TV has been pretty keen on the ‘bury your gays’ trope, killing off queers in almost every genre, but now it seems they’ve upgraded to killing off whole shows.
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, Gotham Knights, The Watchful Eye, Willow, A League of Their Own (2022), Monarch, Vampire Academy, Reboot, Queer as Folk (2022), The Imperfects, Teenage Bounty Hunters. These are just some of the shows with queer women as main characters that have been canceled after just one season. From a range of streaming services including Netflix, Paramount+, Prime Video, and Peacock. And that list doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.
Not only is the cancellation of so many shows focusing on queer women upsetting for the viewers, I loved some of these shows and was devastated when they were canceled, but it’s upsetting for the people creating the shows, for the actors and directors and writers. And it tells us something about what the streaming services think about queer women. Some of these shows weren’t even really marketed, they never stood a chance.
And maybe some of them were canceled because of low ratings alone, but the amount of love I’ve seen poured out for these shows seems to say otherwise. If you market a show properly (or at all) people are likely to watch it, or at least you’ll know if people actually don’t like the show. But a lot of these shows were barely marketed, hell I didn’t even know some of these shows existed until after they were canceled and I’m a lesbian who practically only watches queer shows. If they weren’t marketing to my demographic, who were they marketing to? And why weren’t they marketing to queer women as much as they should have been?
The Facts
In the most recent Where We Are On TV GLAAD report from the 2022-23 season, they found a 6.4% decrease in the number of LGBTQ+ regular characters appearing on broadcast, cable, and streaming shows. A large percentage of queer shows are being canceled after one or two seasons. And it’s not just queer women, it’s all shows with LGBTQ+ representation, “Streaming services debuting shows with large ensemble LGBTQ casts and then quickly canceling those shows is a consistent issue across all platforms,” says the report. However, “it’s clear when there is full support behind inclusive series at all levels… LGBTQ-inclusive programming rises above a crowded media landscape and these shows are successful with critics and audiences,” as some of the recent big hits have been shows with queer main characters like Yellow Jackets, What We Do in The Shadows, and The Last of Us.
Even as LGBTQ+ representation is growing — up from 358 LGBTQ+ characters total found in GLAAD’s 2017-18 Where We Are On TV report to a whopping 596 characters counted in the 2022-23 report — the amount of queer shows being canceled before their planned end is high. According to the report, 29% of the characters of the 2022-23 season won’t be back next season. That’s 175 characters gone, and of those 140 were due to cancellation of the show.
What does it all mean?
Maybe it’s just the way TV works, shows get canceled. It could be that a changing culture around binge-watching and having shorter seasons is causing a faster abandonment rate. But if that were the case we wouldn’t see this many cancellations. Only 12.2% of all TV shows on streaming services are canceled each year, and only 10.8% are canceled on linear TV. And let’s be honest most shows with queer representation only have 1-3 queer characters. Now I cannot for the life of me find how many total shows with queer characters there were in any given year, so bear with me while I do some potentially bad math.
Let’s say that there are 3 queer characters per show, so from the total 596 characters we get 199 shows. We also know that 140 of those queer characters were lost due to cancellation, so if we divide them into their potential shows we get 47 which is 23.6% of 199. and even if it were 5 queer characters per TV show it’s still 23%. If this is correct (it could be completely wrong), queer shows are being canceled 11-13% more often than shows without significant queer representation. Which really sucks, to be honest with you.
And of course we see it predominantly in shows with queer women because there are more of them, there have been for a couple years. This year, queer women made up 52% of all queer characters.
But Why?
There isn’t an easy answer. Any form of representation is influenced by many societal and political factors. We can’t know for certain why so many queer shows are being canceled. Only time will tell whether this is a blip in queer representation of full-blown trend. But whether it’s because of an uptick in anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs or a response to binge-watching culture or both, the response we need to have is the same: We’re here, we’re queer, and we aren’t going away.