Funny, sad, beautiful

Bilal Baig, co-creator and star of ‘Sort Of,’ is ready for the world to see the final season

On the topic of “Sort Of,” I give you a “what if.”

What if Bilal Baig had been accepted by the creative writing program they applied to after high school and hadn’t pivoted into a theatre program instead? Would they still have met Fab Filippo while acting in a play and created the TV comedy “Sort of” with him?

Luckily for fans of witty and intelligent television, those things did happen.

But now “Sort Of,” which stars Baig, who is queer and transfeminine (and uses they/them pronouns), as a gender-fluid, South Asian millennial, is coming to an end with its third season, which debuted Friday on CBC Gem.

When Baig sat down for an interview in the Toronto Star offices a few weeks ago, post-production on the last of the final eight episodes was almost finished, leaving not much else to do but wait for those episodes to debut.

“Really proud for sure,” Baig said, when asked how they felt now that the end was here. “That’s one of the first feelings that comes up for me — and emotional. The way we chose to end this series I think is completely in the ‘Sort Of’ way, like funny and sad, you know? And it’s beautiful. I’m really excited for the world to take in this final chapter.”

Back in the fall of 2021, when “Sort Of” first aired, Baig had no expectation that the world, so to speak, would be watching.

“My friends,” Baig responded when asked who they

thought would watch that first season. “My friends and their moms.”

But the series has been widely embraced, earning critical acclaim both here and in the U.S., where it streams on Max, and winning a prestigious Peabody Award and 10 Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Comedy Series two years running.

“I get messages from people from lots of different communities: cis people, white folks, 70-year-olds, queer and trans people, parents of trans children. There’s a real spectrum of people who feel like the show really speaks to them. And often those messages are just about the way the show has touched their lives,” Baig said. “Sort Of” is mostly about Sabi, Baig’s character, who’s in transition in all parts of their life, not just their gender and sexuality, but their relationships with their Pakistani immigrant family, their friends, lovers, employers.

The people around Sabi are in transition, too, whether it’s Paul and Bessy (Gray Powell and Grace Lynn Kung), the couple whose children Sabi nannied; mother Raffo (Ellora Patnaik) and sister Aqsa (Supinder Wraich); or non-binary best friend 7ven (Amanda Cordner). The series takes a generous approach to these supporting characters, who are as lovingly drawn as Sabi themselves. It’s a thoughtful and nuanced and funny show, and not in a typical sitcom way. “That has so much to do with the writers we got to work with every season (who) were supremely gifted, and Fab is really excellent with grounding jokes,” Baig said. “I feel like I learned a lot from him in that way … I love the way humans naturally speak, but to actually capture it in the show, there’s drafts on drafts on drafts of each of the scripts.”

So yes, “Sort Of” is very much a team effort. And Baig was full of praise for the writers, producers, directors and actors who were part of that team, many of them ethnically diverse, and from the queer and trans communities. (The production team also developed a program, with the help of the Trans Film Mentorship, to employ trans and non-binary people on set.)

Having that collective helped Baig weather being the face of an endeavour for which “groundbreaking” is often the first descriptor: the first Canadian TV show to have a non-binary lead character, the first Canadian prime-time series to star a queer, South Asian, Muslim actor.

“I’ve got really great people around me and I’m grateful that this show didn’t happen when I was 21,” said Baig, who’s nearing 30. “I had a really solid sense of myself and the people who loved me before this all happened.”

Baig remembered being “really terrified” when shooting the first season.

“It was my first time acting on television, on camera. But there was something that felt energetically right about it as we were filming it. Like the actors, our chemistry, the feeling, like how we weren’t always going for the biggest jokes. All of that stuff started to feel like, ‘Oh, are we on to something here?’ And then that got affirmed, so that was cool,” they said, referring to the Peabody win.

While TV wasn’t Baig’s first choice when they were envisioning a career, it meshes with their storytelling instincts.

“From a young age, I was telling stories with my siblings, acting things out,” said Baig, who was born in Scarborough and grew up in Mississauga. “We didn’t grow up with a lot of money so we relied on imagination to kind of build worlds or imagine toys that we didn’t have. And then that kind of turned into writing.”

But Baig assumed writing would remain a hobby and not a livelihood until a high school drama teacher saw potential in the first play they wrote. That led to the now defunct theatre performance program at Humber College when the creative writing one didn’t pan out. Although Baig “didn’t want to be an actor,” the program gave them the chance to keep writing plays.

“And now I’m here.”

Here, for the moment, means working on some plays Baig shelved to focus on “Sort Of”; the anthology of monologues for queer and trans actors they co-edited that’s coming out later this year; the audiobook they were about to record.

Baig and their manager are “being really intentional” about new work. “So I’m not going anywhere, but I think it’s going to take a little while before something kind of big or main-streamy comes out. I’m really interested in anything that feels opposite to ‘Sort Of ’ right now,” Baig said.

In the meantime, viewers who watch the first two of the last “Sort Of” episodes released Friday — to be followed by two a week until the finale on Dec. 8 — will see Sabi and those around them make some life-altering decisions, and they’ll be made with humour and love.

“Getting to work on this show in a pandemic world with the (other) actors, genuinely there’s a lot of love between us, and I’ve loved working with the writers and to say that I love working with my producers, I feel like that’s kind of next level and really cool, too,” said Baig.

“When I think about the three years, there was just a lot of love poured into this thing from all angles, including CBC and HBO Max, too, like they loved this show.”

“SORT OF” SEASON 3 IS NOW STREAMING ON CBC GEM.