Here's an uncomfortably long list of a dozen current tv shows with lesbian or gay characters that got canceled: The New Normal, Happy Endings, Go On, Smash, The Office, 1600 Penn, Don’t Trust the B___ in Apartment 23, 90210, Emily Owens, M.D., The L.A. Complex, Partners, and Southland. Several of these shows deserve to vanish and in no case could you say it was the gay character that killed the show, maybe with the possible exception of The New Normal. IMHO, among other problems what doomed The New Normal wasn't an excess of gay as much as an absence of women that viewers could identify with. Successful gay shows have strong roles like Claire and Gloria, or Grace and Karen, and here weak Goldie didn't satisfy. (Nana and Rocky were inconsistent and often absent.)
Overall, commercial tv ratings continue to decline.
Next year you'll have a lot of bromance. And the return to sitcoms of Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar and Michael J Fox and new stints for Anna Faris and Rebel Wilson and Andy Samberg, and Jane Lynch's voice in the animated Murder Police, and the JLo-produced hourlong drama of a blended family raised by a lesbian couple called The Fosters, and Sean Hayes as a very, very familiar type in this. (Modern Family, New Normal, Fosters, Sean.., it will soon be illegal to show a gay tv character NOT raising kids.) I do love Thomas Lennon and Linda Lavin. Usually.
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