They asked me to write a half-hour with those three characters [from Lorimer], and that was the beginning of our development. It was an opportunity before us—something that wasn’t being done.

Do you think Looking would survive as a network show?

ANDREW HAIGH: I can’t imagine it working. HBO has given us the freedom to explore things that wouldn’t be OK to explore on a network show. In terms of language and sexuality and honesty and realism—you just wouldn’t be able to do it. There would be a lot of pressure to make it funny or make it something that we didn’t want the story to be.

LANNAN: And in terms of the style, they were supportive of it having a cinematic quality, of having Andrew develop the cinematic language and be unconventional, and having characters that were quite subtle in some ways, but also very emotional. Distinctly in the “comedy” department, but they let us find our own type of comedy that worked for the show.

HAIGH: Allowing them to be emotional was the key; you really cared about these people and wanted to watch their development and their journey, and keep it within the everyday, the subtle and the small.

Looking deals with the complicated boundary between sex and intimacy that is universal across relationships—gay or straight.

HAIGH: You want it to be universal. The minute you start to become specific about these characters, you start to see that their concerns and struggles universal. The notion that gay people are completely different from everybody else … well, of course they’re not. We all have similar desires and similar needs. And I think that struggle and search for intimacy and connection is such a universal one, and it’s what we wanted to focus on.

LANNAN: The best HBO shows have been about very specific, detailed worlds. Everything from The Wire to The Sopranos is about very specific places and times. But through that you get this more universal and transcendent thing.

HAIGH: It’s interesting—you watch something like The Wire, and of course you understand those characters and they resonate with you. And then there’s this idea that if you watch a show about a bunch of gay people and you’re not gay, it’s not going to reflect your life. But of course it reflects your life.

Do you think Looking challenges stereotypes about what it means to be a gay couple?

HAIGH: It’s not that we wanted to necessarily challenge the audience, but we certainly wanted to explore the subtleties and the different types of relationships people can have. Just because now gay people can get married, it doesn’t mean they want to get married. It’s important that we look at all the different ways people can have relationships and the ways they can make things work.

LANNAN: It’s built into Patrick’s journey. He begins the show with the idea that you can either have sex in the woods or settle down and get married. As the show goes on, he realizes that those aren’t the only two choices—that there’s this whole world of options.