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Cath Virginia

TV AND MOVIES

LGBTQ+ Representation on TV Has Dipped. Here’s What GLAAD Wants to See More Of

According to GLAAD’s annual Where We Are on TV Report, over 100 LGBTQ+ characters have been lost to cancellations and series endings in the last year.

BY SAMANTHA ALLEN AND RENDY JONES

 

Our inaugural Queer on TV package, produced in partnership with GLAAD and released in conjunction with the annual Where We Are on TV report, is all about queer visibility on television today. At once a celebration of LGBTQ+ stories and a call to action, this series examines the state of representation on TV while also highlighting the vital work being done to expand it. Read more here. 

It’s a risky proposition these days to fall in love with a queer TV show. Just when you get a taste for lesbian vampire romance, First Kill gets the ax. You’re starting to feel at home in the Latinx dramedy Gentefied when you get the news that it won’t be returning. Or maybe you’ve just made the fantasy show Warrior Nun into a habit when Netflix exorcizes it from the lineup. In all, according to GLAAD’s annual Where We Are on TV report for 2022-2023, a whopping 54 LGBTQ-inclusive series have been canceled since last season, resulting in a loss of 140 LGBTQ+ characters. And with entire seasons of many shows landing on streamers at once, fandoms are cropping up, then getting heartbroken faster than ever before. 

In turn, the past year has also seen a proliferation of social media campaigns aimed at saving queer shows: Warrior Nun fans tweeted in droves demanding the show continue, and pleading for another network to pick it up. A petition to save First Kill has gathered nearly 14,000 signatures. This kind of passion shouldn’t be a surprise. Over the past decade, LGBTQ+ storytelling on TV has erupted. But just as viewers were getting used to a buffet of queer-friendly options — from lesbian nuns to bisexual adventurers — they had to watch the table get cleared in front of them. 

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The resulting hunger is about more than just getting another season of a favorite series; it’s about ensuring that we don’t backslide into an era when LGBTQ+ representation was narrower than it is today. The recent wave of cancellations affecting queer shows has already had a sizable impact. According to the new edition of Where We Are on TV,  the total number of LGBTQ+ characters on broadcast has decreased from 141 to 101 since the last report and by a count of two on premium streamers, dropping from 358 characters to 356. Only on scripted cable shows was there an increase — albeit by one character — in the total tally. Series cancellations and endings are responsible for many of these losses. 

Given the broader industry factors that have led to this near-constant churn of content, one of GLAAD’s top priorities is ensuring that LGBTQ+ stories don’t get lost in the shuffle. Queer-inclusive programming is too meaningful, especially to a rising generation of LGBTQ+ youth, to let it casually slide off the schedule. 

“Our focus is on making sure that new things are getting announced,” Megan Townsend, GLAAD’s senior director of entertainment research and analysis, tells Them. “We want to make sure that there are no significant long-term decreases.”

Unless they continue to pay careful attention to LGBTQ+ storytelling, it’s likely that networks will begin slipping on their commitments. For example, GLAAD has long challenged platforms to ensure that over half of their LGBTQ+ characters are people of color. Broadcast networks have reached that benchmark four years running. But this season, 48% of LGBTQ+ characters on broadcast television were characters of color — a decrease of 10% from last year. When shows like Batwoman, Supergirl, and Queens all get axed in rapid succession, these fluctuations can be drastic year to year.

“We can’t be in a place where if a specific show gets canceled or if a specific show moves over to streaming or over to cable, then all the inclusion for that platform drops,” says Townsend. “So that’s what we are pushing for —  that this is something that’s a priority for every network and streaming service executive, and not just something that’s left to one show or to one platform. As good as programming on CW and Freeform and Showtime might be, we love them, but we want everybody to follow their example.”

Broadcast Still Has a Role to Play

The subject of countless obituaries, broadcast is often written off as a dying format with an aging audience. But with an estimated 40-50% of the linear TV audience still viewing episodes same-day, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s best estimates, it’s clear that broadcast still has some enduring power, especially as they continue to incorporate streaming into their models. One need only look at the success of a show like the ABC comedy Abbott Elementary for proof that broadcast networks are still capable of producing fresh, innovative shows with wide appeal, capturing millions of live viewers and millions of streaming viewers. And, to put it bluntly, at least old-guard networks still have the power to deliver more than one season of something. 

“It can be frustrating to see shows that are really great but just fall by the wayside,” says Raina Deerwater, GLAAD’s entertainment research and analysis manager, of the recent heartbreaking series endings at Netflix and elsewhere. “They don't have time to grow an audience before they are unceremoniously canceled. You can see that frustration in a lot of queer spaces and online spaces.”

Broadcast networks are under their own pressures to compete with streaming-first platforms and maintain advertising revenue, but even in 2023, they can introduce the sort of enduring LGBTQ+ characters who stick in our cultural memory. As the Warrior Nuns of the world continue to vanish just as they’re finding new fans, a show like Abbott has been renewed for a third season.

“That is why it’s important for broadcasting to step up because they have that longevity,” Deerwater adds. “When a show is airing weekly, you can be like, ‘I’m going to check in with my friends every week.’ And then as the years go on, you feel like, ‘That’s my best friend on this TV show.’”

“It can be frustrating to see shows that are really great but just fall by the wayside.”

In fact, rather than pushing broadcast networks to simply maintain current levels of representation, GLAAD would like to see them go a step further. To date, the vast majority of LGBTQ+ representation on broadcast television can be attributed to side characters in ensemble casts. The need is clear for a broadcast network to greenlight a show like Pose — which originally aired on cable — that tells a universal human story through a predominantly LGBTQ+ stable of characters.

“It is the one platform that we [at GLAAD] look at that has not yet had a queer-majority show,” Townsend points out, noting that streamers and cable networks have led the way on that front with programs like The L Word: Generation Q and Peacock’s short-lived Queer as Folk reboot.

The Trouble With Streaming

Of course, streaming services are where most younger viewers are watching television — and in order to keep up with Generation Z, executives will have to ensure that they “offset the dramatic loss of LGBTQ storytelling” caused by recent cancellations, as GLAAD recommends in its report. As of 2023, over seven percent of American adults identify as LGBTQ+, with Gen Z’s remarkable openness around sexuality and gender contributing to that rising trendline. Nearly one in five Zoomers (and one out of every ten Millennials) now consider themselves part of the LGBTQ+ community. 

“We are at a place now where more than half of the U.S. population are Gen Z and Millennials,” Townsend notes. “So as networks and streaming services are looking at what to greenlight and what to develop and where to put their budgets, it is important that they are appealing to those customers, who make up the majority of the audience.”

Oftentimes, that will require platforms to replace axed shows with programs that are just as diverse, if not more so. For example, in one of the report’s more dramatic findings, Peacock had 24 LGBTQ+ characters in the 2022-23 season, but 20 of them were on shows that have now been cut from the lineup, including One of Us Is Lying, Vampire Academy, and Queer as Folk. This is typical of the shortened timespan streamers give their shows to find an audience before sending them to the chopping block. In essence, if Peacock doesn’t continue to greenlight queer programming, the streamer would lose 80% of its LGBTQ+ representation in one fell swoop. More than likely, we’ll see a new roster of LGBTQ+ faces in forthcoming Peacock programming; the question is whether there will be enough to make up for the losses.

“There is such a need right now for stories that include real trans people that can be a challenge or a foil to some of that false and awful anti-trans rhetoric that you’re seeing in the news.”

That constant cycle of cancellations may be largely unavoidable in a business environment where streamers produce a wealth of content but put most of their support behind big hits in the hopes of boosting subscriber numbers. That means there will often be shows that are extremely popular among queer people, but that still don’t reach the mysterious and ever-shifting metrics that streamers use to make renewal decisions, leaving LGBTQ+ fans feeling like they’re not a priority. But while it’s impossible for every show to become a multi-season sensation, some industry experts question whether queer programming is receiving adequate marketing resources.

Deerwater cites the success of the Showtime cable show Yellowjackets, which has several queer storylines, as a positive example of caring for your content in an attention economy. “A lot of times with these streaming shows, you’ll get the trailer on Monday and then the season on Friday and then that’s it,” Deepwater notes. By contrast, the campaign for Yellowjackets season two, which premieres this week, has been well-paced and deliberate, including a viral Florence and the Machine version of “Just a Girl” and an installation at South by Southwest. 

And as Townsend adds, marketers across every platform need to make more of an effort to include LGBTQ+ media — including Them, we might add — from the start, “inviting LGBTQ+ reporters to film festivals, to premieres, [and] to do covers.” That’s more than just politeness; it’s also pragmatic. Queer people can be especially loyal television viewers, and if the LGBTQ+ press is looped in from the beginning, we can prime readers to pay attention at the beginning, when viewership numbers matter most.

 

That way, Townsend explains, “everybody can tune in at the same time rather than waiting until there’s a specific episode or a specific storyline.” (One recent example of this practice in action: PR people associated with HBO’s The Last of Us began cluing Them into its very gay episodes well before the season premiere.)

Why We Need Representation Right Now

Although GLAAD’s Where We Are on TV report certainly reflects the challenges of the current landscape, it is also impressive to consider how far we’ve come in the last decade. Setting aside more minor increases and decreases, it’s remarkable to consider the variety of LGBTQ+ characters we can now see on the small screen, 596 of them in total across broadcast, cable, and streaming for the 2022-23 season. Thirty-two of those characters are transgender, over half of them are people of color, and 27 are shown living with a disability.

Still, there are noticeable disparities: Despite comprising a statistical majority of the queer community, bisexual people only represent a quarter of the LGBTQ+ characters on TV in the 2022-23 season. And only eight characters are living with HIV. Indeed, there’s never any excuse to rest on our laurels, no matter how many inroads we’ve made. As Townsend notes, there’s always room for “more intentional inclusion of the full diversity of the community.” 

“When we say that, we mean more LGBTQ+ people of color, we mean more trans people, more queer people with disabilities, more LGBTQ+ people who are living with HIV, and all these different opportunities for groundbreaking storytelling,” she says.

And although Townsend and Deeewater are research experts who are fluent in these statistics, both are motivated by the real-life benefits of expanding LGBTQ+ representation on TV. As states continue to target LGBTQ+ people, especially trans youth, with recurring waves of hateful legislation, entertainment media has an essential and humanizing role to play. It may seem counterintuitive to laugh at a time like this, but Townsend suspects that putting more trans characters in comedies — rather than relegating them to dramas, as they have been historically — could be especially powerful.

“There is such a need right now for stories that include real trans people that can be a challenge or a foil to some of that false and awful anti-trans rhetoric that you’re seeing in the news,” Townsend explains. “And I think part of that comes with putting more people of all identities and experiences into comedies where they get to be the funny ones. They get to have agency over making the jokes and have a sense of humor and talk about their life and experience in a way that isn’t dramatic or sad or tragic [in ways] that we’re seeing in the real world.”

First Kill. (L to R) Imani Lewis as Calliope, Sarah Catherine Hook as Juliette in episode 105 of First Kill.

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Queer TV can also serve as a sort of connective tissue for the community, which is especially necessary given the fact that “so many of these anti-LGBTQ+ bills are targeted at people in the South, in red states, and more rural areas,” as Townsend notes. In the same way that Ellen and Will & Grace served as lifelines in the past, LGBTQ+ television shows and online fandoms can help reaffirm that queer and trans people are an indelible part of this country’s fabric. You can try to pull our stories off bookshelves and keep them out of classrooms, but airwaves are unstoppable.

From that perspective, as fraught as our current cultural moment might be, there’s also a glimmer of excitement about what the future might hold in store. Townsend highlights the impact that shows like Glee and Pose had on recent rising generations of LGBTQ+ young adults. “These were characters people hadn’t gotten to see so they were excited to be like, ‘Oh, this, finally,’” she recalls. 

The inexhaustible diversity of human experience is such that there will always be a queer viewer waiting for that moment, whether it comes in the form of Atypical, Reservation Dogs, or Harlem. And the power of a medium as vast and far-reaching as television is that it can keep providing that “finally” feeling for generations to come.

THEM