Jonathan Van Ness Talks Expanding Getting Curious to the Netflix Audience

Many Netflix audiences first met Jonathan Van Ness thanks to their work on the revival of Queer Eye, as they serve as the grooming expert for each episode's candidate, though their talents have been seen in a wide variety of arenas, including their own podcast, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness. Starting in 2015, the podcast tackles a new subject that Van Ness wants to know more about, enlisting experts to explore the topic to shed unique insight on everything from the realities of the first Christmas to climate change to cults to NASCAR. Van Ness' latest project sees them taking that concept into the live-action arena, with Netflix's Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness tackling topics in ways only Van Ness can, with this debut season running the gamut from insects to hair to the gender binary. All six episodes of Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness are streaming now on Netflix.

When it came to the process of selecting topics for this ambitious effort, Van Ness explained to ComicBook.com, "I definitely wanted to pick topics that I could get the most range of experts to speak about. I don't know if you heard about it, but the last two years, it's been a little bit hard to get in the same room with people, so I was like, how can I get as many people ... how can I be around people and get the most interesting, multi-faceted, and also diverse views on a subject to create these stories and to find my answer? Especially because, once we decided on our episodes, sometimes we didn't exactly know where we were going to end up." 

They added, "One segment would lead us to some other question where we would need to go to a different expert, so it was really a lot of trial and error. And I also think that the thing that really linked it to making it to episode, and why we decided on our topics, was how passionate I was, how curious I was. And that was always, if we really felt way more curious about something, that was where we went."

Netflix describes the new series, "Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness is an unabashedly smart and quirky exploration into topics and questions that make Jonathan curious. From skyscrapers to bugs, or from gender identity to snacks, each episode follows Jonathan as he meets with experts in various fields to uncover complexities in a wide range of subjects."

Given the diverse range of experts Van Ness collaborated with, it obviously poised itself as an experience that would be just as enlightening to them as it would be to an audience. Of everything they learned from the experience, Van Ness talked about one of the more enlightening elements of the entire endeavor.

"Oh, my God, that's so hard," when asked of what stuck with them most about the series. "I think one of my biggest takeaways was how important it is to listen to my intuition. I felt like my gender expression and wanting to talk about the gender-diverse community felt like something really important." 

They continued, "I know that more episodes aren't guaranteed and I didn't want to leave that on the table for some other time and I knew it was something I wanted to do now and here. I'm really proud of our episode, 'Can We Say Bye-Bye to the Binary?' and I'm so proud of the experts and the people who came on that episode and shared experiences with us. So I'm really proud of that and so, for that, I would say my biggest takeaway is that I'm proud I followed my intuition and stuck so closely with making sure that that episode came to fruition."

All six episodes of Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness are streaming now on Netflix.

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