Peacock's Queer as Folk reboot was pitched as the LGBTQ community coming together after a Pulse-like nightclub shooting

The Hollywood Reporter

Creator Stephen Dunn doesn't consider the third iteration of Queer as Folk as a reboot. Instead, it's a "reimagining" that pays tribute to Russell T Davies' original version while finding inspiration in the Showtime update. Dunn, who partnered with Little America's Lee Eisenberg for the reboot, pitched Davies on a Pulse-like nightclub shooting in a New Orleans gay bar and the story of how the city’s LGBTQ community rebuilt itself, taking inspiration from the aftermath of the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting that left 49 dead and 53 injured. “We’re acknowledging the past while fully paving our own way because that was the only way I could approach this,” Dunn tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We had to break new ground in order to tell the story and to make it relevant because we have our own generation’s things to say. We have a new story.” It turns out, Showtime was among the bidders of the reboot, which NBC Universal won with the original intention of putting it on Bravo before moving it to Peacock. Dunn then assembled an all-queer writers’ room and met with a number of Pulse survivors, some of whom served as consultants on the series.