Delivered at Like A Version: Adaptations, Reboots and Remakes in Popular Culture Symposium, 1st – 2nd December 2023, Virtual Conference.

American Gigolo, the 2022 television series which functions as a sequel to the 1980 film, has received an overwhelmingly negative reception with both critics and viewers. An insightful review declaring the show ‘more dud than stud’ encapsulates the problems with viewers’ expectations: despite raunchy marketing promising a direct continuation to the original, there was ‘very little actual sex’ compared to its Paul Schrader predecessor, a choice complicated further with the addition of a controversial backstory in which protagonist Julian Kaye was revealed to have been a victim of child abuse.

The misleading marketing certainly influenced viewer rejection of the show by both promising a continuation to the original and deliberately obscuring this plotline. The post- #MeToo context it was released in, furthermore, can be argued to have impacted the reception of the show’s central themes. The sheer venom with which reviewers broached the portrayal of a male victim of abuse, however, raises questions of its own. Despite the rightly criticised aspects of the show, its choice to depict an unconventional male victim as a lead character on primetime television is groundbreaking. Did audiences reject the show for disrupting their nostalgia for Julian, or does heterosexual male victimhood remain society’s final taboo?