ABSTRACT
Gilad Padva centers on the Israeli musical TV miniseries Mary Lou (HOT Cable TV, 2009), which focuses on Meyer, a gay male adolescent who had been deserted by his mother as a child and moved to Tel Aviv, in his search after his disappearing mother and his quest of artistic emancipation. Padva argues that television drama signifies the growing social acceptance, popularity, and profitability of queer representations in mainstream Israeli television in the 2000s. Mary Lou (aka Always the Same Dream), created by the acclaimed Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox, the most prominent figure in the Israeli New Queer Cinema, is compared in this chapter with the popular American musical TV series Glee (Fox Channel, 2009–2014) which is set in Lima, Ohio and centers on the fictitious William McKinley high-school glee club New Directions that participates in the show choir competition circuit. The intercultural comparison focuses on the different televisual portrayals of gay adolescents, the Israeli teenager Meyer Levy and the American youth Kurt Hummel, in regard to their struggle for recognition, fame, artistic fulfillment, acceptance, and their yearning for true love in a highly competitive, cynical and homophobic world. Mary Lou, in its free-spirited musical celebration of gender and sexual transgression on primetime, and its colorful politics of camp subculture and drag shows, exemplifies the visibility of queer identities on contemporary Israeli television.
