There's some stellar TV to watch, now that the whole election mishagas is over (or just beginning), but first, a word from our watchdog.
GLAAD's new "Where We Are on TV" report is out, and the numbers are up, which is great. But those numbers are also deceptive, because they don't tell the whole story.
GLAAD explains: "Of the 857 regular characters expected to appear on broadcast scripted primetime programming this season, 75 (8.8%) were identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer. This is the highest percentage GLAAD has found in the 14 years this report has counted all broadcast series regulars. There were an additional 38 recurring LGBTQ characters." Wow, that sounds good: 75 LGBTQ characters, 38 recurring.
But who are they (spoiler alert: some of them are animated characters on shows like "Bojack Horseman," "Archer" and "The Simpsons"), and how often do those recurring characters — or even series regulars — appear?
We ask this question as we do every year, because a mere handful of TV showrunners are providing a significant percentage of LGBTQ characters. As has been true for the past few years, Ryan Murphy and Greg Berlanti, who are both gay, and Shonda Rhimes, who is uniquely queer-friendly, have provided the majority of the LGBTQ characters for primetime series.
Berlanti basically owns the CW, Murphy provides a retinue of shows for Fox and FX, and Rhimes was the queen of TGIT on ABC until this season, when she moved to Netflix.
Rhimes still helms the longest-running primetime series on ABC, "Grey's Anatomy," which just introduced new LGBTQ characters for the fall season. Her show "Station 19" has a couple of (hot) gay male characters. Rhimes also executive produces "How to Get Away with Murder," created by one of her former "Grey's" writers, Peter Nowalk, who is gay. That series has a gay male couple, one of whom is HIV+, a lesbian and four bisexual characters. That's seven of the 75 LGBTQ characters in one series.
Murphy's hit series "Pose," one of the most spectacular LGBTQ series ever on the small screen, had over a dozen trans and gay characters, six of whom were main characters. But it was a limited series of eight episodes — so all those trans and gay characters were only on TV for eight searing, mind-blowing, impactful weeks. "Pose" was also defining because the trans characters were played by trans actors, and one of the gay male roles was played by a gay male actor.
Murphy's "American Horror Story" series also has gay and lesbian characters, and employs LGBTQ actors as well. Those two series alone — plus Murphy's Fox series "9-1-1" which has three lesbian and two gay male characters — account for more than 20 of the characters GLAAD is citing — just in those three series.
The combined number of Berlanti's series (he has 11 on TV this season), with an average of two LGBTQ characters each, is another 22 LGBTQ characters.
So among those three showrunners alone, well over half of all of TV's LGBTQ characters are accounted for.
According to GLAAD, "Netflix counts the highest number of LGBTQ characters on all streaming services, and FX counts the highest number on cable networks. The CW boasts the highest percentage of LGBTQ series regular characters of the five broadcast networks." Rhimes is on Netflix, Murphy on FX, Berlanti on the CW. There you have it, there it is.
We don't want to slam GLAAD — this is a hard job, holding TV networks and producers accountable, and reviewing all the series available. But frankly, with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and other providers putting shows together every week, there's really no excuse for TV not to have more LGBTQ representation.
Three of the longest-running series currently on TV have never had a gay character: "The Simpsons," "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" and "NCIS."
These series have been on TV 30, 20 and 16 years, respectively. Each series has addressed a myriad of social issues. "SVU" has had many LGBTQ storylines over the years, many of them groundbreaking. One of the series regulars has a gay son who has appeared intermittently over the years. But there has never been a main character who was gay, even though the series is set in New York City, which has about 800,000 gay residents.
Dick Wolf, creator of the "Law & Order" franchise as well as the "Chicago" franchise of "Chicago Med," Chicago Fire" and "Chicago P.D.," should have LGBTQ characters on every one of his six primetime series currently on the air. Chicago is the third most populous city in the country, with 2.8 million people translating into more than a quarter-million LGBTQ Chicagoans. Surely some of them could find their way onto one of Wolf's shows?
GLAAD asserts they are "calling on the industry to make sure that within the next two years, 10% of series regular characters on primetime scripted broadcast series are LGBTQ. This is an important next step towards ensuring that our entertainment reflects the world in which it is created." Amen to that.
What we found most important this past year on TV is how many trans characters have been added. Disappointing is the continuing trend of killing off lesbian characters. One recent episode of "American Horror Story: Apocalypse" had a lesbian couple enter a scene and be killed within minutes. On screen for five minutes. Seriously. And this from one of our friends.
Also concerning, and not seemingly on GLAAD's radar, is the disappearing gay male character. As series add trans and nonbinary characters, which we applaud and love, gay male characters are being removed. Why? We love the addition of a gay male pre-teen on "The Conners," but can we have some adult gay men, please?
One trend we have commented on repeatedly GLAAD also noted, and that is the addition of more LGBTQ characters of color. But while GLAAD reads this as a plus, we have issues with it for all the reasons we have stated over the years we have charted this trend separate from GLAAD: This is a tactic series use to get a two-for-one: they will add a character of color who is also LGBTQ, thus fulfilling their self-imposed quota with regard to people of color and queers.
An example is a show we love for many reasons, "Madam Secretary," which added Sara Ramirez, whom we adore, as a nonbinary character. She is also Latinx in a show that has one black series regular and no other Latinx. She is the only out LGBTQ character (there is a character who could be gay, but it's never stated).
Lesbian and gay couples are frequently interracial, like Oliver and Connor on "How to Get Away with Murder." Oliver is also HIV+. On the Nov. 1 episode, where the two were planning their upcoming wedding, Oliver was forced to explain to his mother why he had been distant — and reveal his HIV status. In a conversation prior to his telling her, he and Connor were talking and he said, "It feels like coming out all over again." Connor replied, "It is." We need more of these real-life scenarios of gay people on screen.
Grace notes
"Will & Grace" is a staple of gay TV, with two gay male and one bisexual female character among the four principals. But it was Grace (Debra Messing) who was the focal point on the Nov. 1 episode of the series, which is — how is this possible? — even better in many respects than its first incarnation.
Messing, who is known for her comedy and her often zany, Lucille Ball-style antics in various roles, gave a tour de force performance as the show tackled #MeToo that is sure to get her a much-deserved Emmy nod.
Grace and her father, Martin, played by comedian Robert Klein, had a powerful father-daughter meeting in which Grace revealed she'd been sexually assaulted at 15 on her first job, by her father's friend, Harry. It was blistering.
Messing and Klein are pros, and they played off each other brilliantly. Martin had been chatting up waitresses and making sexist/sexual comments. Grace had been getting more and more uncomfortable. She told him to stop. He told her the waitresses liked it. She said they did not. And then they began to fight about Harry.
Finally Grace had had enough, and she told Martin the story of why she didn't want to talk about Harry or accompany Martin to visit his grave. It was the summer of Grace's first job. She was only 15, but feeling so very adult.
"It was hot, so I had to have my hair up, and it showed off earrings that I borrowed from mom that made me feel really grown up," Grace told Martin, who was resistant to listening to anything bad about his old friend. "And then at the end of the day, Harry called me into his office. I walked in. He shut the door. He closed the blinds. And then he pushed me up against the wall. I tried to scream, but he told me, 'Quiet.' Then he started kissing me and touching me, and then he pulled down my pants and put his fingers up —"
We were sobbing as our Grace — our funny, insouciant, zany Grace — told the story of how she lost her virginity at the hands of her father's good friend who sexually assaulted her.
If Twitter was any indicator, millions of viewers had the same response we did. Messing retweeted our tweet about the show and her bravura performance, but there were hundreds of others. So many of us related to Grace's story because it was our story.
When "W&G" re-booted we thought it might last a season, if that. But the new "W&G" is a wholly different series, and the times when the show looks back to explain the present are powerful indeed. If you missed it, watch at NBC.com or Hulu.
Tony winner and "American Horror Story: Apocalypse" star Billy Porter had his own #MeToo moment on Halloween. His searing op-ed about his abuse as a prepubescent child at the hands of his stepfather is graphic, heartbreaking and incredibly honest. The things children do for love, the life-blood of child molesters. Porter has broken our hearts as Pray Tell on "Pose." He will break your heart again with this reveal. Google it and watch the video of him on "The Wendy Williams Show" talking about it. Wow. So brave.
One of the latest gay male additions to TV this season is Tyler Labine's Dr. Iggy Frome on NBC's "New Amsterdam." On the Oct. 30 episode, Frome is revealed as gay. He has a husband, and the two are parenting children they adopted from Bangladesh.
Frome also has homophobic parents who just can't bring themselves to be around the couple and their adorable children. Frome has to tell his sweet little girl that some families are chosen, others are not, and that the grandmother she's already become attached to has decided she can't love the brown daughter of her gay son.
It was pretty gutting, to be honest. We will never understand how anyone can not love their children, but we've lived it, and so have most of our friends. "New Amsterdam" eschewed the grandparents turning up at the last minute realizing their loss in favor of the far more (sadly) realistic phone call saying they were not coming. They were in New York, just blocks away, but no, they didn't want to be with their son and his gay family.
Scenes like this are why it's so vital to have LGBTQ characters on TV series. It shouldn't be rocket science for producers and writers to understand that we all have different stories, depending on who we are in the world. LGBTQ people are living very different lives from our straight peers. Sure, we're working and making dinner and doing laundry and all the mundanity of daily life, but all of it is happening through the lens of our orientation and/or gender identity, and how others see it. No straight person ever has to consider whether revealing they identity might cost them a family member or a friendship, or even their life.
There's nothing frivolous in wanting the most and most varied representation on TV as possible of our community. These depictions are object lessons for viewers, straight and queer.
We never thought we'd see Julia Roberts move to the small screen, but after Ryan Murphy brought in a bazillion Oscar-winning and/or Oscar-nominated actresses for his various series, it doesn't surprise us that she found a vehicle in Amazon Prime's new thriller "Homecoming." We aren't a devotee of Roberts like some, but we do like her, and she can give a superb performance, which she does in this new, creepy, government intrusion series.
Heidi Bergman (Julia Roberts) is working in a program called Homecoming, which is meant to transition veterans into their civilian lives. PTSD, traumatic brain injury (TBI) other trauma stalk these patients — as do their own memories of war. Therapists like Heidi are meant to help these wounded warriors heal and move on.
Things happen. Heidi leaves the program to work in a diner — something people don't do unless they need their minds to be empty of nothing more stressful than burnt toast. The show moves back and forth between the two spheres of Heidi's life, and we begin to get a chilling sense of how those two points will converge.
The series is directed by "Mr. Robot"'s Sam Esmail, and it is really creepy. Memory is the best and worst of us. We all fear losing our memories — but what if — Co-stars include Bobby Cannavale ("Boardwalk Empire"), Oscar winner Sissy Spacek, Stephan James ("Selma") and Shea Whigam ("True Detective"), among others. Definitely a must-see in the current political climate.
So as the new political landscape looms, and we're told there's more queer than ever on the tube, and you never know when some reliable series is going to change it up, you know you really must stay tuned.