‘Reframed’ Season 2 Trailer: TCM Revisits Legacy of Groundbreaking Queer and Diverse Films

Beloved Turner Classic Movies series “Reframed” is back for a second season, but this time with a twist.

While Season 1 focused on re-contextualizing problematic feature films, the upcoming season, premiering November 5, instead looks at groundbreaking movies that had racially diverse casts, showed queer romances, and de-stigmatized differences.

“Movies change our perspectives,” the trailer says. “Movies change us for the better.”

TCM, with the slogan “where then meets now,” will program a series of films that were “groundbreaking for their time due to their depictions of everything from Black or Asian leads, stories about the Jewish experience, films with trans characters and other marginalized groups/issues shown in a positive light,” per an official press statement.

Each selected film, ranging from “The Snake Pit” to “Brokeback Mountain,” will air along with a conversation between TCM host Ben Mankiewicz and a guest, including film historian Donald Bogle, filmmaker Kimberly Peirce (“Boys Don’t Cry”), screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (“Ed Wood”), and film critic Molly Haskell. The conversations cover the time period when each movie was made and the ways in which what was once considered groundbreaking could now be deemed controversial.

Peirce’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” for example, stars Hilary Swank as a trans man, with Peirce discussing on “Reframed” the issues of getting the movie greenlit, but also the controversy surrounding Swank being cast as opposed to a trans actor.

Spotlighted films include 1932’s “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” which inspired laws requiring humane treatment of inmates; “Imitation of Life,” one of the first major Hollywood productions to show two women building a business together as well as to portray Black women seriously and with agency; and “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which brought awareness to the issues faced by veterans, including PTSD, physical disability, and alcoholism.

Additional films include “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” “The Snake Pit,” “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Flower Drum Song.” Famous features like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “The Boys in the Band,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Philadelphia,” “Super Size Me,” “Children of a Lesser God,” and “An Inconvenient Truth” will also be featured.

“Reframed” Season 2 spans films made almost a century apart, beginning with 1932’s “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang” and concluding with the 2006 Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“Reframed” Season 2 premieres November 5 on TCM.

Check out the trailer below.