Prestige TV has too many half-baked gay characters thrown "into a pool of heterosexuality"

TIME

"In 2022, I’ve developed a weekly ritual of absolutely screaming into my group chat about whatever queer show is currently airing. I grew up in the aughts and watched LGBTQ narratives slowly leak into the mainstream," says Jill Gutowitz. "Today, between Euphoria, Special, The Sex Lives of College Girls, Yellowjackets, And Just Like That…, Generation, The Morning Show, The Other Two, Feel Good, The L Word: Generation Q, I can watch a new episode of television almost every week that has at least one queer character. But plentiful doesn’t always mean good. Lately, it feels like every TV show has thrown a half-baked queer character into a pool of heterosexuality and taken the ladder away like a cruel tween playing Sims. I can’t believe we’ve reached a point, as a culture, where I can even think something like this, but we don’t need a queer character in everything; I’d rather see a genuine queer story than a refracted queer character that feels cobbled together, or like a studio note gone wrong. Half of these shows are led by and created by queer people, who can bring their firsthand experience to the writers room, but for the most part, those led by straight creators are lacking in authenticity. It’s not that straight creators have never met a queer person before (hopefully), but it often feels like they’re writing their queer characters to check a box or signify an entire community. These characters are reduced to one-dimensional pastiches, and end up seeming hollow, fake, and not actually representative of how real people—queer or otherwise—live."