Andrew Haigh, director of the hit film Weekend, and the man behind HBO’s Looking, says his new eight-part series is very different to the last big gay cable show, Queer as Folk.

Looking revolves around three friends in San Francisco who explore the fun and sometimes overwhelming options available to a new generation of gay men. Friendship may bind them, but each is at a markedly different point in his journey: Patrick (Jonathan Groff) is the 29 year-old video game designer getting back into the dating world in the wake of his ex’s engagement; aspiring artist Augustin, 31, is questioning the idea of monogamy amid a move to domesticate with his boyfriend; and the group’s oldest member, longtime waiter Dom, 39, is facing middle age with romantic and professional dreams still unfulfilled. The trio’s stories intertwine and unspool dramatically as they search for happiness and intimacy in an age of unparalleled choices and rights for gay men.

“Our show is less about people at the beginning in their twenties figuring out who they are,” Haigh told the US gay magazine, Out, “and more about people stepping into their lives in their 30s and 40s and finding their place in the world.”

“All the characters are from different socioeconomic backgrounds, different ethnicities — that can happen a lot more readily in the gay community. What you connect to initially is your sexuality, not your age or where you’ve been to school.”

The characters in Looking, Haigh says, are not like the characters in that other seminal gay series, Queer as Folk. They’re “not aspiring to be rich. They’re not aspiring to have lots of sex. They’re aspiring to have happier lives, more fulfilled lives.”

Looking begins on Sky Atlantic on January 27

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kawZGuGHDWo