‘Boots’ Creator on Pentagon Reaction & the Netflix Hit’s True Message of Connection

Ahh-ten-shun! That’s exactly what Netflix‘s Boots has been generating since it dropped on the streamer back on October 9th, and nearly all of it has been positive.

In fact, the gay coming-of-age dramedy based on Greg Cope White’s fascinating memoir, The Pink Marine, shot to the No. 2 spot on Netflix’s weekly Top 10 list in its second week, with 9.4 million views… a whopping double of the previous week’s views of 4.7 million.  It’s currently at No. 6, has a 90% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and has been hailed for its immense heart, smarts, and excellent casting by critics around the world.

Liam Oh as Ray McAffey and Miles Heizer as Cameron Cope in Boots / Netflix

The show does have one detractor, though. Apparently, the ’90s-set, eight-part series about closeted teen Cameron Cope (the excellent Miles Heizer) who impulsively joins the Marines along with his best friend (Liam Oh) and endures the horrors of boot camp — this is pre-Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, when it was actually illegal to be gay in the military — crinkled the crinolines of the folks at the real-life Pentagon.

Right after the show blew up, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson sent Entertainment Weekly a statement slamming Netflix’s habit of creating content they deemed soft.

Nicholas Logan as Sgt. Howitt, Brandon Tyler Moore as Cody Bowman, and Blake Burt as John Bowman in Boots / Alfonso “Pompo” Bresciani / Netflix

After declaring that the U.S. military is “getting back to restoring the warrior ethos” and that their “standards across the board are elite, uniform, and sex neutral because the weight of a rucksack or a human being doesn’t care if you’re a man, a woman, gay, or straight,” Wilson’s statement then went on to criticize Netflix as having “leadership [that] consistently produces and feeds woke garbage to their audience and children.”

“I can’t speak to the controversy or what the Pentagon thinks about the show,” sounds off creator and co-showrunner Andy Parker, who chooses to focus on Boots slaying the house down, to TV Insider. “For me, what is exciting to see is just how many people are responding to the show. That level of response and connection has been incredible. And to be honest with you, not something that I anticipated. I knew the show would find an audience. I think it has a voice and an emotion and an appeal to people’s humanity that I think people are really hungry for right now. But I truly did not expect this kind of response.”

Miles Heizer as Cameron Cope and Max Parker as Sgt. Sullivan in Boots / Patti Perret / Netflix

Parker is equally excited to note that the show, which is also the final project from the late Norman Lear, is resonating not just with queer viewers: “What’s encouraging to me is to hear responses from so many different kinds of people, from people who’ve served in the military, from civilians who have no connection to the military or never thought that they would have an interest in a story about this world… for all these different kinds of people to be finding a connection to the show is encouraging to me because what we were setting out to do was tell a universal story.”

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“Yeah, it’s about a gay kid who joins the military in 1990. That is the headline that I think some people are impulsively reacting to,” he admits. “But I think what is underneath that story is this universal story [about] all of these other guys that Cameron meets along the way of transformation, experiencing obstacles and finding connections with people you didn’t think you would have. There’s a hopeful message in that there about our resilience and our opportunity as a country to find a connection again.”

Miles Heizer as Cameron Cope in Boots / Patti Perret / Netflix

In addition to that emotional thread (which is expertly calibrated as the recruits slowly, painfully form a brotherhood), there is also a visceral aspect to watching the Boots boys progress physically through their Parris Island training. Much like Survivor or Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test, you begin to root for the characters to conquer each episode’s tactical challenges.

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“I’m so glad you said that,” continues Parker, proudly pointing out, “The structure of the show is built around the real structure of Marine Corps bootcamp and those 13 weeks. Every episode presents a different obstacle, physically, that the recruits are going to have to face, but it also is going to test them mentally and psychologically, and emotionally. So we’ve built the show around these tentpole events in boot camp and worked very hard to make sure that we were getting that right.”

“It was so important that we had Marines in the writer’s room and Marines on set as we were shooting,” he adds. “So that the depiction of these really important true events in boot camp would be as accurate as possible.”

Given that the Marines’ official motto is Semper Fidelis, or ‘Always Faithful,” that sounds pretty honorable to us. Now, we just need Netflix to enlist the show for a second tour of duty.

Boots, Season 1, Streaming Now, Netflix

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