Today sees the return of one the freshest, funniest, and most unassumingly revolutionary series on television, Sort Of, for its third and final season. The GLAAD Award-nominated, Canadian Screen and Peabody-winning comedy is created by its showrunners and executive producers, Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo. Baig also stars in the Toronto-set series as the endearing nonbinary millennial, Sabi Mehboob. This season finds them coming to terms with their grief, along with an unexpected sense of freedom following the death of their Pakistani immigrant father. Without the constraints of living up to their dad’s expectations, Sabi starts to confront big questions about their identity, prompting some massive life choices.
Alongside the show’s returning characters, such as Sabi’s mother Raffo (Ellora Patnaik), their sister Aqsa (Supinder Wraich), best friend 7ven (Amanda Cordner), romantic interest Wolf (Raymond Cham Jr.), and former boss Deenzie (Becca Blackwell)—who are all grappling with aftermaths of their own—there is also a memorable guest star turn from Angelica Ross and a delightful cameo from Alok Vaid-Menon.
Before Sort Of, Baig’s first play, Acha Bacha was published by Playwrights Canada Press and went on to be nominated for the Dayne Ogilvie prize by the Writer’s Trust of Canada. The queer, trans-feminine, Muslim writer and performer, has worked for non-profits developing and facilitating workshops for youth in underserved neighborhoods in Toronto focused on creative writing and literacy (Story Planet), and playwriting for emerging writers (Paprika Festival).
With the first two episodes of Sort Of season three now streaming on Max, Bilal Baig speaks exclusively The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about getting started in their career, their initial vision for Sort Of, their reflections on the complete series, how they went about making casting and crewing decisions, bringing on Angelica Ross, and their current favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: Congratulations on this beautiful third season and the entire series. While I was watching it, I was thinking about how much I’m going miss this show, but the good thing is, it will always be out there now to return to.
Bilal Baig: “Yeah, that’s right! Thanks so much for being such a lover and supporter of the show. It’s seriously been such a pleasure working on it over these last few years. I think that these three seasons taken together tell a really sweet story and I’m happy that people can revisit this show whenever they need to, over and over again.”
What ignited your passion for storytelling and how did that end up taking shape as a career?
“I loved writing stories a lot as a kid and playing in my own worlds. Then I started writing plays at the end of high school. I had a pretty enthusiastic drama teacher who encouraged me to consider writing plays outside of high school, into my adult life. Before that I didn’t really know that it was even a thing that you could get money for. Art and pursuing the arts and writing wasn’t something that was talked about in my family and I didn’t see any examples of it.”
“I honestly don’t know that I would be writing today if it weren’t for the people who affirmed me along the way and said, ‘What you’re doing is interesting’. I’ve always loved writing, but to this day I still struggle with the sharing of it. With the visibility of it all. With what happens after you write something and the world receives it. But I was encouraged constantly and while I was in theatre school, training as an actor, I started working on my first play. Then a year and a half after I graduated, my first play had its world premiere production in Toronto. I was 23 at the time, so everything seemed liked it was happening pretty fast for me. After the play, I met Fab and Sort Of started cooking.”
“When I look back at it, everything is linked and I’m really grateful. I was writing plays at 19 and part of it is luck, getting to meet people who were so excited by my voice at a young age. Now I’m like, ‘Wow, I was very brave to do that’. It was nice to be affirmed, but I also think there was a tenacity in me as well, a desire—even though I was terrified—to share some of what I was writing and thinking about with the world. I think it’s a combination of those things that got me here.”
When things did start cooking with Fab and you were in development on Sort Of, what were some of the things that were on your minds that you wanted to explore back then?
“I remember speaking to Fab a lot about how I was really exhausted by hyper flamboyant queer and trans characters, or trans women who were hyper glamorous—which obviously, I think is really beautiful—but I know that that’s not the truth for all of us all the time. So there was something about wanting to present the character of Sabi as somebody who is a little bit more inward, who might not say everything that they’re thinking and feeling. A character with a deeper interior world, and not sassy. I knew what I didn’t want it to feel like and that grounding of Sabi was a really important principle that we carried through the development. It felt exciting because it was the kind of representation that I was talking a lot about with my friends, who were also craving something that didn’t feel like we were always the most extroverted or extravagant people and characters.”
“Another thing that I remember feeling really important was how we presented the relationship between Sabi and their mom, Raffo, on the show. I had a lot to say about brown mothers and what it means to love a queer and trans child. It’s not always pretty and easy and simple, but also nobody’s a villain and we all make mistakes. In that first season, Sabi and Raffo run away from each other, then try to run towards to each other and end up making this commitment to stay together as Sabi’s father returns. That felt really important because some of the conversations weren’t there yet around the specificity of a South Asian mother, a Muslim mother, being more than just one thing and having her own life too. When we look at Raffo across the three seasons, she’s got her own things going on.”
As the episodes open in season three, they are time-stamped with how long it’s been since the death of Sabi’s father. How has his passing affected Sabi’s life and those around them?
“It felt so complicated, and therefore juicy, to explore the kind of freedom that can come when someone like the patriarch of a family passes away. It also felt so like our show to embrace that part of grief too. The sense that it’s not all sad and gloom or confusion and lostness. It’s also about the liberation and what’s possible now. With Sabi’s arc in particular in this season, it felt like it took losing someone like their father to start to really ask for themself who they want to be in this world and who they can be. That’s what leads them towards a medical transition and all the way to the final moment in the series and the choice that they make.”
“The undercurrent of the loss of the father is a total force that runs through the entire season, not just for Sabi, but for their sister Aqsa and for Raffo as well. So many of their choices can be traced back to the loss of the father too. In the writers’ room, we were always going back to grief and loss as subtext. We were also really clear that we weren’t that interested in walking everyone through the deepest parts of the grief of these characters—because that’s just not the show, which is a comedy—but it does show up so often in this third season.”
I love the scene with Angelica Ross in the new season as the gender-affirming healthcare specialist who shares some of her own experience of transitioning with Sabi. How involved were you in bringing Angelica on board?
“It’s going to sound crass, but that was all me. I knew that she loved the show because at some point after season two had released in the States, she sent me a DM saying that she loved the emotional world of the series. I thought that was such a beautiful and simple way to talk about the show. We always knew that we wanted this character to be a trans woman, ideally a trans woman of color, and definitely someone who has some age on Sabi. We started to look in Canada first and did an open casting call for trans women of color above the age of 40. We saw a few folks and it wasn’t quite right, but it was really exciting to see who is out there in Canada.”
“I suggested Angelica, really not thinking that it would be a ‘yes’ at all. I thought, let’s see if she would be down, and she was. What’s so cool about her is that she’s doing whatever she wants right now on an artistic level and on a political level. She told me that she’s only saying ‘yes’ to things that she really loves and believes in and that that’s why she said ‘yes’ to us. We had a lovely dinner the night before we shot our scene and she was really fun and sweet, and excellent in the scene of course. Part of me still can’t even believe that Angelica agreed to be on this Canadian show, but she loved it and it was really special when she was on set.”
“When I think about the show, I think about how cool it is that we got to put out all of these really exciting images of different combinations of trans people into the media universe. I think about Sabi and Olympia sleeping together in season two for instance, and it’s been really cool to bring other trans women into the story and to see their dynamics with Sabi.”
Touching on that point of creating representation that we haven’t seen before, this season 7ven says to Sabi, ‘Oh, we’re like…’ and then pauses before saying, ‘I can’t think of a famous duo that applies to us’. One reason I loved that moment is because it made me think that in the future people will be able to say, ‘Oh, we’re just like 7ven and Sabi in Sort Of!’
“Absolutely! We end up saying so much just by putting Sabi’s body next to somebody else’s in a frame. Our universe always started with a range of characters of different ages and genders and skin colors and so it really excites me when we get to see Sabi in a queer and trans space specifically. When we were conceiving the fifth episode of this final season, the one where Deenzie kind of abducts Sabi, the intention behind that was to paint an intergenerational trans picture between a trans dude in his 50s and Sabi. But then also moments between Sabi and Paul, played by Gray Powell, in season one especially, have always been loaded with a kind of tension, given the power dynamics and the racial dynamics.”
“Our writers’ rooms have always been just as diverse as the show is and it’s always been fun for us to say things without really needing to say them because we’re able to put these characters next to each other and have them deal with each other.”
What were your guiding principals when it came to casting Sort Of, and how involved were you and Fab in that process?
“Myself and Fab were part of every casting and crewing decision behind the scenes. One of the things that I love that we did for our trans characters specifically, was that we always did our best to cast the net as far and wide as possible. We opened the casting calls, so we weren’t only seeing union performers. Becca Blackwell who plays Deenzie, Cassandra James who plays Olympia, and Raymond Cham who plays Wolf are all American, so sometimes we dipped into the the US pond, but casting was always about a specific kind of feeling and energy. The tone of the show is what it is and to find actors who can really comfortably play in that was the goal. We actually have a lot of theatre actors on our show like Becca, Gray Powell, Grace Lynn Kung who plays Bessy, Amanda Cordner who plays 7ven, and Ellora Patnaik who plays Raffo. I’m a little biased because I’m from the theatre world, but there was something about that that felt closer to home for me and maybe made me feel a little bit more comfortable, especially on season one when it was my first time doing all of it.”
“Now I really understand that if you find the right person, so much of your work is done, because they’ll bring that special thing to the character. When I look back at these three seasons, and the way these characters evolved and the way that these actors approached their characters’ evolutions, they’re really stunning. I always say that I’m the lucky one, because I got multiple scenes with each of these actors, while sometimes they’d only pass by each other in an entire filming schedule. I’m really moved by that ensemble and how much they loved the show and how much they gave to it.”
What impact has creating and inhabiting the character of Sabi had on you personally? Has it made you reflect on different things about yourself?
“I feel like I grew up really fast and I always felt older than the people around me. With my career, my play was being developed when I was 19 at a time when I was still trying to figure out who I was and understand my own relationship to myself and my identities. In some ways, I feel like I didn’t have the time to reflect too much, I just had to jump into it because the opportunities were presenting themselves. With Sabi, I got to really wander and to slow down a bit and to be lost and a little aimless. To do one thing, like electrician school, and then drop that and try something else. The kind of searching that Sabi does across these three seasons felt like something that I longed for in my early 20s and late teens. So when I think about playing this character over these three seasons, that’s been a real gift. It’s given me a chance to ask, ‘What is the pleasure in not knowing who you are, or what you’re going to be, or what you’re going to do in the world?’ I really got to explore that through Sabi.”
How did you go about reflecting the diversity that we see on screen behind the camera?
“That’s something that we worked on with the Trans Film Mentorship program on seasons two and three. It came out of this conversation between myself and the producers of Sort Of around having more trans people on our set on a daily basis and not just once in a while when actors come in who are trans. It was great that Trans Film Mentorship already existed, it wasn’t a program that we created, but we made some space on our set to let them run their program and give training opportunities to trans and nonbinary potential crew members.”
“I’m still in touch with a few of the mentees and we’ll DM each other sometimes on social media. The ones who want to keep doing this have been working on other union sets too. How cool is that? That we were able to look at the sector and be like, ‘There are some real gaps here in terms of who’s getting chances to pursue this work’. It makes such a difference. I think trans people working on sets where they’re treated with dignity and respect is necessary and I don’t want to work in environments that aren’t like that. So it’s really cool that over these three seasons, every year we pushed ourselves more and more to keep doing this work and keep doing it with as much intentionality and compassion as possible.”
“We’ve been trying to prioritize that kind of diversity behind the scenes since season one. We’ve always worked with diverse writers and queer writers and our directors have been predominantly women of color and in the second season we worked with a trans man as a director as well. By the third season, it was a pretty female dominated set. Our DP was a woman, our camera A operator was a woman, and a lot of the production design, costume, hair and makeup people were also. We work with these amazing, badass producers at Sphere Media who really care about this stuff and who have been pushing these conversations for a while, so that felt like a divine pairing. I care a lot about these things, so does Fab, and I’m really proud of what we were able to achieve in that regard across these three seasons.”
One final question for you, what’s your favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you?
“I just finished reading Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin. It’s an American book that’s a trans sci-fi dystopian horror. It’s so violent and sexy and I think it’s essential reading for everyone, especially cis people, but I know that it’s a super controversial piece of literature. It came out in 2022, but right now I’m pretty obsessed with that book. It rocked me after I finished reading it and I can’t stop thinking about it.”
By James Kleinmann
The eight-episode third and final season of Sort Of debuts with two episodes on Thursday, January 18th 2024 on Max, followed by two episodes weekly through Thursday, February 8th.
