#having them live in vermont and having dani live long enough for a civil union was intentional

[novelconcepts]

I found out not too long ago that they had initially planned Oliver to play the gardener but then thought better since he played Pedretti's twin in HH. But just thinking about it and wondering how different the dynamics would have been. Would the show still be this raving and heartbreaking if it didn't have that queer element?

I really have to imagine the idea of putting Jackson-Cohen in the gardener role was suuuuper early days. Like, before the story was hammered out early. I’ve talked a bit about this before, how the whole story really hinges on the queerness as much as the normalizing of that queerness, and how Dani leaving her Straight White Cis Male fiance for a nearly identical Straight White Cis Male (But Rougher Around The Edges This Time!) would read more like a Hallmark Christmas movie than the deep love-and-loss story Bly ultimately became. I genuinely think them moving him to playing Peter had less to do with “these two actors played twins once” (after all, we’ve seen the opposite happen in film before, like with Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson playing spouses in Godzilla and twins in Age of Ultron), and more to do with wanting to tell a much more nuanced story of identity and agency. 

Because....Jamie being a queer woman is huge. It’s huge for Dani’s arc, obviously, but it’s also just important for the kind of character Jamie is. We get a grumpy-yet-exceedingly-soft woman with limited maternal instincts who still loves her family with her whole heart. We get a woman with a criminal background who has gone through therapy and is now “a beacon of reform”--spoken like a joke, but genuinely, she is. We get a lower class woman working a blue-collar job, and happy with it. If any or all of this was given to a Straight White Dude, we’ve seen it before. A hundred times. Getting to see a queer woman in this place is what made it revolutionary. Getting to have Dani be a feminine, strong, brave, terrified mess of a human being who is also deeply queer is also revolutionary. Getting a story that is inherently framed as a narrative about toxic v. healthy relationship patterns that says “the queer women are the healthy ones--the ones who love each other enough to be selfless”, when so many stories set in the 80s are about queerness being vilified and dangerous is...revolutionary. There was intent in every step of this story. Normalization of queer love, and acceptance of self, and letting go of expectation in order to enjoy every day you get. And, most of all, the queer lens of their marriage being something that isn’t supported legally yet, but is bigger than that, is enough because of what it is, and not what anyone else’s judgment has to say on the matter. Dani’s ring is the last thing we see. That marriage, that love, persists beyond death, beyond reason, and nothing else matters, in the end. None of that would have read the same with a cis male Jamie. I have to believe, given the intentionality of every layer of storytelling, that they decided on this pretty early on.