For our first glimpse of drag queen Brother Boy in the premiere of “Sordid Lives: The Series,” the camera is very tightly focused on his lips, which gleam and glisten with lipstick like red patent leather. As the camera pulls back, we gradually see the full face of actor Leslie Jordan, who plays Brother Boy, dolled up as a demented Tammy Wynette and looking as if she is exactly what ever happened to Baby Jane.
Lip-synching Wynette’s “I Don’t Wanna Play House” and puffing on a lipstick-stained cigarette, Jordan, best known for his turn as Beverley Leslie on “Will & Grace,” lets it all hang out from the get-go.
If that image doesn’t scare you, you might find a few laughs in “Sordid Lives: The Series,” which is writer-director Del Shores’s TV prequel to his 2000 movie, “Sordid Lives.” The new Wednesday night show on the Logo network isn’t just campy, it’s CAMPY!!!
Set in small-town Texas, home of the white-trashy Ingram clan, “Sordid Lives: The Series” takes artificiality, sentimentality, banality and vulgarity to an extreme.
You have to have a taste for flaming excess, as this “Steel Magnolias” is more like “Mylar Magnolias.” Jordan, who is piquant as always, is doing his Wynette in a mental institution, where his family has sent him to be “de-homosexualized.” Poor Brother Boy is about to find out that Wynette, his idol, has just died — the show is set in 1998 — and the women in his family are worried he’ll fall apart.
His sisters are the uptight Latrelle (Bonnie Bedelia) and the loose LaVonda (Ann Walker), and his mother — whose funeral was the occasion for the movie — is Peggy (Rue McClanahan), all of whom wield their Texas accents and their makeup with a vengeance. They’re a bunch of loony hens.
But the Ingram lady I like best is Peggy’s low-key sister Sissy, a chain- smoking caretaker who doles out the family supply of Valium. Sissy is played by Beth Grant and she crosses over from nutty to dear, and she keeps the show from drifting aimlessly in a sea of squawking eccentricity.
Like the movie, the series also follows Latrelle’s son, Ty (Jason Dottley), an aspiring actor in Los Angeles who is dealing with both his own emerging gayness and a stalking ex-girlfriend. Ty is kind of clueless and vain, and his therapist, played by guest star Margaret Cho, doesn’t seem as awful as she should when she openly expresses her contempt for clients like Ty and their “high- end problems.”
While the Texas material has a hint of “My Name Is Earl”-style trailer-trash appeal — check out Olivia Newton-John as a singing ex-convict — the Los Angeles scenes are flat.
“Sordid Lives: The Series” has a decidedly amateurish tone, with shoddy production values and acting that shows some seams. But the tone works in the show’s favor. Our expectations stay low as the actors run around spouting off melodramatic nonsense, clearly having a pretty good time.
