'Oh, Otto!' could be TV's next breakout gay hit
An award-winning existential dramedy about a gay 20-something trying to find himself via Grindr hookups in Brussels is sure to resonate. Why can't we watch it yet? I asked its creator.
Heated Rivalry and Oh, Otto! have a lot in common. They were both made on a shoestring budget, forcing its creative teams to do more with less. They both star handsome, likeable characters who are coming to terms with facets of their identity as queer men. And they both include a lot of gay sex. The difference? Hockey aside, Oh, Otto! isn’t yet available to watch in North America. I’m hoping to help change that.
Created and directed by Stijn Van Kerkhoven, the 7-episode dramedy starts off when Otto (Jonathan Michiels) is unceremoniously dumped by his long-term boyfriend Boris (Gijs De Corte) who returns from a backpacking trip. This was Otto’s first ever relationship, and Boris wants him to go out and evolve as a gay man rather than stay in what he sees as a relationship that isn’t evolving.
Otto, spiralling, leans on his bestie Lente (Jennifer Heylen), who encourages him to process the breakup the old fashioned way: If you can’t get over him, get under someone else. And thus begins Otto’s first journey as a single gay man on Grindr, under his slutty alias, Elio.
Lente doesn’t initially realize she’s created something of a monster—before long, Otto is leaving in the middle of their hangouts to go hook up with a random guy, prioritizing these dates over his friendship. Besides, Lente needs emotional support too! She’s moving to the suburbs with her boyfriend and is feeling some type of way about it. Otto will have to figure it out the hard way, though, as he struggles to keep all the pieces together (don’t even get me started on how bad of a therapist he is).
I found out about Oh, Otto! on gay Twitter, of all places. One of those kismet moments where art comes into your life at the exact time you need it—I, too, had been unceremoniously dumped, and although I was a little less thrilled to be back on Grindr than Otto, I shared in his existential exploration to figure out what it is he really wants, out of his romantic relationships and who he really is outside of the definition of a relationship.
My favorite aspect of the show, though, is Otto’s friendship with Lente, the underrepresented dynamic of the tender friendship between a gay man and his Black girl bestie (thankfully, she’s written to be a full person, too—including a bottleish episode that follows her side of the story). A bonus, but Oh, Otto! is also just beautiful to look at—it has a kind of Euro arthouse indie film look to it, in addition to capturing the queer side of Brussels, a fascinating city where a lot of folks have some level of trilingualism between Dutch, French, and English.
So far, according to what Van Kerkhoven told me over Zoom, Oh, Otto! has not yet been sold to North American markets. It recently received a French dub for streaming in the French parts of Belgium and can be watched on Streamz over there as well as Canal+. I can easily see it on HBO Max, between Heated Rivalry and Looking, with which it shares DNA, alongside Mubi’s television catalogue, or even on Netflix (it reminds me of Anne+, too, which ended up there). The best news out of all of this: Van Kerkhoven and his team are already working on a second season, so there’s more to come.
My hope is by spotlighting it here, I can nudge someone out there to snatch it up for distribution ASAP. It’s rare that television captures the experience of contemporary gay adulthood outside of the coming out experience or major traumas in a way that feels grounded, relatable, funny, and kind of hot at the same time. Below, Van Kerkhoven tells me more about making Oh, Otto! and his hopes for where it could go.
Michel: Can you tell me a bit about what inspired you to make Oh, Otto!?
Stijn: I moved to Brussels when I was 18 and I was actually still in the closet. The city and the people I met in the city really helped me to find my way and to find who should I be in the gay scene but also with myself. It’s a really unique city but it’s also a recognizable story I realized later on, when I was more comfortable with myself, that a lot of people went through the same thing of dating around and hooking up. So I started pitching this series from my experience, but also from the experience of friends and people I met along the way.
I always wanted to make a series that is warm and not necessarily about coming out, but just about life as it is; not making the being gay part problematic, but doing something else with it. Here in Belgium, it hadn’t really been something that had been done before.
Oh, Otto! won for best short series at Canneseries. Since then, it’s available on Streamz and on Canal+ — what have distribution discussions been like for anything in North America?
We are really trying to get it sold. It’s working here in Europe. We have French and Dutch-speaking parts here in Belgium. We have the show dubbed now in French which means we could also sell it in France. So a lot of things are happening around it. I don’t get to know all the details because I’m simply a director, but we’re hoping to make a second season; that would also help to sell it.
I can definitely see it on HBO Max or Mubi here. Maybe in the ecosystem of Heated Rivalry and Proud.
Heated Rivalry did the unimaginable with their series, which is amazing. I hope there’s more to come for shows like that made.
Not that I’ve been yet, but Oh, Otto! captures Brussels really beautifully, from the architecture to the gay scene (that bathhouse episode!). Do you feel the show accurately captured your vision of the city, were there any limitations on locations that you bumped up against?
Brussels is known in Belgium as like, not the best place to be. A lot of people in Belgium don’t like Brussels, and if the city is represented in a show, it’s usually the criminal part, or it’s represented as dirty and unsafe. I’ve been living here for more than 10 years now, and I just love the city. I see it through maybe too much of a romantic lens, but that’s my Brussels. I was so happy to be being able to really push to film here, it’s really not easy compared to Antwerp or Ghent, smaller and more accessible cities. I’m really happy that I could push it through and show people how pretty the city can be, but also the gay part of it. I think in Belgium it’s the only place where we still have that, streets with gay bars and the gay sauna, it’s a big community.
How realistic was too realistic when you were making the show? I noticed Otto doesn’t really talk about being a top or a bottom or PrEP and doxy PEP.
It’s really hard. I wanted to make a show that was centred around being queer, but I wanted as many people as possible to watch it. For a broad audience, if you use too many words that are specific to our community, people get lost. They might think, Oh maybe it’s not for me. It was always a hard balance to find.
For example, in the episode in the hotel when he has his first hookup with this Dutch guy, I actually had him ask Otto: “Did you douche?” And Otto would reply, yes, and he would say me too, implying that they were both vers and were going to have…a lovely night. Then you make the edits and do small screenings to see what resonates and what doesn’t work. Most straight people don’t know what douching is. They think it’s like showering, because here it’s the same word. So they’re like, Why would he ask that? Is he smelly? So it’s those things where it would would have been such a nice way to have this in but you have to cut your darlings. Sometimes I had to not explain, or not use certain words, to make sure everyone feels connected to the story.
That totally makes sense. I also love that Otto has a straight girl bestie, who gets her own piece of the story (played wonderfully by Jennifer Heylen). Having girl besties in your coming-of-age is such a universal gay man experience.
She feels like a safe space! She’s such a fun character to write. I don’t have like, one girl bestie that inspired this character, but she’s based on a few. It’s mostly inspired by the actress herself, Jennifer, she’s amazing. I love her so much, it was my dream to work with her. While we were writing the show I always thought of her, she was the first one I asked, and then even in the casting process I kept pushing, like it has to be her. Every scene she touches becomes better because she’s such a natural, funny, relatable actress and character. It made sense on Otto’s journey to have her as an ally, someone who is like, yes, let’s go, let’s do it, but is also equally clueless in life.
I don’t think she realizes how much of a monster she creates when she encourages him to get on Grindr! I’m curious, how much of yourself is written into Otto?
A lot! I used to be the guy with the stories, you know? I went on a date, and then I would report to my friends how the date went, and it was almost always as unbelievable as the things that Otto goes through. You meet people who are different in life, and even though it was maybe not a successful hookup, they can teach you something about how there are so many different nuances in experiencing your sexuality. So it started with all these things that happened to me, all these people that I met, trying to connect them. Then, obviously, I have been a simp following a boy I liked to parties, kissing with him, but then it turned out to be nothing, and he was a douchebag afterwards about it, and being like, who am I doing this for? You know, am I doing this for myself? Who’s getting happier here? So yeah, I would say about 80% of what happens to Otto also happened to me.
Ugh, relatable. Are there formative works for you in your coming of age that ended up being influential as a filmmaker?
Obviously Looking for me was the show that showed that gay people are people, and that their experiences are valid, and that you can have a life like that. It opened a lot of possibilities in my head. I have the obvious ones too like Stranger by the Lake situations where you watch a film out of curiousity at 16. I was like, what’s happening in this film? And then it definitely meant a lot to how I became who I am.
How did you get into filmmaking in the first place?
I didn’t know filmmaking was a thing until like 14/15 and my niece went to study it. I was like that’s insane, I’m gonna do it. I had very supportive parents, luckily, who were like, okay! I’ve been so lucky, this is my first show that I pitched. Every step that we got further into it, I thought we’re going to hit a wall, and I will have learned something for my next project, but then it got greenlit and we shot it and it happened. I was 28 when we shot it which is pretty young to do your first show. I was very, very happy that I got that opportunity, but it’s because I have amazing producers and people around me with a vision on it too, and that’s part of the deal.
Oh, Otto! has a very specific look that feels arthouse indie film vibes, can you talk a bit about how you landed on the cinematography of it all?
My DOP Kobe Vangronsveld is a good friend of mine, we both live in Brussels. The first part of it was really locations—we cycled through the city almost every day making shot lists. We would pass a café and nice bars and think it out.
Secondly, being on a very, very tight budget. It’s a very cheaply made show. I think you couldn’t make it for less money than we did it. So that meant that anything we did, I didn’t want it to feel cheap. I wanted to go for a look that felt chosen, something that wasn’t accidental. So we did a lot of static shots. I’d rather have less shots that look amazing that we can put our energy into.
I wanted to get it right because it was the first show that was going to be shot in the gay street. For the gay sauna, it’s so pretty in a way, I wanted to show that. But really it was good team work on every part, from finding the locations with the right colours to the costumes that fit it, it’s a lovely puzzle to make.
The lighting in the bathhouse was amazing! My mind obviously goes to Heated Rivalry on doing more with less, too, considering their small budget. Other than it ending up somewhere to watch in North America, what is your vision for the future of the series?
Otto is pretty straight passing, and he has a very narrow idea of what masculinity is and what it should be, and I think that’s something to explore. Even though he had all these dates, I feel like he is not really comfortable with his own self. He wouldn’t get into drag or something, that would be out of his comfort zone. It would be very interesting to see him explore how masculinity is not necessarily this one-size thing.
Also, I think it would be very enlightening, instead of finding sex and short term things, if he found an entourage of queer people to see what community can be. A lot of times when we talk about the gay community, they’re often thinking about partying and sex. I was part of a gay water polo team for a while, and that really opened my mind. These were all very different, open-minded people in a queer team where everyone’s welcome, where it doesn’t matter if you’re skinny or muscled. I think in a community that discriminates as much as our community it’s nice to explore how people can be long-term allies in your life as a group of friends.
I’m so excited to hear Otto might be taking a little break from the hookups and maybe won’t be spiralling as much. I was scared he would eventually stumble on Sniffies or something!
[Laughs]. He can’t! Don’t show him Sniffies!
Before I let you go: What’s your favourite TV-watching snack?
It changes from time to time, right now I’m into honey cherry tomatoes. They’re super, super sweet. I also recently discovered pistachio nuts. These were not in my world, and now I know that they exist, I can eat them forever. It’s getting problematic, actually. It takes time to peel which I love, but it’s not for anything you watch. You can’t watch something in a different language and be peeling all the time.