It's hard to actually create art with the intention of being campy - really good trashy stuff, the true guilty pleasures, are usually happy accidents of destiny, timing and a certain mood. And most of all, really, is finding an audience.
No one, really, could have (or did) predict Dynasty, for instance, to be the camp-fest it became. Watching Seasons one and two on DVD , it's as if I'd forgotten the fact that what the show was at the start was not what it became. It took a while for the show to ramp up the bitchy, catty fights, the linebacker shoulder pads, 
the wealth and consumption on speed ethos that made it such a guilty pleasure. Which is not to say what they started with didn't work - Season one especially, is better than I remembered it to be.
And then too, much of what's come since Dynasty in campy entertainment can often be tied directly to it - often in the person of Aaron Spelling, who produced Dynasty (as well as most of ABC's schedule in the seventies and early eighties) and had a real sense for what appealed to mass taste (or, just as much, mass tastelessness) - Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210 both bear thematic links to Dynasty's suffering through wealth ethic, and Melrose also had Heather Locklear as the poor, young man's Joan Collins. From there, it's only a short hop to The OC and even to the current pleasures of Gossip Girl.
I mention all of this - in a post I really just mean to toss off before bedtime - because in my spare moments I've been catching up on The Lair, the latest in a string of deliberate campy efforts by here! the other gay network (in comparison to the slightly more tasteful, slightly less sleazy Logo). It's a brave effort... but I'm not sure you can say lightning struck on this one.
The Lair is an outgrowth of here's semi-phenomenal with Dante's Cove, an emerging gay camp masterpiece with an actual tie of its own to Dynasty: Tracy Scoggins, who starred in the Dynasty spinoff The Colbys. On Dante's Cove, Tracy plays an aging witch with a grudge against the man she almost married back in the 19th Century, who turned out to be gay (and apparently ahead of his time, since he fits right in to today's gay party boy world). In it's first, slightly tentative season, Dante seemed like a cross between Melrose and Dark Shadows by way of Queer as Folk: a young nubile crowd in a haunted gouse in a mysterious town with a dark secret... that made for threadbare (literally) excuses for nubile people to wear next to nothing and pant over each other.
Populated largely by a cast of good looking unknowns, Dante almost instantly jumped into "so bad it's good" territory with overheated dialogue, preposterous plotting, and largely hammy acting with occasional flashes of brilliance... all of which got even campier when the second season changed location (switching from the Caribbean to Hawaii and losing its principle set, with no one saying a word about it), and some key cast members in the blink of an eye (and in the case of Scoggins, what sure looks like a quick nip and tuck), while also ramping up the smut and slut quotient. What had, in some ways, only been hinted at in Season 1 became full-on softcore porn in Season 2 (and from what I've seen, keeps pushing boundaries in Season 3). Through it all the cast is game, the supernatural elements are at least amusing, and there's just enough unseriousness to make it fun. And for all of that, I think, it's really caught on.
You can't blame here! for trying, then, to repeat success. The Lair moves from witchcraft to vampires, centered on a private sex club staffed by a vampire coven led by Damien, a Dorian Gray-ish figure hanging onto his youth through the old magic portrait trick. So far so good. Into the mix stumbles Thom, an intrepid (and as is so often the case in the horror schlockfests, stupid) reporter investigating a series of... you guessed it, unexplained deaths in town, along with the beefy sheriiff.
I could go on... but you get the idea; there's a girl, and a few other key male characters, but it's mostly sharp teeth and tan skin over any kind of coherent plotting or sensible dialogue. The Lair's problems start (and probably end) with trying to do much of anything on too little budget, which might have mattered less f the script and the performances were stronger. Several of the cast, including Beverly Lynne as the girl, are refugees from either soft or hardcore porn, and perhaps most painfully, Colton Ford, a former gay pornstar, is probably the best thing here. He deserves better, if only because he has the ability to bring a bemused naturalness much of the rest of the cast lacks, and because he has been working, for years to break out of porn.
Still, there's hope for The Lair, if only because here! seems committed to letting this "gay horror sex and camp" genre develop over time, and The Lair certainly has potential, both as a concept, and even with its pretty cast... if they get a bit better and less wooden. I sure hope so; because good trash makes a guilty pleasure seem like a worthwhile endeavor, while bad trash just makes you feel dirty. And after The Lair Season 1, what I wanted most was to take a shower - a cold one, but still.
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