Any week when the presidential election is front-and-center on the tube is a good week for this political junkie. More on that later. First we talk the new season.
More than possibly anything this fall season we are looking forward to the return of three of our fave shows, the TGIT (Thank God It's Thursday) lineup on ABC: Grey's Anatomy, How to Get Away with Murder and Scandal (best political drama on the tube, although CBS' Madam Secretary and The Good Wife are both superb, and Netflix's House of Cards stands alone). ABC knows just how much these shows have been missed because they have been running a huge promo just for TGIT.
We've lauded Shonda Rhimes for like ever because she is the face of diverse programming on the TV landscape. She's single-handedly made it "viable" to have people of color headlining a TV show. Because, as we know from last week's embarrassing blacksplaining by Matt Damon to black filmmaker and producer Effie Brown, who is one of our people, for which he has since apologized, although really badly, "viability" is the issue in greenlighting of marginalized folks.
Kerry Washington and Viola Davis were film stars before Rhimes grabbed them up for the small screen for Scandal and HTGAWM. And it has been fabulous. HTGAWM is exec produced by Rhimes, but is the baby of the show's creator and out gay man Peter Nowalk. As we keep saying, we get in front of the camera when we are behind the camera, and no one proves that better than Rhimes, and now Nowalk. Last season's cliffhangers were stunners, and we've been waiting since May for more. On Scandal, Fitz (Tony Goldwyn) ordered both Mellie (Bellamy Young) and Cyrus (Jeff Perry) out of the White House after Elizabeth (Portia de Rossi) revealed their roles in the execution of the grand jury, which was carried out by Huck (Guillermo D'az), who may or may not have been shot by Quinn (Katie Lowes), because that last 15 minutes was a rollercoaster. (D'az starred in the 1995 Nigel Finch film Stonewall as La Miranda, a big-haired drag queen. He was fabulous.)
At first, when Elizabeth told Fitz about Mellie, we thought it was an accidental spill, because she's insinuated herself so deftly into Mellie's inner circle. But when Fitz threw Cyrus, who has been his protector since before he was president, out of the White House, and Elizabeth slithered into Cyrus' Chief of Staff office with a cat-that-ate-the-canary glance at Cyrus and defiantly put her vase on his desk, we knew. Oh, how we knew. So what happens now? Cyrus is married to his sex-worker husband but still mourning the death of his first husband, the journalist. His whole life was being the power behind the throne. The throne that he said he couldn't be on because he was a gay man. While we know Cyrus is a monster, we love him. Considering Fitz murdered Supreme Court Justice Verna Thornton (Debra Mooney) in her hospital bed, we think it's hypocritical for Fitz to be taking this tack with Mellie and Cyrus, who were just bystanders in Papa Pope's (Joe Morton) plan. We await whatever La Rhimes has to offer us. Let the Scandal begin.
One of the cliffhangers on HTGAWM was between Annalise's (Viola Davis) gay intern Connor (Jack Falahee) and his boyfriend, Oliver (Conrad Ricamora). When not covering up murder, Connor was getting serious with Oliver. One fab element of HTGAWM has been that the gay characters have sex as hot as the straight ones, or in the case of Connor, the hottest of all. But in the final minutes of the cliffhanger, Connor goes to see Oliver, who is sobbing. The two had just got tested, because Connor has a lot of sex, and it's all unprotected. So we never expected Oliver to be the one who tested positive. Neither did he or Connor. HIV/AIDS is so not a storyline anywhere since Looking crashed and burned, even though the CDC says "more than 1.2 million people in the U.S. are living with HIV infection, and almost 1 in 8 (12.8%) are unaware of their infection. Gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM), particularly young black/African American and Latino MSM, are most seriously affected by HIV." So Nowalk making this a storyline with Oliver, a Latino man? Oh yes.
Meanwhile, we still have that murder thing going on, the show ending with Wes (Alfred Enoch) in Annalise's lap, Michaela (Aja Naomi King) outing her fiance as gay or bi to his mother, and the crazy Rebecca (Katie Findlay) on the loose. What's next?
Grey's Anatomy didn't leave us with cliffhangers, but it is back for season 12, making it one of the longest-running series on TV. We feel like we have got older and wiser alongside Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo). G'sA speaks to Rhimes' ability to craft and re-craft an ensemble to hold viewers' interest. This show has had the longest-running lesbian characters in prime time, consistent LGBT storylines, and front-and-center roles for people of color. Pompeo isn't like any other actress on the tube, and the role of Meredith has really held up. She's a flawed yet engaging character, easy to imagine as one's problematic bestie. We haven't quite got over the death of the love of her life, Derek (Patrick Dempsey). Nor have we got over Cristina (Sandra Oh) leaving, because that was the core relationship on the show, Cristina and Meredith, but we trust in Rhimes, and we know she will bring it this season.
GLAAD tidings
Fall is also that time of year when GLAAD reports on LGBT TV, and we wonder if they ever turn on the TV. GLAAD is ending their annual report because �" well, we don't know why exactly. They seem to think we are all caught up with TV because a lot of shows have walk-on lesbian, gay and bi characters, so it's all good. (Shows or reality series with trans people have outstripped LG&B characterizations. There isn't one show on the entire TV landscape that centers on lesbians or gay men, including shows by gay showrunners. When Looking was cancelled, that was it. Trans is the new black, with more than a dozen shows concerning trans people. There hasn't been a lesbian TV show since The L Word ended in 2009. But GLAAD announced it will be focusing on trans issues on TV. )
GLAAD's Network Responsibility Index (NRI) examined original primetime programming on the five broadcast networks and 10 cable networks from June 2014 to May 2015. Here's their grades: "ABC Family and Fox earned a grade of excellent. This is the third excellent grade for ABC Family and a first for Fox, which received a failing grade in the inaugural NRI in 2006. Good: ABC, CW, FX, HBO, MTV, Showtime. Adequate: CBS, NBC, TLC, TNT, USA. Failing: A&E, History." We disagree with some of these ratings and don't even know why History is in there and PBS is not, but whatever.
"The ninth edition of the NRI marks the first time in the report's history that a major broadcast network �" Fox �" received an 'Excellent' as a grade," said GLAAD CEO & President Sarah Kate Ellis. "This milestone highlights real change across the media landscape, especially considering that the network received a 'Failing' grade in the NRI's first two editions." Here's what this report doesn't explain. Anyone who walks on a TV show as LGBT is counted as being LGBT representation. So a tertiary lesbian character on Fox's The Mindy Project counts the same as a main gay character on Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Empire. Nearly every one of the lesbian and gay characters on Fox shows is also a person of color. The networks use this two-for-one deal to give us a gay or lesbian character who is also one of their only people of color. That's not diversity. When Fox's new sitcom Grandfathered has one lesbian character, Annalise (Kelly Jenrette), who is also the show's only black character, it's problematic. On FX's American Horror Story: Hotel, Angela Bassett will be playing the sole lesbian (there are also two bisexual women). On ABC's Asian-focused sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, Sonya Eddy plays Deb, a lesbian bartender. Yes, she is also black. GLAAD's statement also notes, "GLAAD will shift focus to its annual TV diversity and transgender reports." Good news for trans people, well-represented. Bad news for lesbians and gay men, wildly underrepresented.
We were outraged by an off-the-cuff comment by the producer of the CW's long-time hit The Vampire Diaries. The show is adding a lesbian couple, Nora (Teressa Laine) and Mary Louise (Scarlett Byrne), when it returns Oct. 8 for its seventh season. Exec producer Caroline Dries told AfterEllen's Trish Bendix, "We figured after maybe 130 episodes we should have a lesbian character. Being a lesbian story or gay story on TV is not really groundbreaking now in 2015, so we wanted to lean into that." Not really groundbreaking now in 2015. Hey GLAAD, listen up.
The blowback from the GOP debate on CNN continues, and all we can hope is that some of the more despicable (hard to quantify in this group) candidates will be out of cash soon due to their lackluster showings, because that's five hours (five hours, people!) of our lives we will never get back. We hope Mike Huckabee is the first among them. His slithery support for Kim Davis brought out our repressed violent streak. Plus we take issue with people running for president who have no idea how the U.S. Constitution works. We hope Huckabee takes the low-end guys Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum and Lindsey Graham with him.
Here's the thing you aren't seeing unless you watch the more obscure MSNBC pundits. Carly Fiorina is more frightening than Donald Trump. She's like the reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher with a big dollop of Dick Cheney thrown in. While we agree Trump's slamming of her face was egregious, that doesn't mean we have to like her. Her grisly description of Pres. Obama and Hillary Clinton eviscerating the beating hearts of aborted babies on the tables of Planned Parenthood is not an image we will soon forget. Speaking of Thatcher, she's the only woman Jeb Bush could imagine putting on American money, forgetting we've been free from British rule for 239 years. Jeb also forgot his brother George did not keep us safe, as he asserted in the debate. Remember 9/11?
Speaking of the $10 bill, we watched the Miss America Pageant, and one of the finalists, Miss Colorado, was asked whom she would put on the $10 bill. She said, "Ellen DeGeneres. I think that woman is so amazing. Not only is she kind, not only is she intelligent, not only is her entire platform speaking tolerance and equality for all, but she's able to be funny without insulting someone." Was this our first lesbian Miss America finalist, or was that just wishful thinking on our part? It was a much better answer than any of the Republicans gave. Ben Carson chose not Harriet Tubman or Rosa Parks, but his mother.
Pundits gave Fiorina the win, with homophobes Ben Carson and Ted Cruz close seconds. No one cared about the lies they told. The jingoist Trump had a bad night, but made up for it on Sept. 17 when, at an event in New Hampshire, he agreed with one of his supporters who said that Obama was a Muslim who wasn't born in America. To which Trump said, "Right," unlike John McCain in 2008, who told a woman making a similar claim that what she was saying was untrue. Trump didn't stop with that egregious moment, though, televised live on CNN. He told the card-carrying member of the racist lunatic fringe that he would be "looking into" rounding up Muslims. Because rounding up Mexicans isn't enough for him. The mainstream media was oddly silent on this. Except for Anderson Cooper, who had a near meltdown on his 360 show on CNN with Trump surrogate Andy Dean. Cooper felt he had to apologize. Live. We wish he hadn't, but the Silver Fox is nothing if not decent. Also, Cooper is moderating the first Democratic debate in October, so perhaps he felt it was needed.
With the pundits and network news, there has been no challenging of the Republican narrative. Jake Tapper, who moderated for CNN, let so many egregious comments slide, including Marco Rubio's poor-taste joke about California's drought. Tapper never asked a single question about Black Lives Matter or anything racial despite the fact that racial profiling and killings of black men and women by police continue apace. Tapper also didn't challenge Fiorina's grisly Planned Parenthood scenario.
Meanwhile, on the other side, Bernie Sanders continues to be on every talk show, coming in second only to Trump for TV airtime. He's been on every network news show and most of MSNBC's shows, the ones that haven't been purged in MSNBC's recent slash-and-burn. Sanders was on Rachel Maddow Sept. 17, where he said he had nearly a quarter-million volunteers, the same number the Obama for America campaign claimed in 2008. Martin O'Malley was on Seth Meyers on Sept. 16, but as usual, no one noticed. Hillary Clinton did a somewhat stilted turn with Ellen, which disappointed us, since we love Ellen and she loves Hillary. But Clinton's appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon following the GOP debate was superb. She and Fallon did an opening skit where he played Trump (he does a mean Trump), then had a 20-minute sit-down where she answered tough questions. For her part, Ellen asked, but because the show was held outdoors, we think a lot of what she said got lost. As with Joe Biden's interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, there was a little too much fawning for our taste. We didn't like seeing Colbert drool on Biden, and much as we love the lesbian doyenne of daytime, we didn't like seeing Ellen do it with Hillary.
Fallon went right to the email issue with Clinton, and asked a lot of other serious questions. While he clearly liked her and she was totally at ease, the questions came fast and furious and were pretty hard-hitting. One surprise for us was seeing Bill Maher defend Clinton on Hardball with Chris Matthews. We were pleased to see him take on Matthews over the amount of coverage the media has been giving Trump. (TV Guide puts Trump at more than half of all air-time devoted to candidates, with Sanders in second place, Jeb in third, Carson and Fiorina next. Clinton comes in dead last, despite her front-runner status.) When Matthews began slamming Clinton, Maher said, "You're just so mean to Hillary Clinton. It's like they get her for parking the mid-sized car in the compact spot. Who cares? This is not Che Guevara in a pantsuit. For the Republicans it will always be something. 'Well, she says she's not a witch, but it's kind of suspicious that she won't let us dunk her.'" We laughed pretty hard at that last line. So for all things political, the sexy hot queers of HTGAWM, and to catch fleeting glimpses of that rare sight, the lesbian TV character, you know you really must stay tuned.