Emma Teitel: Queer family relationships are complicated. But Bilal Baig’s hit show ‘Sort of’ gets it

There’s a scene in the forthcoming second season of the CBC comedy, “Sort Of,” in which the lead character, Sabi Mehboob, played by Bilal Baig, stands on a ladder tinkering with some wires in the ceiling of their parents’ suburban home.   

Like the 28-year-old actor and writer who co-created the show and is its star, Sabi uses they/them pronouns, wears their hair long, dresses femme and sports manicures and bangles. This fact plagues Sabi’s well-meaning, conservative dad, Imran, so much so he mostly ignores it. “You’re really handy,” he says leaning on the ladder as Sabi, a former electrician, works the wires above. “You’re going to make a very good husband to a nice lady someday.”    

Sabi doesn’t lash out at their dad. They don’t even climb down from the ladder. Instead, they shoot Imran an annoyed look and inquire, matter of factly (everything Sabi says is matter of fact), about when they will be paid for the electrical work.   

Imran is confused. “Like allowance?” he says. “Like white people give their children?”   

“No,” Sabi says, “like what you have to do by law when you hire someone.”  

“OK, OK,” Imran concedes. “Don’t call your lawyers.”    

Spoiler alert: Sabi does not call their lawyers. Sabi doesn’t even stop taking calls from their parents, because “Sort Of” isn’t that kind of story.    

A great deal has been written about “Sort Of” — which premiered in 2021 and enters its second season on the CBC, Nov. 15 — as a groundbreaking series. The show is groundbreaking because Baig, its brilliant Mississauga-reared star is the first queer South Asian Muslim person to lead a Canadian TV series.    

But it’s also original in a different way: Sabi is a rare queer adult character on TV who is as enmeshed with their birth family as they are with their friends. This sets “Sort Of” apart from the kind of queer story traditionally told in mainstream entertainment; one in which adult children belong exclusively to a “chosen family” of like-minded friends, having become estranged from their homophobic or transphobic birth families.

On “Sort Of,” it seems the more awkward and strained things become between Sabi and their immediate family, the closer they pull together. When Sabi’s mother, Raffo, sees them in femme attire for the first time, she is shocked and disturbed. But the incident seems to render her more overbearing and present, not less.  

There’s a reason for this, Bilal Baig told me over dinner recently at a Toronto restaurant, weeks before the release of the show’s highly anticipated second season. “Some of the stuff I was seeing (on TV), it didn’t really feel like trans people were fully realized characters,” said Baig.   

The absence of family relationships was just one example; Baig found queer and especially trans characters on TV to be lacking in nuance in all sorts of ways. Baig, like their character Sabi is pensive and shy and nothing if not subtle; they described themselves as “maybe one of the chillest people that exists on earth.” One particular trans-character trope that really irks them is the notion that trans feminine people are preternaturally “sassy,” that they walk around snapping their fingers at everyone.    

“There’s so many ways to dehumanize us,” said Baig. “We’re either these amazing angel people or totally violent. The finger snapping feels like another way of dehumanizing. It reduces us to this one thing that I think people find fun, and it’s just so not my reality. I have so many trans friends and finger snapping is not a part of their existence.”    

There is a lot that is innovative about “Sort Of,” which follows a non-binary Muslim millennial of Pakistani descent who works by day as a nanny for an affluent hipster family in Toronto and by night as a bartender, all while juggling relationships with a loyal but self-absorbed best friend, nosy parents and various romantic partners of different gender identities.     

“Queer Eye” cast member Tan France, in a speech presenting “Sort Of” with a prestigious Peabody award earlier this year, noted that in addition to its “blazingly original comedic sensibility” it is a “tender portrait of a queer non-binary individual.” But “Sort Of” is also innovative, and refreshing, for its honest and generous portrayal of family.   

For decades, the birth families of gay and trans characters on TV fell primarily under the umbrella of one-dimensional bigot. On the original Degrassi series, Spike’s older brother returns from college to tell his parents he is gay, to which they respond that he doesn’t “exist anymore” in their eyes. 

As a result, TV queers’ families were either out of the picture on most shows or linked by a fine thread: an awkward dinner here, a strained phone call there. On the original “The L Word,” for example, a series that follows the love lives of affluent Los Angeles lesbians in the mid-2000s, lead character Bette Porter’s dad appeared only briefly in the series, whereupon he refused to acknowledge his daughter’s long-time partner Tina, referring to her coldly by last name only, as “Ms. Canard.”    

Of course, queer TV characters of that era seemed to lack close family ties but also personal histories of any kind. During the 2000s, TV writers were extremely fond of the “gay best friend” trope, i.e. sassy male characters a la Anthony Marentino on “Sex and the City,” who served as platonic arm candy to heterosexual women and had virtually no internal lives.

At least when it came to the family dynamics, TV did often mirror real life, Dana Piccoli, a critic and editor at the queer media site News Is Out told me. “It was pretty much ‘I don’t want to know … or I’m going to cut you out of my life because you’re queer,” she said.    

Today art is catching up to reflect the reality of many LGBTQ people: that while the families they grew up in may not wholeheartedly embrace their sexuality or gender identity, they remain a fixed presence in their lives — for better or for worse.  It’s increasingly common for queer characters, particularly those in modern teen comedies, to have uber-liberal parents for whom their kids’ identity is an afterthought (the recent teen movie “Crush” comes to mind).  

“It’s such a huge shift in the last 20 years,” said Piccoli. “We’re getting to be the heroes of our stories. Not just the villain, or the kid whose parents reject them.”  

But this perfect ally scenario is, in real life, the exception, not the rule. And the “overcorrection,” as Piccoli dubs it, of writing trans and gay characters with hearts of gold whose parents are 100 per cent on board with their lives, can register as insincere.  “As fans we want to see all the parts of us. We have joys and triumphs and troubles,” said Piccoli.    

“Sort Of” is just one piece in a collection of recent series that are beginning to reflect a more complex truth. On the 2019 comedy-drama series “Work in Progress,” comedian Abby McEnany plays a self-described “fat, queer dyke” who when she isn’t writing furiously in a journal about her obsessive compulsive disorder, enjoys a close and loving relationship with her square, suburban heterosexual sister. On the British show “Feel Good,” Canadian comedian Mae Martin can’t seem to escape their brutally honest but devoted mother (played by Lisa Kudrow) whose video calls to their home in London are equal parts concern and judgment. 

And on “Sort Of,” Sabi’s parents try and try to understand their child. This doesn’t mean they are instantly accepting of Sabi’s choices — any of them. The conflicts don’t all centre on gender presentation, another fact that adds complexity to the show. Sabi’s mother, Raffo, (a role played by the thoroughly hilarious Ellora Patnaik), a first-generation immigrant from Pakistan, is bothered by her child’s feminine appearance, but truly appalled that Sabi does domestic work for a living. “Like Mary Poppins?!” she exclaims, mortified, when she learns they are a nanny.    

And yet, she shows up one afternoon on the doorstep of the family Sabi works for and immediately begins assisting with dinner for the kids, lightly trolling Sabi for their sloppy vegetable dicing. “It’s good you are terrible cook like normal Pakistani man,” she says before taking the knife from their hands. Sabi defers obligingly.

 “It felt really compelling to be able to explore Sabi’s mom in a full and honest way,” Baig told me. “Talk about trans and non binary people getting a bit of the short end of the stick in terms of representation, I think the same goes for South Asian women of a certain age.”

Notably, things unfold differently from Baig’s real-life experience with their own parents. “I think the journey Raffo is on, I wish that for my mom and my dad,” they said. “They’re taking their time. They’re trying to figure it out. They know I have a TV show, they know about how I move through the world and identify. We don’t talk that often but I’m curious where we’ll be in a couple of years.”   

The world of “Sort Of” bridges the gap between immigrant parents with empty nest syndrome, queer bartenders and videogame-addicted elementary school kids, a combination that has arguably never existed on TV before. But Baig has straddled many worlds too, and this combination is likely a natural one.

The actor and writer grew up in a big, working-class, Pakistani-immigrant family in Mississauga and fell in love with theatre in high school. A few years ago they were performing in a play in Toronto alongside actor Fab Filippo, when the two decided to brainstorm ideas between scenes (neither had a starring role). The result of those brainstorming sessions was “Sort Of,” a show that catapulted Baig from respected Toronto playwright and actor to in-demand TV star.

When I met them they were between events, attempting to get a quick meal in before a handler whisked them away. The unrelenting pace of their public life felt out of sync with their quiet, thoughtful demeanour. And yet, Baig is “drawn to what feels challenging,” they said, and in this case the challenge is worth the reward.    

 “It’s not lost on me that a show like this has changed conversations for people and even changed family dynamics,” they said. “I’ve gotten messages from people saying their parents totally get their pronouns now, or parents sending me DMs saying ‘I get it in a way I hadn’t before seeing the show.’”  

This could be because “Sort Of” is as generous in its treatment of Sabi’s parents (good people coming to terms with their child’s identity) as it is in its treatment of Sabi.  “I think what you often don’t see in a lot of un-nuanced queer content is the experiences that parents are also having getting to know their child’s identity,” Samra Habib, author of the queer, Muslim memoir “We Have Always Been Here,” told me. “What I appreciate about ‘Sort Of’ is you get to see the humanity of their mother and the fact that their mother is really trying to connect the best way she can. That’s what is so special about it and so mirrors what I’m trying to navigate with my parents.”   

What “Sort Of” has done and masterfully, is depict the space between total rejection and total acceptance that many queer people occupy when it comes to their families; a space in which parents say all the wrong things on a loop and then, out of the blue, something right. On the first season of “Sort Of,” Raffo calls Sabi in the middle of the night. When they don’t pick up she leaves a voicemail. “Live your life,” it says.  

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