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“2 Broke Girls” keeps everyone guessing

When 2 Broke Girls was at this summer’s TCA, show creator Michael Patrick King told me that the show’s major characters Max and Caroline would not be having any sexual tension.

“They’re 22 and they have to pay the rent,” he told me. “They don’t have time for sexual fluidity at this point. They have to work!”

But after the show debuted this fall, there have been instances of the girls in bed together, rampant vagina jokes and enough innuendo to get people talking. (And not just us – New York magazine asked Beth Behrs (Caroline) about the lesbian subtext earlier this year and later penned a piece “Are 2 Broke Girls‘ Girls a Will They Won’t They Couple?” So maybe things have changed with the success of the show. I asked the show’s executive consultant Whitney Cummings and she said we’re not imagining things.

“I think, in general, young girls are just more sexual now,” Cummings said at the NBC TCA party. “We don’t discriminate and so I love that there’s a sexual thing between them. They’re both hot and smart and sexy and we laugh about it a lot that [Max] is kind of a dude and Caroline is such a girlie girl. We always envision it as a romantic comedy between two girls; always wrote it like that. There’s no real male love interest in the show. We had one but we took him off because it was so much less sexy. We kind of see Max as the guy – she has a man’s name – and [Caroline] as the girl, so we always envision them as sort of in a relationship.”

But star Beth Behrs disagrees, saying it’s just that they have a close friendship on and off screen. “Where are people getting that from? Have they never seen two girls be friends? We’re really good friends in real life so maybe that’s what you guys see,” she said after a 2 Broke Girls panel at TCA this week. “I think [Whitney] meant ‘relationship’ as in the friendship growing. I can assure everyone, we’re really close friends and nothing more.”

Behrs may not see where we’re seeing the subtext, but it’s clearly coming from the girls’ chemistry and the writing room. Cummings said that it just how she and Michael Patrick King think.

“I just don’t think about gender. Neither does Michael Patrick King. We fall in love with people, not genders. Gender is just obsolete,” she said. “We don’t think about color, we don’t think about gender. That’s just kind of generation we live in. I think it’s a fun way to play with masculinity and femininity and what it all means. I mean, Kat is the most gorgeous woman you’ve ever seen; the most gorgeous, ridiculous body. But she has masculine qualities, feminine qualities – sexuality is just more fluid now, a little less defined.”

I mentioned that they also hired a lesbian writer (Liz Feldman) and Cummings said that the percentage of gay people on staff doesn’t seem to affect the gayness of the show, at least not intentionally.

“Liz is one of my favorites but we didn’t hire her because she’s a lesbian: We hired her because she’s a f—ing brilliant writer who I love. Michael Patrick King is of course gay but we don’t really think about that stuff. It’s awesome and we’re certainly proud of if. A lot of people think of me as a gay man and I have a guy on my staff whose kind of a lesbian. We just don’t really think of labels. Everybody has sex with everything and everyone!”

But while there doesn’t seem to be a promise of Max and Caroline bedding each other in the near future, Whitney does say there will be some sexual fluidity on her own NBC sitcom, Whitney, which had her in a lesbian kiss earlier this season.

“It’s like two girls kissing is not that scandalous,” Cummings said. “I was more proud of the fact that it wasn’t supposed to be shocking. It’s just kind of what girls do. It’s just sort of a young modern fresh thing. To me, it was was much fresher to not make it a big deal; to be just kind of a nonchalant thing. So I think that that is a better message than being like ‘Ugh, two girls kissing! Isn’t that gross and crazy?’ It was f—ing awesome. Girls are hot.”

As for what we can look forward to, Whitney said her show is about to “play a lot with sexuality.”

“I’m very much looking forward to that,” she told me. “We have some characters on the show who are sexually fluid, which means you don’t think about gender, you just fall in love with people. You can date men, women – I know that bisexual is usually the term but that’s almost a little too calculated. It’s like, I fall in love with people!”

It seems that Cummings is open to having any of her characters explore their sexualities, so there could be hope for Max and Caroline yet.

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