![]() (The buoyant, genre-spanning score was also conceived by a “music factory” of five Toronto artists.) The eight-episode season is wonderfully confident the writing is lean and sharply drawn, and scenes aren’t wasted with exposition or explanation. If there is a representational trap for shows by non-white, gender non-conforming people to pander to those who would dismiss them outright, Sort Of sets its own rhythms. And what both Sabi the character and Sort Of the show insists upon is doing so on their own terms. The demand from outsiders upon seeing someone like Sabi is this: Explain yourself. Sabi, on the phone with Paul, tells him to “white-savior it,” and the principal relents. Violet, in the key of adolescent brat, pretends not to know them. In a tightly written scene, they go to the school to pick up Violet, who’s been suspended for pushing a fellow classmate “in the vaginal region.” A finicky principal is reluctant to allow Sabi to take her home, even though he’s checked their ID and their name is on the list of emergency contacts. He gets abrasive and possessive meanwhile, Sabi must do their job while brown and nonbinary. Sabi and Paul form an uneasy family: Sabi is great with the kids Violet (Kaya Kanashiro), 13, and Henry (Aden Bedard), 10, a dynamic Paul finds threatening as he realizes just how little he knows about his own family. “Acknowledge that.”īut they stay, a choice that appears, at first, like inertia - their friends worry they’re allowing life to happen to them. “Some things are just too big to be choices,” she says. Sabi’s sister Aqsa (Supinder Wraich) wants them to go abroad. But when the mother of the kids, Bessy (Grace Lynn Kung), gets into a bike accident and becomes comatose, Paul asks Sabi to stay on. Initially, the timing seems opportune: Sabi’s best friend 7ven (a delightful Amanda Cordner) is moving to Berlin and asks Sabi to join her for an adventure in queer self-actualization. He offers to help them find another family because of how difficult it might be, he says, “for someone like you.” He tries to amend the comment and Sabi cuts him off. ![]() Sabi works two jobs, as a bartender and a nanny to two half-Asian, half-white kids (very Toronto) in the pilot, the family they work for - well, really, the man of the house, Paul (Gray Powell, looking like a frowny Duplass brother) - has decided to let Sabi go. So they might stonewall or deadpan: totally. ![]() They’re perceptive and droll, someone who knows their body can elicit a response - some form of confusion as cis-normie people attempt to mentally slot them into a preexisting taxonomy. Sabi uses they/them pronouns they have choppy bangs and long curls and a penchant for bangles, crop tops, and shiny things. Sabi, the gender-fluid protagonist conceived and played by Bilal Baig in CBC and HBO Max’s Sort Of, gives a great whatever. ![]() Maybe a cocked brow or an “uh-huh.” It’s, like, whatever. When I go about my day and a casually ignorant comment comes my way - something we used to call “microaggressions” - I usually give very little. ![]()
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