Another landmark week on TV, and a week of endings. Not just in season finales, but in a chapter closing as David Letterman's last show was May 20.
We are definitely still in a new Golden Era of TV. There is so much to watch, it's not surprising the majority of Americans haven't read a single book in a year. But at least there's a lot of TV that's smart, literate and intellectually stimulating, and we don't just mean BBC's Wolf Hall, which is all of those things. Dramas like True Detective, Penny Dreadful and American Crime all drive us toward contemplation more than just passive viewing.
Among the shows that got us thinking was Mad Men, whose series finale aired May 17. If you never watched Mad Men, the entire series is now available on Netflix and will be available in a boxed set later this summer. The iconic period drama re-defined TV. It wasn't just Jon Hamm's amazing portrayal of Don Draper or the compelling women on the show or the way the show dealt with the clash of cultures as the 1960s altered American history. Mad Men re-shaped cable, almost single-handedly making it a viable alternative to network. Mad Men was the first cable TV show to win an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, the first Emmy of 15. It is widely considered to be one of the best TV series of all time.
What we liked most about Mad Men was how it contextualized the 1960s. The gay men hiding deep in their closets. The women desperate to have careers, being held back by their gender. The claustrophobia of marriages where women were expected to be married to their houses first and foremost, and men considered their wives more acquisitions than partners. The Vietnam War. The Sexual Revolution. Booze. The advent of recreational drugs. Sexual harassment in the workplace. And all of it scripted in mesmerizing prose and shot in gorgeous super-saturated color with stellar acting. Mad Men was a show people will be talking about and writing about for years to come.
We don't know if any of the new spate of shows debuting this month and next will have anything like that kind of resonance, but there's a lot worth seeing. The Astronaut's Wives Club premieres in June on ABC, and it has that same look and feel to it �" a "girl" version of Mad Men. Whether it will be a frivolous miss or an incisive hit remains to be seen.
Another iconic series leaving the airwaves is Fox's American Idol, the show that launched more than a dozen careers of major talents, like Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and Jennifer Hudson. It also added the phrase "a little pitchy" to the lexicon. On May 11, Fox announced that season 15 will be the last for American Idol, the network's flagship show and long-time ratings juggernaut. The final season will bring back former contestants �" no doubt some of the terrible ones as well as some of the major stars. All the judges will return, so look for some crazy from Paula Abdul, whom we still miss.
American Idol, whether you loved it or hated it or just never got around to watching it, was the mother of all talent shows. Several dozen also-rans, including the very popular NBC show The Voice, have hit the tube since the first episode of American Idol aired on June 11, 2002, but most have only had a few seasons and faded away, while American Idol continued to hold viewers and establish both careers and audience loyalty.
Much as we have enjoyed the show over the years �" some seasons more so than others �" we think Fox made the right decision. The show no longer feels fresh, and while the current panel of judges is strong, the Mariah/Minaj battles left a bad taste that was hard to recover from. Also, the sheer volume (no pun intended) of singing competitions has just worn us down. The excitement we used to feel discovering new voices has waned considerably over 14 seasons. We're sure the last season will be memorable, but unlike Mad Men, which continued to explicate, deconstruct and reveal until the very last episode, American Idol has shown us all it has to offer.
Returning champs
Many of our favorite shows have come to their seasonal end this month and won't return until September or October. We were glad to see most of our faves renewed, including the stellar new Fox drama Empire, with its gay characters and storylines, which is adding some high-caliber stars and a full 18 episodes next season. All of Shonda Rhimes' TGIT shows will return, along with their LGBT characters. Black-ish, one of the best new sitcoms of the new season, has also been renewed, and has added a lesbian character, Rhonda, played by Cosby Show alum Raven-Symone, who is a lesbian in real life.
May is a fraught month for TV. We have sobbed and shrieked our way through several season and series finales, including Mad Men, Scandal, Grey's Anatomy, Arrow, The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, The Blacklist, Gotham, American Crime, Nashville and The Following.
We are anticipating new shows like NBC's David Duchovny vehicle Aquarius, and are already enmeshed in the Matt Dillon thriller Wayward Pines, which debuted May 14 and the quirky gay dramedy Grace and Frankie. Some of the new shows debuting over the summer are moving seamlessly into the now-vacant slots of shows we have come to have a deep connection to.
But we like some familiarity. May and June find returning gay-friendly favorites like Under the Dome and the intensely homoerotic Hannibal, as well as the gay-themed Masters of Sex, The Fosters, Pretty Little Liars and True Detective. Each proffers some gayness while also creating a balance between the very new shows we aren't quite connected to yet and the classics we may be too comfortable with, like CSI, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and a show we only seem to watch in hospital rooms, NCIS, but which is the top-rated show on TV, was voted America's favorite TV show in 2011, and which was just renewed by CBS for a 13th season.
But while four of the top five showrunners on the tube are gay men and the fifth is the superlatively LGBT-friendly Shonda Rhimes, LGBT characters still lag far below where we appear in the general population. Trans characters and trans-themed shows are on the rise on the tube, which is good news for the trans community. Be sure to catch Keeping up with the Kardashians: About Bruce. The two-night special on E! aired May 17 and 18, but is available on demand.
Yet while there are now several trans-specific shows on the tube, there is not one gay- or lesbian-specific show. In March, HBO cancelled Looking, the only gay-themed show on the tube.
Lesbian characters are on the decline, which is bad news. And TV continues to confuse lesbianism and bisexuality, which is really starting to irk us a lot, much as we love some of the shows that are prime offenders in this confusion, like Orphan Black, Grey's Anatomy and The Good Wife. That conflation of lesbianism and bisexuality slights both groups.
As for gay men? Still mostly neutered. (Speaking of neutered gay male characters, one of our readers brought to our attention something we also noted on the May 6 episode of Modern Family: some upside-down gay pride flags at a protest. We expect more from continuity people on a gay-themed show. Also, Jesse Tyler Ferguson is gay in real life, so how did he miss that?)
Along with the sweeps, finales and premieres in May come, alas, cancellations. Unfortunately, nearly every cancellation from the May 7 cancellation spree will take lesbian and gay characters off the TV landscape �" without getting many in new shows to replace them.
ABC cancelled Revenge and Resurrection, removing several gay characters. Also canned is Cristela, the only Latino sitcom on network.
CBS has cancelled one of its longest-running shows, CSI, after 15 seasons. A two-hour "wrap" film will air in September. (We love those. Eye roll.)
While �" inexplicably, as it was set in Las Vegas �" CSI did not have any LGBT characters, several other shows CBS is cancelling do. The Millers and the new dramedy Battle Creek have been cancelled. Both are very good, gay-friendly shows, and we have repeatedly noted that The Millers is hilarious. But neither show had the requisite ratings.
We think Battle Creek was badly placed on Sunday nights and would have done better in a weeknight slot. This "guy" show just didn't follow Madame Secretary and The Good Wife. Also, it was more comedy than drama, while the two lead-ins were pure drama. It needed a space that maintained an audience.
The McCarthys was never one of our faves, although it had its moments. But the show's whole pivot was a gay storyline, so we're not happy it's going. CBS has also cancelled Stalker, taking gay characters, storylines and Kevin Williamson, the series' gay showrunner, off the air.
Williamson loses another of his shows, as Fox has cancelled the intensely homoerotic The Following, which was one of our faves. We recognize that the show has got increasingly more violent, but it's also got increasingly more homoerotic. We think this show should have moved to cable. It's difficult to understand why American Horror Story continues apace while The Following has been cancelled. The only clear answer is The Following is too creepily gay for network, while AHS is happily ensconced on cable. (The recent supplicant scene between Joe Carroll [James Purefoy] and Ryan Hardy [Kevin Bacon] on The Following was an incredibly sexual moment without either of them actually touching the other.)
Fox has also cancelled another fave �" with lesbian and gay characters and storylines �" The Mindy Project. Mindy Kaling's tour de force has had three good seasons, and Hulu is considering picking the show up for two more, so all may not be lost, there.
And of course Fox's Glee is over, with the full range of LGBT characters.
We said here that Ellen DeGeneres's NBC sitcom One Big Happy was one big mess. We like Kelly Brook and would love to see her back in something else, but we never really liked the lesbian character Lizzy (Elisha Cuthbert), and we were always irked by the "gay woman" moniker. (Stop erasing lesbians, please!) We hated the show's basically hetero premise of a lesbian having a straight man's baby. We never saw Lizzy being a lezzie, and we don't really know what DeGeneres was thinking when she decided to produce this show, in which a straight woman married to a straight man fights with a lesbian who is his best friend over the fact that she is having his baby.
Did you feel that? It was us shuddering again at the concept. So even though there are few lesbian characters on prime time, we won't miss Lizzy the lezzie now that One Big Happy has been cancelled. Please do better, people.
NBC has also cancelled Constantine, and while there was quite the furor over the character not being bisexual like he is in the graphic novel series, the show had gayness written all over it. There's a strong viewer pushback to the cancellation, so the show might get moved to Amazon, Netflix or SyFy for pickup. NBC also cancelled State of Affairs, which we had mixed feelings about, but which had some strong characterizations. Courtney Vance and Alfre Woodard were both excellent in that series. And it was intriguing to have a black woman president and black first man. Their conversations were compelling, especially as we contemplate our first female president and first man.
Which segues nicely into one of the most bizarrely manufactured stories of the week. ABC News director George Stephanopoulos, who is also co-host of Good Morning America and host of This Week, has been forced to step down from moderating one of the Republican presidential debates in February 2016. Why? Because he donated $75,000 over three years to pay for AIDS drugs for people with AIDS in Africa. The "story" broke on May 14 that Stephanopoulos has donated $25,000 a year for the past three years earmarked for AIDS drugs to the Clinton Foundation, which facilitates HIV/AIDS drugs for nearly 10 million people globally.
TEN MILLION PEOPLE WITH HIV/AIDS.
Stephanopoulos said he thought his donations were public record, but apparently not. So Stephanopoulos apologized (because philanthropy is definitely a no-no) and said he was in no way attempting to hide the donations, and he intended to continue to make them in the future. (Go, George!)
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who is running for president, told The New York Times that because Stephanopoulos has been close to the Clintons "there would be a conflict of interest if he tried to be a moderator of any sort."(Stephanopoulos worked in the first Clinton Administration before joining ABC News in 1997, but has certainly shown no favoritism in reporting on either Bill or Hillary, and some would argue, ourselves included, that he's been pretty vicious toward Hillary.)
Stephanopoulos has reported on Peter Schweizer's book Clinton Cash, which purports to be a smackdown of the Clinton Foundation and its funding sources, but which has been revealed to be filled with falsehoods and roundly debunked as a Fox News-style "expose" that isn't. Stephanopoulos interviewed Schweizer on This Week, where Schweizer fumbled most of his answers. ABC News, led by Stephanopoulos, also found more than a dozen factual errors in the book that the author said on May 14 he is correcting in the e-book version and will correct in subsequent print versions. Oh, okay. But Stephanopoulos is the problem?
So many corrections, so little time. Much like Jeb Bush has done on Iraq, even though he's had 14 years to figure out what he wants to say on the war if he ever decided to run for president. This week Jeb fumbled first on MSNBC, which could be construed as partisan, since MSNBC is the closest we come to that liberal media we all keep hearing about. Then he flubbed for ABC, which has always been center right. Then �" and this is most damning �" he flubbed for Fox. So his brother is Dubya, and Jeb is Flubya.
Open season on gays
It's going to be a long presidential season on the tube. But really the only thing you need to know is that every single Republican candidate is anti-LGBT and making their anti-gay agenda a major part of their presidential bid in every TV interview. The May 10 Meet the Press was so full of invective against gays and women, we had trouble watching through to the end. That show's fave right now is Carly Fiorina, who was given a loooong interview segment. Californians know Fiorina for her attempt to oust pro-LGBT Barbara Boxer from her Senate seat in 2010, and for Fiorina's support of Prop 8.
Fiorina announced her run on Good Morning America in an interview with Stephanopoulos. When Fiorina isn't on the tube saying, as she did on NBC and, natch, Fox, that Hillary Clinton has "accomplished nothing" (because being a two-term senator and Secretary of State aren't real accomplishments in Fiorina's world), she's touting the importance of "real" marriage and "real" families. Hint: ours aren't.
Fiorina is on TV more than any other Republican candidate. She gets the face time because she's the anti-Hillary and an anti-feminist woman, and TV loves a "cat fight." But the more she talks, the more her culture-wars platform is revealed. PBS' NewsHour showed Fiorina explaining that "Marriage is between a man and a woman," although like some other Republicans, she believes same-sex couples should be allowed civil unions.
Fiorina supported the recent Indiana anti-gay law, and said on May 13, "People of religious conviction know that marriage is a religious institution with a spiritual foundation because only a man and a woman can create life, which is a gift that comes from God. We must protect their rights as well."
And not to be cruel, but Fiorina was not able to have children herself, so it seems rather hypocritical to cite procreation as the basis for "real" marriage.
Not to be outdone by Fiorina, Sen.Ted Cruz (R-TX) told ABC that "gay marriage is the greatest threat to religion in American history." So the bar is being set by Republicans with lesbians and gay men as the focal point.
In case you forget any of the Republican candidates hate us, just tune in to any of the political shows. They'll be talking about just how much they hate us every chance they get.
One person who has always challenged the likes of Fiorina and Rand Paul is David Letterman. A sotto voce politico, Letterman was the first of the late-night hosts to encourage politicians to come on his show and talk about the issues. In the final weeks of the show, which ended May 20, Letterman invited both President Obama and former President Bill Clinton on as guests. Obama was funny, serious and wonky. Clinton was funny, self-deprecating, and talked a lot about the work of the Clinton Foundation with regard to AIDS, which was so impressive, it made us wish we had Stephanopoulos' money. The Clinton Foundation now serves 70 countries as facilitator for low-cost HIV/AIDS drugs for some of the poorest people in the world.
We will miss Letterman, who is now the longest-running late-night talk-show host, having debuted on NBC Feb. 1, 1982. In 1992, Johnny Carson, whom Letterman credits with giving him his start on late-night, retired from The Tonight Show, ending the (then) longest run of any late-night host. The two contenders expecting to get the vacant seat were Joan Rivers, who had been the guest host more than anyone else, and Letterman, whose own show followed Carson's.
But NBC chose Jay Leno, and the rest is history. Letterman was wooed away from NBC by CBS, and The Late Show debuted on Aug. 30, 1993, at the historic Ed Sullivan Theater, where Sullivan broadcast his variety series from 1948 to 1971.
Letterman has always got audience approval as well as critical acclaim, and at both NBC and CBS his has been an award-winning presence, with 57 Emmy Award nominations and a dozen wins. He has received more nominations than anyone else in the history of television. In 2012 he received the Kennedy Center Honors. At the ceremony, Letterman was called "one of the most influential personalities in the history of television, entertaining an entire generation of late-night viewers with his unconventional wit and charm."
The past few weeks Letterman has shown compilation clips of some of his shows, and they have been fabulous. He's also had a star-studded group of celebrities on as his tenure was drawing to a close, ending the show with some all-time favorites, like Cher, Oprah, Bill Murray and Tom Hanks.
We always loved Letterman's irreverent, self-deprecating style, and we will miss it and him. He's taken the Right to task over and over again in a way that has been awesomely eviscerating, yet delivered in Letterman's characteristic "aw shucks" manner. (A particular fave of ours was Letterman, after listening intently to his spiel, telling Rand Paul, "You really have no idea what you're talking about, do you?")
On Sept. 19, 2001, Letterman's was the first late-night show to come back after 9/11. He began the show with a monologue about the sadness of the city and how important it was to return the city to normal. You can see the entire monologue here �" it's worth watching the whole seven minutes. It gives a keen sense of the immediacy of the feelings then. He notes that the only thing we can do in life is be courageous. At the five-minute point, prepare to be gutted: youtu.be/DBLgp1qTCTg.
On March 31, Letterman, an Indiana native who invokes his home state often and has frequent bits featuring his mother, took Gov. Mike Pence and his religious freedom bill to task in a monologue. Letterman said, "This is not the Indiana I remember as a kid. I lived there for 27 years, and folks were folks, and that's all there was to it. We all breathed the same air, we were all carbon-based life forms. We didn't care."
Letterman added, "This guy throws a monkey wrench into the works. Something's gone haywire. It doesn't pass the sniff test. It may be legal, but it ain't right."
He then proceeded to skewer Pence with a Top 10 List of "Guys Indiana Governor Mike Pence Looks Like." (You can see the whole bit here: youtube.com/watch?v=3vd1zA5ZeXs.
So Letterman ends his era, and so does Mad Men. Our faves are on summer hiatus, but others return throughout the rest of May, including two of our fave contest shows, NBC's America's Got Talent and Fox's Master Chef, which always bring the gay.
For the old, the new, and the endless search for the gay, you really must stay tuned.