He climbs up to the top of one, and turns around, saying, "I think I'll come back down now." LOL
"And here," Hal says, stepping through another doorway, "You might recognize Woody's. Right now there's a set... we're doing a shot in a bathroom stall, so, in the middle of Woody's right now there's a big..." He stops, as the camera shoots the inside of the stall. "Don't look in there," Hal says, laughing. "It's not proper."
He points out the posters of the guys on the wall...
"And here's Debbie's house; the capital of gauche." Hal points out that Dan, one of the executive producers, is standing nearby, talking to the cast. Peter Paige laughs, and Sharon Gless asks, "Are you giving a tour? Good luck!"
This is the enormous Alien 3-style air conditioning unit that they use to blow cold air... kinda scary, isn't it? It pops eggs out, and these things pop out and grab onto our faces... very frightening. "This is my favorite part of the air conditioning tube," Hal says, as he pushes down on one side and the air blasts into his face. What a nut!
"This is my version of cup and ball. I like it. "Hello," he says, then switches to the Queer As Folk version, "Oooohhhhh," he says, grunting. LOL "It means something different on our show."
"Stand over here, you have to see this. This is the magic actually happening." Crew members are moving a wall "They're taking a wall out." He starts to give them directions... "Pull it straight back, there you go, now it's clear..." He tells the viewers to "come and look at what they did, check this out." and we see Debbie's kitchen from the opposite view (behind the sink). "Now that's a view of a kitchen, am I right? Welcome to the cooking show," Hal jokes, as two crew members stand on the other side.
Hal leads the cameraman to one last spot. "Right over here, just along this side, just at this purple door. "Even our new sets have steps that go nowhere," he says, opening the door. He goes through the door and up a couple of steps, then turns around. "Well, this is Hal Sparks signing off from your behind-the-scenes look at the sets Queer As Folk, and I think it's pretty clear that we couldn't get another one in here with a shoe horn, but it's year two and by god, we'll try. I think by year three we'll have four-story sets and it'll be a fire trap, but we'll make it. But thanks for watching, and we'll see you in January." He shuts the door, then reappears moments later, "er... whenever you see the show. Uh, we'll see you Monday, I guess. Oh wait...these stairs don't go anywhere."
The actors talk about their characters
Sharon: Debbie is Michael's mother, and she also works in the diner where they hang out. And Debbie is kind of the mother to all of them. Debbie's scenes are very funny; I mean, she's got a mouth on her. Things coming out of Debbie's mouth are different than if they came out of the boys' mouth. [clip of Deb telling Emmett to eat some of his protein off a plate]
Hal: This is one of the first shows I've ever seen where characters are sexual, not just having sex, but the sex they have defines who they are: How they have sex, who they have sex with, how many people they have sex with.
Scott: For example in the first episodes, to see Brian with Justin, to see him take this kid's virginity, to see how he kind of winds his way into this kid's brain and understand why he would stick around.
Hal: Every time we get a script there's always that... ‘Oh...' when you get to your sex scene, because it's not going to be just a sex scene. Because at a certain point it becomes just like machinery. ‘Okay, what do you need?' We've all become sort of like Singapore prostitutes, male or female. We're like, ‘What's your name? Roy? Okay, come here, Roy. Yeah, just take off your pants over there.' There's more to it than you think, it's no big deal.
Peter: I don't think the sex keeps people there, because if it did, sex television would be nothing but pornography. If that was enough, if sex was enough to keep people excited and interested and coming back every week, truly that would be all there was. It's easy, it's cheap, and you don't have to be talented to do it.
Scott: If it was just sex, they could tune to SexTv, they could go out and rent a porn, if they just wanted to see people having sex together and they could be far more graphic than we are allowed to portray ourselves.
Ron: You're going to see a lot of sex. People often complain that there's too much sex, but then we also hear them complain that there's not enough full frontal nudity. So, go figure.
Hal: I just know that I have to call my parents and go, 'Don't watch episode seven! Kill on episode seven, episode seven is a NO for this week. NO for seven.' I just have to leave it on my mom's machine, my dad's machine... but then the rest of my friends and family go, 'Nice ass, Sparks.'
Randy: Sex meetings... we have sex meetings, they've been changed to scene meetings now, but they're sex meetings.
Thea: They're bascially meetings where we talk about the sex scenes that we as actors are going to do in a scene.
Michelle: Sometimes like the day before, or a week before, we get together with the producers and we actually go over what exactly is going to happen so that when you get there and you're naked, it's not like, ‘Okay, what are we doing?' [laughs]... just standing around, naked.
Thea: Everything's clear cut, everything's laid out, there are no surprises.
Dan: The director will discuss the shot list, and basically what he wants out of it, we'll [Ron and Dan] discuss what we want emotionally out of it, so that by the time we get on the set, all the actors know exactly what they're doing...
Randy: ... where the camera's going to be, what we have to wear, what the director's goals for the scene are, what's going to be captured on camera, what isn't...
Gale: How much clothes, or how little clothes they have on, how much of your pubic hair is going to be seen...
Michelle: We just kind of go through it, a preliminary meeting, so that everyone's cool, especially if there's like a guest star who comes on the show.
Dan: Our principal cast is pretty comfortable now, but we have guest people who come in all the time; they've never done this before. They come in, they're terrified.
Michelle: It must be terrifying! I mean, we all know each other, and we all know that it's cool, and we have it all worked out, but if I came onto a show and people were having sex all over the place, I'd be like... eeeahhh!
Dan: But they're taken care of, and by the end of it they feel that they're incorporated in the production, and they feel good about it.
Randy: That's a sex meeting.
Ron: They tell us that over half of our viewing audience is women, which is a big surprise; I assume most of those women are straight. Straight men seem to be watching it too.
Sharon:: What they hadn't planned on, was that fifty percent of the viewers are women; and not all gay women. They're straight women, who love to look at these gorgeous boys, and love to look at them making love, and love to look at them naked, and they tune in because they get hot watching it, and their boyfriends are tuning in because their girlfriends are getting hot, and they get to wait until the show's over so they get lucky.
Scott: It's a real peek inside a world that a lot of people don't know about. I think that's why we've been able to get a split audience the way we have, between the gay and straight audience.
Peter: People come up to me and say, ‘I came out to my mother because of your show,' or ‘I really admire your character, and I really admire how you live your life,' ‘my friends and I get together every week and watch the show...' I love that, because it's a show about friendship, so I love that it brings people together.
Dan: Previously on television, we've seen gay characters that are either eunuchs (sexless) or clowns. And this has been a view of gay characters. On QAF, we have some characters that one might say are stereotypes, certainly some 'queeny' characters, but they exist.
Peter: There are a lot of single, gay characters bouncing around TV shows, but to show them interacting, to show them as sexual people, and not just comic relief or victims, I think is definitely a barrier that has not been broken down before.
Scott: You may see things that absolutely shock you, your jaw may be on the ground, but the next second you're going to be laughing, the next second you may be incredibly touched and moved.
Sharon: I like its courage, I like it's balls -- you'll forgive the expression -- but it takes balls to do a show like this. It's a very daring piece.
Closing credits... Hal praising Thea by singing a little song for her and pretending to flash her.
