The elevator pitch was three words: “Gay James Bond.” Which, if you know anything about Gabe Liedman’s work—from Big Mouth to Pen15 to his stand-up—is the kind of setup he was genetically engineered to flip on its head. “I went away and came back with Q-Force,” Liedman explains. “Not gay James Bond—but what if gay James Bond gets treated like shit by the CIA?”
Thus began Q-Force, Netflix’s gloriously subversive and proudly queer animated spy series that somehow folds Mission: Impossible-level storytelling into jokes about animated penises and Deborah Winger. Liedman leans in: “I didn’t want this to be some bootlicker, pro-surveillance thing,” he says. “I wanted them to be rebels. You know, queer people not carrying water for the state.”
While the series came out of the gate with controversy (a gay spy show? with jokes?), Liedman understood the pressure. “Your own community has the highest expectations. They don’t want to be embarrassed by you,” he says. “Hopefully I didn’t fuck it up.”
The ensemble series features a team of LGBTQ+ agents, each a riff on spy tropes and queer archetypes, voiced by the likes of Wanda Sykes, Patti Harrison, and Matt Rogers. “From the beginning, I knew Deb was Wanda,” Liedman says. “And Matt’s sample script to get into the writers’ room was the funniest thing I’ve ever read.” Rogers was supposed to just read the role of Twink at a table read, but “he fit like a glove. It was undeniable.”
And yes, they were all recording from home, under blankets, during the early waves of COVID. Liedman still can’t believe they pulled it off. “To get David Harbour and Laurie Metcalf to record under a duvet? I have no idea how that happened.”
The show’s jokes hit from all angles—there’s a Brokeback Mountain riff, a Princess Diaries nod, and a sudden, inexplicable obsession with cobblestones that took on a life of its own in the writers' room. Liedman says there’s “hours of garbage about cobblestones” that didn’t make it to air. “It became our great obsession. I want to produce a whole spinoff called Cobblestones.”
But Q-Force doesn’t just want to make you laugh. “I wanted to balance everything,” Liedman says. “Yes, representation matters. But I also wanted the audience to laugh, to be surprised, to be turned on. I wanted queer characters who fall in love, go home for the holidays, and totally fuck things up—just like all the straight characters in every other comedy.”
That balance even applied to how the story unfolded over ten episodes. “Netflix told us from the start it would all drop at once,” Liedman says. “So we built arcs—real cliffhangers—to make it bingeable. We threw in twists at the end of episodes just to keep people going.”
And if Q-Force felt like a spiritual cousin to Archer, Liedman doesn’t mind. “It’s spy shit, it’s queer shit, it’s pop culture shit,” he says.
Ultimately, though, Q-Force is less about genre parody and more about seizing a rare opportunity to tell queer stories in a mainstream package. “There’s still not enough out there,” Liedman says. “We’re lucky to have Universal and Netflix behind this, going to every country, every language. That’s bananas.”
Bananas, yes. But also brilliant. And possibly just the beginning. Liedman won’t confirm if more Q-Force is on the way, but says this: “You and me both want that cobblestone spin-off. Let's make it happen.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailers below.
