Out with the old, in with the new. It's that time of year again, the one we all dread, when sweeps month meets cancellation month. There isn't an Ides of May, but it felt as if there were when the cancellations were announced this week. Shows being cancelled that have had LGBT characters and storylines are ABC's wry sitcom Suburgatory; CBS' arch sitcom The Crazy Ones, which had marked Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar's return to TV; and NBC's dystopian Revolution. ABC also cancelled Trophy Wife, Super Fun Night and The Neighbors, all of which had had gay storylines.
We were surprised by The Crazy Ones being cancelled, since the show got stellar reviews, but the ratings must have slipped precipitously, and none of the networks is giving anything a chance without strong ratings these days. We were also surprised by Revolution, but we stopped watching this season because the Lost -style, non-linear narrative had begun to wear on us.
NBC also cancelled Sean Saves the World, the only show on network specifically about a gay character, but that's been expected for some time since the show was, in a word, terrible. It also cancelled The Michael J. Fox Show, which we guessed since Fox has joined the cast of CBS' The Good Wife. NBC cancelled its other disability sitcom, Growing Up Fisher, as well as its long-running sitcom Community .
NBC also took the ax to the stellar period drama Dracula, which had both a gay and a lesbian storyline and a central lesbian character, and which we absolutely loved.
A lot of freshman shows with LGBT elements have also been cancelled, including two shows we've touted here in recent months, NBC's Crisis and Believe, and CBS' hilarious new sitcom Friends with Better Lives. CBS had announced last season that its long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother, starring Neil Patrick Harris, would end this season when NPH headed off for Broadway, where he's already garnered a Tony nomination for his starring role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch .
The good news is that other shows with strong gay presence are safe for another season. NBC didn't cancel Bryan Fuller's magnificent Hannibal, which had been rumored. Given there's really nothing else like it on network, we're both surprised and pleased. Hannibal is mesmerizing, and Fuller has expanded his already exciting repertoire with the cannibalistic psychological thriller. If you haven't been watching, now's your chance to do a binge-watch catch-up over the summer.
We were also pleased that since Fox took the ax to several shows, including Rake and Surviving Jack, it left Kevin Williamson's homoerotic thriller The Following alone. This is another one to binge-watch until it returns in September. Ryan Murphy gets all the queer press for his TV series, but Fuller and Williamson have never been off the TV landscape for long. Both have retained a strong following, not just of gay viewers, but of straight ones who don't even know they are gay. We consider The Following and Hannibal among the year's best dramas.
Speaking of showrunners with strong LGBT appeal, Shonda Rhimes is now the official lead showrunner in Hollywood, and we could not be happier. ABC just gave her a big present this week when the networks did their upfronts Tuesday. Rhimes got the green light for another drama, this one starring Oscar-winner Viola Davis as a "complicated" professor, in How to Get Away with Murder. The only part of this deal that worries us is the placement. Grey's Anatomy now moves to the 8 p.m. slot, which means some of that TV MA-14 stuff that has been a strong subtext of the show, particularly with the lesbian couple Callie and Arizona, might get muted. Scandal should still be safe to go wild in the 9 p.m. slot, but it does make us wonder just how intense HTGAWM will be if it can only fill the 10 p.m. slot.
We love Davis and have always wondered why she didn't have her own show, since she's been a guest star on the episodic Jesse Stone series with Tom Selleck, as well as a plethora of Law & Order episodes. Since Davis has always been a stellar actress who can make a walk-on sing, we chalked it up to colorism, since Davis' is one of the darkest faces on screen and TV tends to like its African Americans lighter-skinned. We've always been appalled by this, but we're thrilled to see Davis finally getting her own vehicle. She's such a nuanced actress, and we know she'll bring that nuance and then some to this new role.
The casting of Davis in HTGAWM is a statement for all the black girls out there who don't have Halle Berry (who will be starring in the new series Extant come June) or Beyoncé-toned skin. If one goes back to the first big-name black women stars on the tube �" Lena Horne, Diahann Caroll, Abby Lincoln �" colorism is blatant. As former ABC news anchor Carole Simpson, herself African-American and light-skinned, used to say, "The brown-bag test is still in play." Those whose skin is darker than a brown bag need not apply.
Some may think this colorism issue is a minor point. It's not. As recently as last fall, Elle magazine was accused of lightening Gabourey Sidibe's (American Horror Story ) dark skin, another mag was accused of lightening Beyoncé's skin, and in January Elle was accused again of lightening skin when it put comedian Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project), a dark-skinned Indian of Tamil and Bengali descent, on their cover. In doing the talk-show circuit to promote her work, Kaling ended up talking about color in every interview.
Meanwhile, controversy has swirled around Dove (owned by Unilever), Procter & Gamble, and Vaseline. Dove has promoted their "real girls" campaign all over the TV in the U.S., but sells skin-lightening products throughout Asia and Africa. P&G has just bankrolled a documentary on colorism, but also sells tons of skin-lighteners. Vaseline promotes a line of gradual tanning lotions on the tube in the U.S., promotes skin-whiteners in Asia, and just promo'd a skin-lightening app for your photos on Instagram. So yeah, colorism is still a thing. A big thing. And Rhimes is breaking that down, just as she seems to have broken down the "black people can't star in a TV show" barrier.
The reason Twitter belongs to Rhimes on Thursday nights is because Black Twitter is in love with her, and those of us who aren't black are in love with her, too. In her shows, Rhimes isn't positing how black people might think and act, she knows. And black women and men know she knows.
And therein lie both Rhimes' power and a reminder of why we must have people behind the camera who represent us. Rhimes is doing it for blacks; Murphy, Williamson and Fuller are doing it for gay men. But we need more than just this tiny handful of showrunners addressing our minority status. The upcoming 2014-15 TV season looks like it will be the least LGBT in years. We can't afford to keep losing ground. But at least we can depend on Rhimes to keep gay in play.
That the entire Thursday night prime-time lineup on ABC now belongs to Rhimes, a first in TV history, is beyond major. It's not just one showrunner running the table on a given night. It's Thursday, the biggest ad-revenue night of the week. ABC's bold move is causing other networks to scramble. NBC has long held Thursday to be their sacrosanct arena of comedy, but Rhimes' stranglehold on the ratings, especially with ratings giant Scandal, has forced the network to re-think. They've cancelled all but one of their sitcoms, and that remaining show, Amy Poehler's Parks and Recreation, will have its final season in September. Thursday's dramedy, Parenthood, was already slated for its final season. And in an attempt to woo viewers away from Rhimes, NBC is moving its Monday smash hit The Blacklist to Thursdays. So, whole lotta shakeups going on.
New 'Normal'
The other big gay news on the tube this week is the years-in-the-making debut of Larry Kramer's iconic play about AIDS and activism, The Normal Heart, which Ryan Murphy has brought to HBO. It debuts May 25, and will be around a long time this summer. Anyone who thinks this story won't still have power 30 years after Kramer wrote it could not be more wrong. No one of a certain age will ever forget the B.A.R. issue that finally had no obits. We will never forget the first day we met Cleve Jones in the Castro in 1987 to discuss the Names Project. This is our history, and no matter which coast it depicts, seeing it on TV? Yeah, we're verklempt, alright.
For those of us who lived through it, this is somehow a coda. AIDS isn't over, not even close, but Normal Heart reminds us of how far we have come, the lives we have saved. Murphy's film chronicles the rise of AIDS in New York City in the early 1980s. The superb cast includes out gay actors Matt Bomer and Jim Parsons, as well as Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts and Taylor Kitsch. Kitsch was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon last week talking up Normal Heart and showing some intense clips. When one considers Kitsch was born the year "GRID" was first discovered, it puts a whole different spin on the long road to getting the play to the screen.
From our lives on the line to our love being celebrated is a strange counterpoint, but that's the trajectory of queers on the tube. As you prep to watch TNH, you can also watch Mitchell and Cam, TV's longest-running gay male couple, get married on the season finale of ABC's Modern Family. ABC has been promoing this event like they were the ones getting married. Already the gay network with more gay-themed shows and more gay characters than anyone else, ABC has been tag-teaming on GMA. Two of their own were getting married, and they decided, what the hey, let's pay for weddings in New York City as promotion for Mitchell and Cam's great big fat gay wedding. Gay, straight, young, old. Wow. We saw two lesbians interviewed on ABC World News Now when ABC paid for them. We always cry at weddings.
We also always cry during Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Sometimes it's because the show tends to be triggering, other times it's because as good as this show is, in large part due to star Mariska Hargitay (Olivia Benson), the reliance on female and gay criminals always makes us, well, nuts. Much of this season has focused on Olivia recovering from her kidnaping, near-rape and near-murder by psychopathic serial rapist/torture-murderer William Lewis (Pablo Schreiber, in a spectacular 8-episode story arc). But in the two-part season finale that ended May 21, SVU chose a provocative subject: pedophilia. In a wild shift from his usual role as good guy Assistant U.S. Attorney David Rosen on Scandal, Josh Malina played Simon Wilkes, an empathy-less art photographer with a sideline in extreme child porn: photos of boys (of course) in scenes of sexual torture. It was a complex scenario.
The May 14 episode, "Thought Criminal," brought pedophile Wilkes, whose main interest was the abduction, sexual torture and torture murder of boys. Malina's character is set up by undercover Lt. Murphy (Donal Logue) to buy, torture, and kill a young boy. Wilkes is arrested when the team discovers his torture chamber. But the twist is he hasn't actually committed the crimes, he's just in the planning stages. The episode poses a key question: What do we do with people who are planning heinous crimes, but have yet to actually commit them?
May 16 marked Barbara Walters' final day on the tube as she retired from ABC and her long-running talk show, The View . There's no one else like Walters on the tube. She's been a face of television news since 1976. The 84-year-old Walters was the first female co-anchor of a nightly newscast in 1976, has interviewed nearly every head of state between now and then including every president from Nixon through Obama, and opened the door for women in broadcasting. It's difficult to overstate her importance, especially in a week when The New York Times fired the only female executive editor of the paper (or any other major newspaper in the country) for asking to be paid commensurate with her male colleagues. Women only represent a fraction of people in media and the newsroom, so Walters always being there means something. As does her retirement. Walters told Diane Sawyer in an interview on the May 16 ABC World News that she was looking for the next chapter. She was ABC's "Person of the Week," and the network did a special, Barbara Walters: Her Story, in prime time. It was the end of an era. And so to salute Ms. Walters, Ms. Rhimes, Ryan Murphy, and all the women and queers who have changed the TV landscape for us, and in hopes of seeing yet more, you know you really must stay tuned.