Del Shores takes his hit play and movie to the small screen with ‘Sordid Lives: The Series’

The Logo sitcom features a galaxy of gay-fave stars, including Rue McClanahan (second from left), Olivia Newton-John (center) and Leslie Jordan (second from right).

Del Shores still vividly remembers the phone call.

It came from his alma mater, Baylor University, shortly after Matthew Shepard’s murder nearly 10 years ago.

“I went to Baylor on scholarship, so I always try to give back. When I get a call from a current scholarship student asking me to give, I do,” he says.

But the Shepard case weighed heavily on him that day, especially what he saw as “the way the church was part of the murder, how the hatred spewed from pulpits was part of the justification for it.”

The sweet Southern voice cooing at him from the other end of the line had no way of knowing that. She was just asking if he could contribute to the alumni association fund drive for the Baptist college. But Shores felt emboldened by the Shepard incident to ask a question first. He said, “I want to, but first I want to know what Baylor University is doing for their gay students.”

There was silence. Then the voice tentatively said, “Uh, this is a Baptist university. There are no gay students here — well, maybe in the drama department.”

“Well,” Shores said in a huff, “I guess I’ll write my check to them, then.”

He laughs about it now, but the experience is emblematic of Shores’ work and his life: The same events are often both riotously funny and darkly tragic.

Consider his two best-known plays: “Sordid Lives” and “Southern Baptist Sissies.” Each is full of hysterical scenes of Gothic Texas humor, drag queens and slapstick. But they also contain death, suicide, prison and gay-reparative therapy — and all in substantial doses.

That formula might not sound like the makings of a weekly half-hour sitcom, but that’s exactly what Shores is attempting, when “Sordid Lives: The Series” — a prequel to his play — begins airing on the Logo channel this week.

Shores is no stranger to serialized TV — he was a writer and producer for several seasons of “Queer as Folk” — but “Sordid Lives” marks a challenge even for him.

“I’m a control freak,” Shores says, as if that’s news. “I love every aspect of [making the show]. We’ve done 12 episodes. It was almost as if I created a TV series and got to be in the theater again.”

In part that is because “SL: The Series” was filmed unlike most sitcoms. Without the budget of a major broadcast network show like “Will & Grace” or “Scrubs,” Shores had to approach production from a different angle. Instead of filming stand-alone episodes in chronological order, he filmed the entire season like a feature film, shooting all scenes in one location at once, irrespective of which episode it appeared in. (It helped that Shores wrote and directed every episode himself.)

The format had two significant advantages: Logo could afford it, and it allowed Shores to assemble a dream cast. Among his stars: Leslie Jordan (“Will & Grace”), Bonnie Bedelia (“Die Hard”), Rue McClanahan (“The Golden Girls”) and Caroline Rhea. He even snagged Margaret Cho and Tammy Wynette’s daughter, Georgette Jones, for memorable cameos.

Shores gushes over his entire cast.

“I loved working with all of them,” Shores says. “We’re all really happy with the episodes. Leslie Jordan is so good we have no outtakes for the DVD. When I wrote it, I thought, wouldn’t it be great to get Rue McClanahan as Peggy? So we contacted her. Rue read all 12 scripts in a day. She said, ‘I never thought I’d get to play a woman in love again,’” and she quickly signed on.

“Everyone said I should do a sequel to ‘Sordid Lives,’ but I thought I didn’t want to continue after — there was so much texture to all that went before, so many unanswered questions,” says Shores. “Almost all the stories do not unravel the movie on any level but I have to make some concessions for TV — it’s the same story and tone” as the film and play.

McClanahan’s character is already dead when the curtain rises on the play, but making the series a prequel proved a rich source of inspiration for Shores. It begins on April 18, 1998 — the day Tammy Wynette died and about four months before the film and play. Wynette was the idol of Brother Boy (Jordan), a cross-dresser confined to a state mental institution trying to cure him of his homosex’ality.

At the same time, Brother Boy’s nephew Ty (Jason Dottley, who is Shores’ partner in real life) has just been fired from acting on his soap, and is toying with coming out by auditioning for a “gay” play as family members try to track down Peggy. And that’s just the first half-hour episode.

The result is a kind of white trash version of “Dynasty,” or a Texas “Twin Peaks” without any backward-talking dwarves — but give it time. Shores hopes the weekly cliffhangers will cause people to come back enough that Logo requests a second season, for which he already has a lot of ideas in his noggin. And if it is a hit?

“The first season we do it for passion — we truly all had to make it work budget-wise,” he says. But he wants a bigger budget for year 2.

After all, half of show business is business.

Premieres July 23 at 9 p.m. on Logo.



This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition July 18, 2008.