Earlier this week the animated series Q-Force was made available on Netflix in the UK, and perhaps elsewhere. Since this show has been mentioned a couple of times on this subreddit, usually for all the wrong reasons, and because I have very little else to do on a Saturday evening, I thought I would give it a watch, and review it 'properly'. I have only watched a couple of episodes but my thoughts are below.

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The show follows a group of American Intelligence Agency (AIA) agents based in West Hollywood, California, headed by Steve 'Mary' Maryweather. The Q-Force has been twiddling their thumbs for ten years without ever being assigned a real case. The Agency's director, Dick Chunley, gives the group the sobriquet 'Q-Force' and says:

The queers! Your fucking lollipop brigade in West Hollywood. [...] Need I remind you that they're too soft for active duty? What if somebody sprains their pronoun?

Chunley is clearly supposed to be the villain of this piece but he very quickly became my favourite character, based on nothing more than quips like the above.

The other main characters are:

• Steve 'Mary' Maryweather - The 'protagonist' and the valedictorian of the AIA's class of 2011, before the honour is unceremoniously stripped from him and handed to a classmate when he comes out as gay during his valedictory address. He heads the Q-Force and is probably one of the most likeable characters in the show.

• Deb - Deb is the team's mechanic, and in the first episode it is revealed she has created a super spy car from the group, apparently from parts she has just found around and about. Tracy Chapman's entire discography is pre-loaded onto the sound system. She is a butch lesbian, very happily married to another butch lesbian, and has 16 'trauma dogs' (what a 'trauma dog' is is anyone's guess). Another actually quite likeable character. I would be friends with her in real life. Very much the shows mother hen figure.

• Stat - The team's computer whizz. Very little has been revealed about her so far, but she gives off the moody / edgy / emo teen vibe. She has apparently spent some time in prison but the reason has not been made clear yet.

• Twink - The team's... I don't know what he does exactly. Disguises? Drag? Easily the show's worst character, and I hated him from the moment he first appears on screen. Picture every tired gay cliché you can think of and Twink is all of those things rolled into a huge ball of awful. Vapid? Check. Stupid? Check. Bitchy? Check. Flamboyant? Check. Promiscuous? Check. He has a drag show and names all of his wigs. He also apparently speaks Kazakh, which is something of a non-sequitur when you consider he doesn't know what raisins are, or is surprised to learn that planes can land in Wyoming. When the team go on their first field work he packs two trunks of just shoes.

There are other, more minor characters like Deputy Director V, who has spent years fighting sexism in the Agency to rise the position she has attained, and fellow agent Rick Buck, the straight dudebro who is tasked with 'babysitting the sodomites'. Buck, like Chumley, is unimpressed with the Q-Force's whole deal, and anyone from LGBDropTheT will have caught themselves saying more than a couple of Buck's lines... He is supposed to be seen as the dumb archetype of toxic heterosexual masculinity (think sitcom dad) but to be honest I found him quite funny, and not in a LolAretheStraightsOkay kind of way.

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On the whole, I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. I'm actually a little disappointed I can't fill this post with righteous indignation. I'm only a couple of episodes in, but it's a lot less 'queer' than I thought it was going to be, and the various trailers played that aspect up for views, I feel.

There's not been any mention of pronouns or gender ideology (so far), and apart from Twink the gay and lesbian characters are all refreshingly normal. There's some 'positive messaging' shoehorned in there, but I suppose it had to be really, didn't it?

Is it a great piece of LGB representation? Not really. It is going to win awards? Who knows. Is it a fun, slightly silly way to kill a couple of hours on a rainy evening when there's nothing else to watch? Absolutely.

Check it out. Like me you might be pleasantly surprised.