Latecomers

Project Type: Web Series

Year: 2022

Screen NSW support: Production Finance

Company: Lazy Susan Films Pty Ltd/Mad Ones Films Pty Ltd

Directors: Madeleine Gottlieb & Alistair Baldwin

Production Details: IMDb page

From directors Madeleine Gottlieb and Alistair Baldwin’s TV drama Latecomers. Frank and Sarah two strangers with cerebral palsy become entrenched in each other's dysfunctional lives after witnessing their able-bodied friends in an awkward situation at a bar.

Sarah is a bookish introvert who thinks going out and partying is a waste of time, because she is convinced that she’ll never be accepted by the kinds of people who engage in that behaviour. She is brash but perceptive and uses her biting wit as a defense mechanism to keep her walls up. Sarah likes living her sheltered life, but her well-meaning mother wants more for her, so she hires mature age party animal Brandi to get Sarah out of the house and socialise. Conversely, Frank is fiercely independent. He works a 9 - 5 job doing disability equipment demonstrations, loves to get maggot with the boys on the weekend and lives in his own place with his housemate, Elliot. After going back to Frank’s house so Elliot and Brandi can have sex, Frank and Sarah open up to each other about their sexual experiences, or lack thereof. Sarah has never been kissed and satiates her desires by reading erotic novels about men in uniform. Frank has a history of kissing girls but never sleeping with them and when he once went to a sex worker he couldn’t maintain an erection. This admission leads to a string of sexually charged events: a platonic hang out in an Adult Shop, a romantic date gone wrong, a sexy pool rescue and an amateur porno, filmed in a brothel. By the end of the series, Frank and Sarah lose their virginities to able bodied people, in events which test their friendship, and force them both to confront hard truths about disability, misogyny, love and self-worth. This is a series that asks: how far would you go to be seen sexually?