Violence and Visibility: Transgender Women on TV in 2015

Written by Mey Rude and Heather Hogan

2015 was the best of times and the worst of times for transgender women in the United States. While it was a revolutionary year for transgender visibility on television and in movies, it was a devastating year of record-high violence against trans women in real life. As we were tallying 18 fictional trans women on TV, two celebrated fictional trans women (played by trans women) in film, five reality shows featuring real life trans women, and the continued popularity rise of Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, we were also counting the murders of 23 trans women, most of them Black women.

While we cheered never-before-seen trans TV characters, we mourned the nearly biweekly loss of a transgender woman to murder. While Caitlyn Jenner was featured on the cover of Vanity Fair, untold numbers of trans women were raped in prison and immigration centers. While Tangerine made history with its four Independent Spirit Award nominations, Houston overwhelmingly voted to take away civil rights protections because they didn’t want trans women to have access to women’s bathrooms.

We wrote more obituaries for murdered trans women in 2015 than TV recaps for any single show we cover.

Diverse on-screen representation and real world social change have always been locked in a symbiotic relationship, forcing each other forward, hand-in-hand. The percentage of Americans who support marriage equality, for example, has grown in almost direct proportion to the number of lesbian and gay characters on television. When GLAAD began conducting research for its Where We Are On TV report in 2006, they discovered that knowing a gay character was as effective as knowing a gay person in real life when it came to supporting positive legislative and social change for gay people. Why, then, did the reported number of murdered trans women nearly double the same year trans representation in pop culture took a revolutionary step forward?

Not All Visibility Is Created Equal

In May 2014, Time magazine featured Laverne Cox on its cover and declared that we had reached the Transgender Tipping Point, but it wasn’t until this spring when Caitlyn Jenner came out that trans people became truly visible to the majority of Americans. Yet, even without Jenner, 2015 saw a surge of trans visibility. Transparent and Orange is the New Black were critical and ratings successes, pulling down dozens of awards show nominations between the two of them, and receiving renewals almost as soon as their seasons premiered. We saw guest appearances on Faking It, The Mindy Project, and How to Get Away With Murder from trans actresses Laverne Cox and Alexandra Billings. Trans reality shows like I Am Cait, I am Jazz, and Becoming Us were readily available on basic cable. Glee showcased a choir composed entirely of transgender members, led by black trans character Unique. And Janet Mock’s MSNBC show, So Popular!, was so successful she became a coveted guest on nearly every talk show in America.

We wrote more obituaries for murdered trans women in 2015 than TV recaps for any single show we cover.

But not all visibility is good visibility. The three main tropes used when writing about trans women are: 1) That trans women are deceivers, liars, and mentally unstable. 2) That trans women are acceptable targets of violence. And 3) That it’s tolerable to misname and misgender trans women (which, of course, dehumanizes them and provides justification for violence against them). Compounding the problem of those ubiquitous tropes is the fact that trans women are very often played by men, which only furthers the confusion about who trans women are and perpetuates the harmful idea that trans women are men who like to dress as women and trick other men. In fact, of the 11 regular (non-streaming) TV shows that featured trans women this year, only three hired actual trans women to play trans women.

One of the most frustrating things about our rankings of all the queer TV storylines in 2015 was the disparity between trans storylines. Nearly all of them fall on the Really Good or Really Bad end of the spectrum, and when we dug deeper, we found that the most positive portrayals of trans women on TV were viewed by the fewest people. Unsurprisingly, streaming platforms — which have proven themselves monumentally more progressive than their broadcast and cable TV counterparts — produced the best storylines for trans women. Netflix’s Orange is the New Black and Sense8 both featured main characters who were trans women (played by trans women); and Amazon, of course, produced the critically lauded Transparent, which was not without its issues (a cis man playing the main trans woman, for example), but which learned and grew from its first season mistakes.

Neither Amazon nor Netflix release information about viewership, so there’s no real way to know how many people watch OITNB and Sense8, but surveys indicate that it’s only about half of all Netflix subscribers for the former, and about 12 percent of all Netflix subscribers for the latter.

Of the 15 regular TV shows that told stories about trans women this year, only four managed to sidestep damaging tropes completely, and of those four, three of them (Blunt Talk, Penny Dreadful, and Faking It) were viewed by less than a million people. Conversely, the Law & Order: SVU episode “Transgender Bridge,” which actually allowed a respected character to argue that a man shouldn’t be charged with the murder of a trans woman because he was “confused by her,” was the second most viewed trans-themed episode of regular TV, raking in six million viewers. And the Pretty Little Liars summer finale, which revealed that the show’s shadowy villain is a trans woman, was viewed by three million people and was the most popular single episode of TV on social media in 2015. The Bold and the Beautiful became the only daytime TV show to feature a trans character this year, and it clawed its way through every horrible trope, painting its trans woman as a conniving impostor whose main goal was to dupe a rich man into marrying her, and allowing other characters to abuse her because of her duplicitousness.

In addition to the scripted TV shows that featured trans women this year, we also saw an influx of reality TV shows about trans women. The most popular, of course, was Caitlyn Jenner’s I Am Cait, which expanded the Kardashian reality TV model to include a group of trans women who folded Caitlyn into their world and exposed her to the harsh realities many trans women — particularly black and brown trans women — face when it comes to attaining healthcare, housing, and career opportunities. The show went a long way toward introducing the audience (through Caitlyn) to trans topics they would not normally be exposed to, but it was not without its problems. For one thing, some of the trans women who appeared on the show were really unhappy with the editing, which chopped up and spliced together different moments to create drama in a way that wasn’t authentic. And for another, plenty of Caitlyn’s friends and family were shown misnaming her or misgendering her, or making transphobic jokes at her expense. Also, Jenner seems to be trapped in a dance where she takes one progressive step forward when it comes to queer community, followed by an enormous leap backwards. She is certainly not qualified to be the spokeswoman for trans issues in America.

Jazz Jenngings’ show, I Am Jazz, actually pulled in ratings similar to I Am Cait, and handled her story with significantly more aplomb. ABC Family’s Becoming Us had its ups and downs, ultimately choosing to focus more on the trans woman’s son than on the journey of the trans woman herself. And New Girls on the Block also featured trans women in a mostly positive way, though ratings for it were sparse on Discovery Life.

The Danger of Hypervisibility

While pop culture visibility is certainly important in pushing any movement forward, one of the biggest dangers trans women face right now is hypervisibility. There’s a growing pop culture buzz surrounding trans women and trans rights — though, devastatingly, that mainstream new coverage does not often extend to the pandemic of violent crimes committed against trans women — and people are beginning to form opinions and take action against trans women, even though they’ve never engaged with a trans woman in their lives. Many people also believe this hypervisibilty is contributing to increased intimate partner violence against trans women, as the men who date trans women lash out to posture for their friends in a culture of toxic masculinity.

The New York Times recently reported on a similar trend in Nigeria, where the West’s push against anti-gay laws has actually contributed to a significant increase in violence against gay people.

America’s money and public diplomacy have opened conversations and opportunities in societies where the subject was taboo just a few years ago. But they have also made gay men and lesbians more visible — and more vulnerable to harassment and violence …  by groups of men, some of whom call themselves “cleansers.” … Before, a lot of people didn’t even have a clue there were something called gay people. But now they know and now they are outraged.

Conservative politicians and evangelical Christian groups have always scapegoated minorities to advance their agenda in the United States, and as it becomes less and less acceptable to target gay and lesbian men and women, you can count on those legislators and religious leaders to turn their attention toward trans people. See Houston’s Prop. 1, for example. It is remarkably easy to prey on the unfounded fears of majority voters who have no experience with the minorities they’re being taught to fear, and it makes matters infinitely worse when the majority’s fears are confirmed by the very few portrayals of that minority group they see on TV.

Visibility is terrifying when the people who see you want to do you harm.

The True Transgender Tipping Point

The fact that Time magazine declared the Transgender Tipping Point over a year ago actually shows how far we have left to go. That the success of a very small handful of trans women and trans TV shows feels like a landslide victory only highlights what a deserted wasteland pop culture is for trans women. It also drives home the point that every single second of transgender representation on television matters. The sample size is still way too small to absorb the impact of irresponsible stories. What happens in our story boxes informs what happens in our hearts and in our homes and in our culture at large.

That the success of a very small handful of trans women and trans TV shows feels like a landslide victory only highlights what a deserted wasteland pop culture is for trans women. It also drives home the point that every single second of transgender representation on television matters.

In 2015, folks who were searching for quality trans representation on TV had a few really remarkable hours to choose from; but folks who will only become acquainted with trans women if they stumble across them on television were mostly exposed to tired tropes, damaging cliches, and men portraying trans women.

Zella Ziona, Keisha Jenkins, Tamara Dominguez, Elisha Walker, Kandis Capri, Amber Monroe, Shade Schuler, K.C. Haggard, India Clarke, Ashton O’Hara, Jasmine Collins, Mercedes Williamson, London Chanel, Keyshia Blige, Kristina Gomez Reinwald, Penny Proud, Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, Yazmin Vash Payne, Ty Underwood, Lamia Beard, Papi Edwards, and the murdered trans women whose names we’ll never know deserved more. We must honor their memory by demanding more, and by refusing to accept stories that contribute to a world where their deaths are more common than the TV characters who represent them. Stories don’t exist in a vacuum; where they lead, our culture follows.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Dead Lesbians and Bisexual Psychos Dominate May Sweeps

Happy Tuesday, apple pies! I’m sorry this week’s Boob(s On Your) Tube is a day later than usual. It was quite a week in the world of queer TV. Before we get started, I ran down all the lesbian TV shows that were renewed and cancelled last week on Broadcast Network Bloodbath Day. And Riese wants you to know Orange Is the New Black has released another trailer and some new promo photos.

Now, onto the Boobs!

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Jane the Virgin

Mondays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Luisa is back for the penultimate episode of Jane the Virgin‘s first season for just a minute. The Michael-Jane-Rafael love triangle zigs back in Michael’s direction, and so Rafael is feeling pretty heartbroken about it. At the end of the day, he confides to Luisa (and Juicy Jordan!) that he’s still in love with Jane and only broke up with her because he was trying to be chivalrous. It’s actually a really funny sight gag, the way it happens. The scenes with Luisa are filmed like she and Rafael are having an intimate conversation, and then JJ wanders into the frame and throws down some truths because she’s been listening in the whole time. And then she makes out with his sister. JJ and Luisa tell Rafael to suck up his pride and tell Jane how he feels. He agrees that’s what he should do.

Last night was the season one finale and (SPOILER ALERT!) Sin Rostro went on a kidnapping spree!

Here’s What Happened Live in Slack:

Gabby: HEATHER THEY STOLE JANES BABY I AM SCREAMING
Heather: I KNOW IT WAS SO BEAUTIFUL AND THEN WHAT THE FFFFFFFFF
I actually really did shout.
Gabby: AY ME TOO + LAURA
but so so good like what a good telenovela twist
Heather: i know! i shouted and jumped up, and then i laughed and laughed. seals the deal on being tied with empire for my favorite new show of the season!
Gabby: yes totally like 100% ok i feel better now. you calmed my spirit.
Heather: i am so glad you had an all caps reaction! i felt unhinged for a minute!
Gabby: heather what the fuck!! (this is laura)
Heather: laura, hey!
Gabby: what if sin rostro is foxier than before?
Heather: how could that even be possible?!
Gabby: why does she want a baby?
Heather: ransom!

Look, if you didn’t watch this show in real-time, catch up over the summer, okay? Trust me and Gabby and Laura on this.

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Arrow

Wednesdays on The CW at 8:00 p.m.

Remember last week when I told you about how Ra’s al Ghul decided to marry off his lesbian daughter, Nyssa, to the show’s hero, Oliver? Well, that is exactly what happens.

Early in the episode, Oliver is forced to break character and start revealing to people that he’s not brainwashed because his entire team gets captured and shackled and stashed away in Nanda Parbat, so he needs to assure everyone that he’s going to take care of everything and free them. Luckily, his sidekicks are all really good at being heroes, so they’re able to scheme and plot and fight for themselves. All of them except Nyssa, whose agency is completely stripped from her by both the writers and her dad. Ra’s does insist on the marriage between Oliver and her, which: fine. Totally believable al Ghul bullshit. And it’s not like Nyssa is going to fall in love with him. (She better not f*cking fall in love with him.) But unlike the other characters in the episode, she is completely impotent in fighting back against the League of Assassins, even though she grew up in the building where they’re all being held and has known the weaknesses of these baddies her whole entire life.

I hope she kills the hell out of Ra’s in the finale.

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Younger

Tuesdays on TVLand at 10:00 p.m.

Younger is light on Maggie this week. She hangs out with Liza and Kelsey in a Brooklyn pub to watch Liza’s boyfriend play a washboard in his band. And then Maggie shows up later to give her blessing to Liza’s plan to raise $1,800 for her daughter’s tuition by selling her used panties on Craigslist. Maggie says she’s been around the block of the panty-trading world, and they don’t call the box seats at Lilith Fair “box seats” for nothin’. Mostly the episode focused on Liza’s relationship with Josh and how he’s getting suspicious that she keeps sneaking around and taking weird phone calls in the mornings and the middle of the night. She comes clean and says it’s because of her panty-selling business, and that’s true. But also: She has an ex-husband in New Jersey, and a daughter in college in India. She does’t reveal that, though, because it’s only season one.

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Newlyweds: The First Year

Tuesdays on Bravo at 10:00 p.m.

Sam and Laura went back to the baby doctor this week, I think because Bravo is absolutely obsessed with making sure there are some common themes between all these couples. But the main event was a reading Laura did where she talked about how she spent two years without an ear and how it affected her self-esteem and physical health. Here’s a clip from the episode.

And BuzzFeed published the whole piece. It’s really good. Sam and Laura’s mom were so sweet and supportive when she was reading it. It warmed my heart.

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Gotham

Monday on NBC at 9:00 p.m.

There is no love left in my heart for Gotham. None at all. After completely abandoning Renee Montoya in the middle of year, the show closes out its freshman season by turning Barbara Kean into a Bisexual Psychopath. On the outside, it appears that Barbara has unwittingly fallen into a relationship with The Ogre, who brainwashes her into requesting that he kill her parents — but in an eye-rolling twist of the cliched trope knife, it turns out Barbara is the one who killed her parents. She confesses this to Jim’s new girlfriend while pulling a cleaver on her and trying to stab her to death. The episode ends with Babs getting conked on the head and presumably checked into Arkham Asylum.

You will never convince me that the loss of Renee Montoya, the only queer character of color in Marvel or DC’s cinematic universes, and the sociopathic spiral of Barbara isn’t direct capitulation to straight white fanboy culture. The outcry when Barbara and Renee got together — when the bisexual woman chose a Latina lesbian over fanboy Mary Sue/future Commissioner Gordon — was swift and ferocious and supremely gross. Of all the things I’ve written about in my seven years of professional blogging, I have never experienced the kind of hate that was hurled my way for being vocally supportive of Renee.

So yeah, Gotham, I’m done with you unless you answer my anger with The Question. And in a major way.

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Bold and the Beautiful

Weekdays on CBS

Welp, I am absolutely done writing about Bold and the Beautiful‘s trans storyline. This is the last week I’m going to watch it or talk about it because CBS doesn’t deserve the ratings of even one person. These writers have had plenty of time to understand how harmful and hurtful their writing is to the trans community, but they haven’t changed their course or tone even a little bit. On Friday, the show opened with this scene.

Maya: I will tell Rick when I’m ready.
Brooke: You will tell him today.
Maya: Yes. If Rick proposes, I will tell him today.
Brooke: This has gone on long enough. Rick needs to know the truth. He deserves to know who he’s proposing to. That Maya used to be … Myron.

Later on, Maya’s sister outs Maya to one of her co-workers like this: “Her real name is Myron. She’s transgender. She’s my brother, not my sister.” And so that co-worker says it’s time to get the PR machine going because “A scandal like this, you can’t even imagine.”

These are the same problems I wrote about on week one of this storyline: Using Maya’s birth name is an act of violence. Repeatedly referring to her as Nicole’s brother is an act of violence. Perpetuating the very false stereotype that trans women are conniving and duplicitous with their romantic partners is an act of violence. Treating the fact of a trans person coming out as scandalous is an act of violence. Even the coverage of this storyline on the soap blogs is horrible. They’re referring to Maya in headlines as “Myron” now. Black trans women suffer more violence than anyone in the queer community, and this kind of storytelling is reckless and destructive. I feel like I’m contributing to the problem by watching it and writing about it, so I’m going to stop.

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Grey’s Anatomy

Thursdays on ABC at 8:00 p.m.

Due to a death in her family, Jenn was unable to recap last week’s Grey’s Anatomy. There is nothing gay to report about the episode. Callie and Arizona are in it for a couple of minutes each, mostly just doing the kind of doctor things you do when a tunnel collapses during a morning commute. However, Heather Matarazzo plays a pregnant patient whose soon-to-be husband is trapped under the rubble. It’s a rough hour for her. She arrives yelling about how someone needs to dig out her boyfriend so they can get married, nearly loses her baby, doesn’t lose her baby, overhears some stupid new asshole interns talking about her soon-to-be-husband being trapped under his car under the tunnel with no feasible extraction plan to keep him alive, has a panic attack, gets paralyzed when one of the stupid new asshole interns takes off her neck brace because she can’t breathe (because they caused her to have a panic attack!), gets un-paralyzed, and goes into labor. Also her boyfriend is maybe saved. That part isn’t clear.

I’m talking about this for three reasons: 1) Heather Matarazzo is a lesbian lady, who 2) also played Stacy Merkin on The L Word, which means 3) I have a reason to link to this clip.

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Law & Order: SVU

Wednesdays on NBC at 9:00 p.m.

Samira Wiley guest starred on last week’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as a woman named Michelle who came forward after 17 years to disavow the testimony she gave that sent her father to prison for rape and incest. The episode is based on the true story of Chaneya Kelly. It is heavy and moving and terrible and wonderful, and Samira just crushes it from every angle. You should watch. You’re going to cry.

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The Good Wife

Sundays on CBS at 9:00 p.m.

Just a couple of years ago Kalinda Sharma was one of the most exciting, nuanced queer women on broadcast television. This week, she left The Good Wife forever, after several seasons of poorly written, out-of-character storylines that frankly derailed the entire show. No one knows what went on behind the scenes, but the heart of The Good Wife‘s first two seasons was the relationship between Kalinda and Alicia. Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies didn’t share the screen together in the last 56 episodes of the show. It’s obviously something that bothered Panjabi a whole lot, if only because cutting off her character’s access to the main protagonist severely limited the scope and range of Kalinda’s storylines.

Entertainment Weekly flat out asked her why Kalinda and Alicia stopped interacting, and she said, “I think that’s a question you need to ask the producers.” And when they asked her if she was happy with the way Kalinda was written off the show, she said, “Honestly speaking, I would’ve liked something that would have featured Kalinda a little more, but they have restrictions and I respect that. They did do a degree of justice to her in the last episode.”

The producers promised one last scene between Alicia and Kalinda before it was all said and done, and they gave us one — kind of. I had joked that Panjabi and Margulies would film their interaction with CGI trickery, but after watching the finale, I think that’s exactly what happened. And I’m not the only one. As soon as I finished the episode, I went on a Twitter dig to see if anyone else thought Kalinda and Alicia’s final scene was a split screen. Vox did. And Indiewire too. Like what is Alicia even looking at the whole time?

Panjabi is right that Kalinda did have a small triumph in her final exit, in the sense that she rejected a powerful alliance and left on her own terms, all sunglasses and swagger. I wish I could say I’ll miss her, but the writers and producers have watered her down so much, she’s unrecognizable. She was never going to rebound from that. I’m just glad Panjabi has already signed on to headline a new show where she can showcase her considerable talents.

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Supernatural

Wednesdays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

So. Women in Refrigerators. You know it, right? That superhero trope where a woman gets beaten, raped, mutilated, murdered, whatever to advance the plot of a male hero through the power of manpain? That’s exactly what Supernatural did to Charlie last week.

Sam ropes Charlie into helping him crack a codex that will hopefully rid Dean of the Mark of Cain. She bounces from Dean and Sam’s high security HQ to work out the codex in a seedy motel, and at the end of the episode, Sam and Dean find her murdered in a bathtub. And that’s it. A beloved fan favorite. One of the only women on the entire show. Definitely the only queer woman in the show’s history. (Rachel just reminded me there was another queer woman in the early seasons of this show … who also died.) No build-up, no scuffle, not even a death scene. Just a lifeless body in a bloody bathtub like a comic book from 1964.

And here’s what’s nuts: At a panel last week, executive producer Robbie Thompson said he begged the CW not to make them kill of Charlie. He said he texted, emailed, called, tried to set up in-person meetings, but to no avail. And another executive producer, Jim Michaels, said the same thing at a con in London. The decision to fridge Charlie came from the top.

This on the same week as Nyssa marrying Oliver. Keepin’ it classy, CW!

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Weird Loners

Cancelled on Fox

Fox pulled the plug on Weird Loners last week, but at least they aired the final episode of the six-ep first season, because in it, the gang spent a whole lot of time at Truck Stop and Zara revealed that she’s bisexual. It’s a cute episode even though the premise is kind of Kissing Jessica Stein-y. Zara’s ex-girlfriend is also bisexual, and so both Stosh and Caryn (who has decided to be gay because she’s not having luck dating men) go after her. It doesn’t work out for either of them. Stosh because he’s a narcissistic asshole. And Caryn because she’s straight. But, in true Truck Stop fashion, it is Zara who ends up making out with her ex at the end of the episode. No one is heartbroken and ladies kiss and everyone wins.

In the B-story, Eric is mistaken for a gay woman, and accidentally joins the Truck Stop’s lesbian dart league. I thought about being offended by it, but it was pretty funny.

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Black-ish

Wednesdays on ABC at 9:30 p.m.

Raven-Symone guest starred as Dre’s lesbian sister on last week’s Black-ish, and Gabby has some thoughts on how the episode landed with her as a queer person of color.

I don’t make it a point to watch Black-ish; it’s funny as hell but I can’t get over Dre’s self-centeredness. It’s this ever-present thing that just makes me roll my eyes like is this what it’s really like to deal with men? Every sitcom dude suffers from the same myopia.

But, I’m really here to talk about Raven-Symone as his sister Rhonda and how this episode focused on her in the closet but still under the hood lesbianism. Dre explains how his family has a very polite don’t ask, don’t tell policy and the point is portrayed in a bunch of super funny running gags, like how his oldest son, Dre Jr., has absolutely no gaydar. Like had no idea Aunt Rhonda, Raven-Symone, is a lesbian even though she lives with her “mechanic roommate” in a one-bedroom and they have a cat name Kitty Lange. Drum roll snare.

I can’t speak about any family other than my own but let’s just say that these jokes really hit home. In my family, the abuelas and titis have refered to my girlfriends as mis amigas aka my friends. Always friends. Never novia which is girlfriend or esposa which is wife. It’s always la amiga de *insert your name here*. And it’s not like they don’t know what’s really good between me and whoever, it’s just easier to politely say friend so you don’t have to say dyke. So I really felt that joke on this show.

Also, twenty-three minutes isn’t enough time to tackle anything too in-depth but I appreciated how they covered Biblical condemnation and gay marriage in that amount of time. My family’s Christian too and my mom definitely had her struggles with scripture that considered my budding gayness an abomination. She didn’t flip the switch into loving and accepting me in twenty-three minutes but through communication and lots of tears/hugs, things definitely evolved. Despite Dre’s fixation on himself as the savior of all things, Rhonda and her Mom found their way to each other and made peace and wedding plans.

Maybe the portrayal of a Black mom coming to terms with their child’s sexuality on Black-ish wasn’t as nuanced as Kim Wayans excellent performance as the mother in Pariah but damn, Black-ish did its best. For what it is – a sitcom- and its time limitations, the episode and its stereotypes flowed with the vibe of the show and dealt with issues that have historically plagued many ethnic communities.

So I’m with it. This entire episode is worth a watch.

Black-ish has been renewed for a second season with a promise of more Raven!

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Whew! That’s a lot! Let’s talk about your thoughts/feelings on the week in queer TV.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: “One Big Happy” Ends with a Surprise Gay Wedding

It’s time to talk about teevee, and the queer things you might have missed on teevee, or the queer things you just want to rehash from teevee. It was a good/bittersweet week for lesbians on last week, so let’s hop on in.

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One Big Happy

Tuesdays on NBC at 9:30 p.m.

One Big Happy aired what was probably its final episode on Tuesday night, and it was really, truly wonderful.

After walking out on Prudence last week, Luke holes up at a friend’s house, leaving Lizzie and Pru to cuddle up in bed together. Or, well, no. To leave Pru to cuddle up in bed with Lizzie and cry about how much she misses Luke and how sorry she is she lied to him and also to read Lizzie some of the erotic poetry Luke writes on Post-It notes. It’s as romantic as it sounds. Lizzie agrees to help Prudence out, because she’s going to get deported if she and Luke don’t really get married. And because she relates to Prudence’s dilemma of hiding who she is from the people she loves because she’s afraid of what they’ll think.

Unfortunately, Luke borks it all up because he agrees to be a wingman for his best friend and finds himself on a double date with a stage five clinger who handcuffs herself to Luke, tosses the keys out the window, and promptly passes out from alcohol poisoning. By the time Luke shows up for his wedding redo, Prudence’s deportation date has already passed.

BUT WAIT. Lizzie plans the wedding, hires the officiant, decorates the backyard — and then she goes right ahead and marries Prudence herself, to keep her in the country, because Lizzie has developed a begrudging love for her best friend’s almost-wife. For all the nagging I did about this show falling into ’90s sitcom tropes, it really whacked me in the heart with a brand new thing in the finale. I honesty don’t think this has ever been done before, and how could it have been done? Legislation that makes this thing a reality is brand new!

The episode ends with Luke and Lizzie and Prudence hugging it out, and me crying like a dumb baby.

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Jane the Virgin

Mondays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Luisa finally arrived back in Miami last week, after taking a mental health vacation to recover from the fact that: She artificially inseminated a random woman with her brother’s last remaining sperm sample after finding out her wife was cheating on her, and sought sexual healing in the arms of her stepmother who turned out to be a notorious drug lord who also killed her father by burying him in a pool of cement. After her stepmother seduced her in an insane asylum.

Oh, but it gets better. Luisa returns with a new girlfriend, a professional wrestler named JUICY JORDAN(!). Luisa quickly reclaims the shares of the Marbella hotel that she was letting Petra control and starts making some amazing demands. First up, she makes Petra and Rafael agree to host a wrestling match at the Marbella between Juicy and her arch nemesis, Candy Crunch. It is such a huge success — both in the story and on the show, which trots out alter-ego wrestling match-up cards for all the characters over the course of the hour — that Luisa suggests to Rafael that they make the hotel a one-stop shop for pro wrestling.

Rafael shoots her down, but she’s just messing with him. She has an IQ of 152, basically made it through medical school drunk, and can figure out how to help him save their family’s real estate legacy if he’ll let her shoulder some of the burden. He agrees that he needs her help.

If you’re not watching this show, you really should give it a go. It’s fast and silly and features so many women of color having so many different kinds of relationships with each other. It always passes the Bechdel test. It’s always a ridiculous, feminist romp. And it looks like Luisa will be here until the finale!

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Arrow

Wednesdays on The CW at 8:00 p.m.

Nyssa al Ghul was back on Arrow this week in an episode that made me lock and load the fire breath in my chest in case I need to Be The Dragon and burn something down to the ground.

Nyssa, as you know, has bolted from the League of Assassins because her father chose Oliver to take over her birthright, and had now brainwashed him into doing so. Nyssa is spending most of her time these days training Laurel and having confusingly delicious chemistry with her, even though both of those things are because they both miss Sara so much. After some general combat lessons, the two of them decide to go out to dinner at this place that serves french fries and milkshakes by candlelight. So, honestly, the perfect date scenario. Laurel teases Nyssa about how gorgeous she is in street clothes and they dip their fries into their milkshakes and eat them, because I guess fighting crime burns six thousand calories an hour.

Sadly, it is not all faux dates and leather jackets and women kicking asses. Oliver shows up to kidnap Nyssa and take her back to her father. One they arrive, Ra’s decides he doesn’t really want to kill his daughter after all. Instead, he’s going to marry her off to Oliver so they can have babies and the future leader of the League of Assassins will be his direct descendent. The lesbian married off to the male hero of the show after her bisexual girlfriend was murdered and stuffed in a refrigerator.

And yeah, that’s a potential real problem. Nyssa is a lesbian, has identified as one from the beginning, as spoken about and written by the show’s creative team and Katrina Law herself. KLaw gave an interview to MTV in which she indicated multiple times that Nyssa is not going to hook up with a man. So. Like I said, I’m ready to light it on fire if I need to, but I’m withholding judgment for the moment. This show already has some hard strikes against it.

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Younger

Tuesdays on TVLand at 10:00 p.m.

I wouldn’t have started watching this little sitcom if it didn’t feature lesbian artist Maggie as a main character, but I sure am glad I did. It’s not heavy. It’s not dense. It’s not going to win any writing or acting awards or anything. But it’s sweet and fun and explores relationships between women in ways we rarely get to see on TV, especially women over the age of 30.

During the last episode, Jane Krakowski came to town playing a best-selling author who has written a book called She-donism. Liza is tasked with throwing a young, hip book launch party in Brooklyn, and of course she invites all her friends, including Maggie. It only takes Maggie a second to spot a woman she’s been crushing on for years, and she decides to go for it, even though/because the woman just got out of a five year relationship. They chat, they flirt, Maggie asks her out — and then the woman stands up to reveal that she’s like eight months pregnant.

It’s all good for Maggie. She takes her home anyway, for a wild night of scissoring.

(Meanwhile, Liza learns that it’s not her responsibility to mother anyone except her daughter. Not her ex-husband. Not Kelsey. And not alcoholic authors.)

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Newlyweds: The First Year

Tuesdays on Bravo at 10:00 p.m.

Laura and Sam have not been reading our Makin’ Babies column, I don’t think. They should be, though. It would help them process a lot of the feelings they’re having these last few weeks about how Laura does not want to make babies yet and Sam wants to make babies, like right this dang second. Which, it turns out, is something they actually need to get serious about because Laura’s got some fibroids that are going to prevent her from getting pregnant if she doesn’t get them removed, and Sam’s eggs are almost all gone. It’s tough. It’s a lot of tough conversations that they don’t reach a resolution on. But Bravo did dedicate two glorious minutes to their puppies, Luda and Winston, which was my favorite part of last week’s episode. I love these dogs.

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Bold and the Beautiful

Weekdays on CBS

All right, y’all. This is well and truly my last week covering this show if it doesn’t get significantly better. And maybe they will. According to TV Line, B&B bringing on trans actor/speaker Scott Turner Schofield on May 8.

Schofield, who speaks and writes about diversity, became acquainted with the show when it asked for his recommendations of transgender actors to flesh out its headline-making storyline starring Karla Mosley. Though he was surprised when he received an invitation to audition, the New York Daily News reports, he nabbed the part.

Nick and Maya know each other from “when she first landed in Los Angeles before she became the huge success that she is,” Schofield tells the Daily News, adding that Nick will “remind her that she is beautiful and whole and authentic exactly as she is.”
The actor, who has taped six episodes so far, explains that he’ll be around when “things start to happen and discrimination mounts, so [Maya] can stand strong in who she is and how she made the right choices for herself.”

Right, so: This jerk lady named Pam rifles through Maya’s purse, finds some estrogen pills, and straight up is like, “There’s only one reason Maya would be taking estrogen; she’s transgender!” Which: No. Then, later, Pam gabs about it to all her friends, talking about, “Maya is not the woman Rick thinks she is!” Right, and then all the characters who know Maya is trans continue to blurt out Maya’s birth name behind her back with reckless abandon, like it’s not a complete act of violence. And so now pretty much everyone besides Rick knows that Maya is transgender.

Rick, meanwhile, tells Maya about a hundred times that she’ll never let him down, that she’s perfect, that she’s never lied to him and will never lie to him, and that he wants a dozen kids. After which he goes out and buys an engagement ring that is, and I quote, flawless and pure, just like Maya.

This guy is a crazy person! No one on earth could live up to these kind of expectations of flawlessness, except maybe Samira Wiley. Maya, you need to get away from him!

Anyway, Rick invites Maya for a weekend away in Big Bear for a surprise. (Spoiler alert, it is a proposal of marriage.)

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Person of Interest

Tuesdays on CBS at 10:00 p.m.

As I mentioned previously, Person of Interest took a turn for amazing this season when it made Root and Shaw more than just a pair of women with antagonistically sizzling chemistry who make sexy, sexy gif sets on Tumblr. Right before Sarah Shahi took a breather to go have a baby, Shaw kissed Root full on the mouth, shut her behind a gate, and went running full-tilt toward death to keep Root safe. I don’t think anyone really expected the storyline to resurface this season, but it sure did!

It all happens when Root finds herself in shock after receiving a call from Shaw, begging for help. She’s been trying to track down her probably-almost-girlfriend, but this is the first time she’s heard from her. So, of course Root goes all the way motherfucking in and plays a game with The Machine ON TOP OF A ROOF so The Machine will tell her where to find Shaw. The game is: Tell me where to find Shaw or I am going to walk across this ledge until I plummet to my literal death.

Despite everyone’s logical protests that this is all a giant trap, Root plows ahead, infiltrating a hospital, and ultimately getting her beautiful, perfect self kidnapped. It’s Martine and Greer. They used Shaw as bait to snag Root so they can cut her open and try to gain access to The Machine. She ends up killing Martine, who wastes way too much time monologuing because she’s never seen a superhero movie before, and The Machine ends up handing out its location to save Root and Finch’s life.

The season finale is tomorrow night. I don’t think Shaw will be back for real, but the show is 50/50 on getting renewed, so fingers crossed for season five!

(Also, please look at this glory.)

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Lost Girl

Fridays on Syfy at 10:00 p.m.

Lost Girl 503: It’s a whole death situation. Lauren is getting death threats for turning the Morrigan human. Three whole dead bodies show up on her clinic doorstep, and while Dyson can tell they’ve been killed by fae, that’s all they know. And also, Bo doesn’t really care if she dies.

Let’s do Lauren first: After the death threats and the bodies, she asks Dyson to hook her up with some self-defense lessons, and he does. So when a fae pretending to be a patient shows up and tries to coerce her into giving up the serum, she gives him a Ketamine dart right in his neck. And now she’s ready to become Bo’s partner in crime. You know, or not. At the end of the episode, one of her dead patients comes back to life, slays her assistant, and takes some time to get dolled up.

And Bo: She can’t have sex with Dyson. Or Lauren. Or Tamsin. And no sex means she can’t heal. Which is kind of a problem when Musashi shows up and stabs her right in the gut. It is Tamsin who calls her out, and finally Bo admits that she’s seen so much loss and death that she’s having trouble summoning the will to keep living, and that’s why she’s having a hard time with sex stuff. Once she admits that she hates herself for not being able to always save the people she loves, she finds her courage to keep trying. She snags Dyson for some sexual healing while Tamsin and Lauren sit on the counter and awkwardly hear them.

Afterwards, the four of them canoodle on the couch and watch TV and are the family we know and love.

---

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Boob(s On Your) Tube: Lost Girl Crosses the Border For Its Final Season

Hello, waterlilies. I’m sorry I’m a day late with this column this week. Orphan Black‘s return complicated my Monday schedule. I’d never recapped it before. It takes a lot of time! I’m restructuring some things so I’ll be back on scheduled with Boob(s On Your) Tube next week. There actually wasn’t too much going on, queer TV-wise, last week. The Good Wife is on hiatus. Nyssa didn’t appear on Arrow. There’s no bisexual stuff on Weird Loners yet. There were a few conversation starters, though, so let’s shake ’em down.

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One Big Happy

Tuesdays on NBC at 9:30 p.m.

Last week’s One Big Happy fell back into that pilot pattern that kind of drove me bonkers, with Lizzie and Prudence spending the whole episode fighting over Luke. Who knows Luke better? Who loves Luke the most? What should Luke spend the weekend doing: Hanging out with Lizzie at the farmers market, like always? Or skydiving with Prudence because she’s his thrillseeking wife? The three of them work it out in the end, with Pru and Lizzie agreeing that they each love Luke and can share him, before embarking on a family journey up to the Hollywood sign to (illegally) watch the city at night. (Obviously Lizzie did not know it was illegal.)

After pulling in 5.4 million viewers with the pilot, One Big Happy‘s ratings have leveled out around 3.5 million viewers per week. NBC only ordered six episodes of the show, and while the ratings have been just okay, that may be enough for a second season. NBC’s comedy slate has been in trouble for a while now, and it’s not like they have another 30 Rock or Parks and Recreation in the queue. The places that track these things seem to be giving One Big Happy about a 35 percent chance of renewal. Fingers crossed. The first season of all sitcoms is almost always rough.

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Younger

Tuesdays on TVLand at 10:00 p.m.

Maggie only made two quick appearances on Younger last week, both times as a sounding board as Liza worked through her early days relationship jitters with her new boyfriend. But this show is always passing the Bechdel Test because it features three super career-focused main characters who are women, so I’ve always got office hijinks to report. Last week, Kelsey’s awful shitbird boyfriend peer pressured her into getting drunk the night before a big meeting, so Liza had to give her new workplace gal pal a stern talking to about owning up to her problems and fixing them. Kelsey fixed the work thing, but she’s still dating the awful boyfriend. (He doesn’t “do Brooklyn,” whatever that even means.)

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Newlyweds: The First Year

Tuesdays on Bravo at 10:00 p.m.

On this week’s Newlyweds, Laura and Sam celebrate Laura’s birthday at Fantasy Castle Strip Club. You’d rather watch that than see me type about it, so here you go:

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Bold and the Beautiful

Weekdays on CBS

I have reached the point where I feel gross about giving CBS my one-person ratings to stay caught up on Bold and the Beautiful. They are absolutely mangling this trans storyline. It’s terrible. Everyone in the world is finding out Maya is trans because all of her friends and enemies are running around whispering it to each other like it’s the most titillating piece of information in the world, but Maya hasn’t told her boyfriend yet because she wants to wait until they’re engaged. The language is inciting. They keep calling it “Maya’s shocking secret” and whatever. And her sister is still blackmailing her by threatening to out her. According to the spoilers I read, Maya is going to get engaged next week and make plans to come out to her fiance. Black trans women are the most persecuted queer people in this country, and this storyline is just reinforcing dozens of completely untrue and damaging stereotypes. I want it to be over.

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Lost Girl

Fridays on Syfy at 10:00 p.m.

Lost Girl finally landed in America for its final season on Friday night. I have been trying to figure out a way to fully recap this show for y’all because I know you love it so much, and it really is one of the best shows w/r/t bisexual representation in the whole history of TV — but there’s so much to cover right now! Pretty Little Liars and The Fosters are both back in a little over a month, which means they’ll be overlapping with Orphan Black, and you know Orange Is the New Black‘s third season is landing soon too, and Riese and I will be co-recapping that for you. If only I had a Time-Turner! So, I think what I am going to do is keep you updated here, and write a couple of longer, more comprehensive articles about Lost Girl as the season progresses.

In episode 501, Bo climbs up a giant rock formation, singing “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” to retrieve the mythical hellshoe she needs to teleport to Valhalla to rescue Kenzi. Bo pops by Lauren’s new hospital to have sizzling chemistry and exchange longing looks, and while her One True Love is prepping the medical equipment to monitor Bo’s body while her spirit romps around Valhalla, Bo goes ahead and slips her foot right into the hellshoe.

Valhalla is very Kurbickian. It’s a literal hotel. Bo seduces a maid, steals her uniform, and wanders willy-nilly around the hotel, skirting the Valkyrie. She finally does track down Kenzi, who keeps receiving these weird, breathy, threatening phone calls in her hotel room, and their reunion is the sweetest thing. Hey, and guess who else is in Valhalla? Hale! So Kenzi arranges to marry him and stay here forever, but at the last second, she decides she’d rather go on home with Bo. But the Valkyrie aren’t just going to let Kenzi leave! So, Tamsin shows up with a soul to trade (after literally telling Lauren to “eat a sack of tits” when she presented her with the soul-trading idea), and Kenzi is freed.

Unfortunately, Bo is not. She gets sucked into a portal that is maybe taking her to the depths of hell to finally meet her Big Bad dad.

While all of that is happening in the otherworld, Lauren and Dyson are teaming up(!) to crack the Valhalla code and bring Bo back home.

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The Lizzie Borden Chronicles

Sundays on Lifetime at 10 p.m.

Riese tells me there was no new queer stuff on Salem this week, but that there is lesbian stuff on Lizzie Borden. I am juxtaposing those two things because of all the blood and how I can’t watch them. A quick Tumblr search confirms that: Yes! Women were smooching on the mouth on Lizzie Borden! The woman Lizzie kisses is named Adele; she’s a sex worker Lizzie rescued when Lizzie found out she was being abused by a client. But then, apparently, this other guy tried to rape Adele in Lizzie’s house, so Adele stabbed him in the gizzard with a pitchfork, and when that didn’t kill him, Lizzie went ahead and chopped him into about a hundred pieces. But then Adele got buried alive in a box. You can watch the kiss here. It’s terrifying and also really hot? And Adele is maybe dead but maybe alive? We’ll see how it goes. (And by “we,” I mean Riese.)

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Supernatural

Wednesdays on the CW at 9:00 p.m.

Felicia Day’s lesbi-nerd returned to Supernatural last week, after acquiring The Book of the Damned. Some henchmen tracked her down once she landed in Des Moines, and she escaped with the book, but got shot in the process. She phoned up her old buddies Dean and Sam to tell them about the book, and about how it might hold the key to removing the Mark of Cain from Dean. She met up with the brothers and they worked together to crack the book’s code (it was written in cipher in Sumerian, obviously). They didn’t have time to translate it before some bad guys showed up, guns blazing. Charlie killed one and Dean and Sam killed some other ones, and Dean was forced to burn the book in holy oil to keep the bad guys from getting their hands on it to use for their own nefarious purposes.

After a hard day of battling demons, they all retired to the bunker to drink beer and eat pizza with Castiel, who healed Charlie’s gun shot wound and her carpal tunnel. It’s nice to have an angel around sometimes!

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I’m still catching up on The Returned, but I’m happy to report I’m only two episodes away from being completely in the know about Person of Interest! So we’ll be talking about both of those things soon.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: “Mad Men” Almost Goes There With Peggy Olson

Hello, dragon fruits. Welcome to your weekly round-up of all the queer shenanigans happening on your teevee. There were no new episodes of One Big Happy or Arrow last week, and none of the promised bisexual happenings on Weird Loners, but some shows that don’t usually have gay things on them had gay things on them, and so here we are! One Big Happy and Arrow are both back with new episodes tomorrow night. Also, and most importantly, Orphan Black returns for its third season THIS SATURDAY NIGHT. I will obviously be recapping that one fully. Also, I have finally started The Returned, so I’ll be able to speak about that like an intelligent human person in the next week or two.

Until then:

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Mad Men

Sundays on AMC at 10:00 p.m.

Mad Men has gifted us with two lesbian characters over the last seven season: Joan’s roommate, Carol, who confessed her love for Joan and was last seen crying alone in the bathroom in season one; and Joyce Ramsay, the Life magazine photographer who one time licked Peggy’s face and also said, “He doesn’t own your vagina” when Peggy rebuffed her advances because she had a boyfriend. (Peggy ended up stabbing her boyfriend in the gut on accident. She should have just made out with Joyce.)

Last night, a new queer character whisked onto the scene, wearing pantsuits like you would not believe and making moves on both Peggy and Stan. Her name is Pima Ryan and she is a famous photographer that Peggy is accused of “digging deep” for because she wants a woman on the vermouth campaign. Pima is into Peggy’s whole deal right away, flattering her for being in charge of the photo shoot (and, by extension, all the men working at the photo shoot).

Later, in Peggy’s office (after having sex with Stan in the darkroom), looking over the proofs of her photos, Pima goes:

Pima: You’ve never been married?
Peggy: Nope.
Pima: Me either. The adventures I would have missed. I’d love to take your picture.
Peggy: I don’t know about that.
Pima: The way you’re looking at me, right now. I would capture that.

Their exchange is tense and also a silent power struggle and also a dance of respect, and for one hot second, you think Peggy is actually going to get in there. She doesn’t, but she gets so flummoxed! She comes so close! After she finds out Pima went for Stan too, she’s pissed. I could write a novel on this dynamic, but I’d rather you watch it and tell me what you think! Also, here’s the other pantsuit:

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Younger

Tuesdays on TVLand at 10:00 p.m.

TV Land’s new comedy is a good ol’ time and I’m not just saying that because I’m super into Sutton Foster’s whole deal, as I made clear last week when I was whining about Bunheads. Two episodes appeared this week, and they were both very cute and very lady-led and very Maggie-inclusive. (Maggie is Liza’s lesbian best friend, in case you’ve forgotten.)

In the first episode, “Liza Sows Her Oates,” Liza is tasked with making Joyce Carol Oates relevant to the Twitter generation, and somehow her head doesn’t explode when someone says that to her. Instead, she cooks up a social media campaign where young feminists tweet photos of their boobs covered with signs that say #ShowUsYourOates. She’s also still dating the 26-year-old tattoo artist and getting cold feet about it, until Maggie swoops in and tells her she looks younger and better and happier than ever because she’s being herself. Also, Liza is living with Maggie now, so that’s good news.

In the second episode, “IRL,” Maggie ups her Cupid game, texting the tattoo artist on Liza’s behalf, while they’re driving to Liza’s old house in Jersey to pack up her furniture. She saves the day in every way, finally convincing Maggie to just get in there and go for it with her boyfriend — by pep-talking her vagina, who she names “Frida,” obviously — and by loading up Liza’s moving van and driving her stuff to Brooklyn, where she can sell it to overzealous hipsters for ten times the amount she would have gotten from the consignment furniture guy.

Also, Lizzie Mcguire is on this show as a grown-up. She’s great. I know I mentioned it last week, but it’s worth repeating.

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The Good Wife

Sundays on CBS at 9:00 p.m.

Kalinda’s finally back in the thick of things on this week’s The Good Wife, as the show is setting up her departure arc. The truth about the metadata is out, so everyone has to scramble to keep Diane from getting disbarred. They work out a deal with the police where someone has to testify against Lemond Bishop and they’ll forget Diane presented false evidence to a jury (even though she did it on accident!), so she doesn’t have to go to jail. Kalinda is very seriously thinking about doing it, but Cary warns her that Bishop will kill her, and so he bites the bullet and says he’ll testify.

TGW‘s bosses have said they won’t kill Kalinda, so my best guess is she goes on the run (or in witness protection) after selling out Bishop in a major way in the end. Oh, how I wanted her to ride off into the sunset with Lana!

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Newlyweds: The First Year

Tuesdays on Bravo at 10:00 p.m.

This week, Laura’s family starts pressuring her and Sam to start popping out babies now that they’re married. Laura’s brother takes the reins at the family dinner and demands when and where and most especially how. He’s obsessed with who’s “going first.” They tell him they’re going to hit up a fertility doctor and whoever has the least number of eggs is who will carry their first child. “So it’s just based on engineering and not emotions?” is an actual thing he says.

Laura and Sam do go to a fertility doctor. They’re gobsmacked when he shows them the price tag on insemination, and they’re even more weirded out when they go home to search “donor Facebook,” which is this website where you can learn all about the donors and also hear audio clips of their voices.

Sam wants a baby n-o-w. Laura, not so much.

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Bold and the Beautiful

Weekdays on CBS

Well, B&B finally stopped having their characters say Maya was “born a man” this week, and finally started having them say things like, “And that’s why she didn’t tell anyone she was born — I mean, tell anyone her secret.” Maya’s sister, Nicole, is still running around stirring up drama behind her back. First, she interrogates Maya’s former fiance, Carter, who comes to the conclusion that Maya never told him “her secret” because she never really planned to marry him. But he believes that Maya will tell Nick “her secret” after her proposes.

Later, Maya pops some estrogen pills in Nick’s office, in the most conspicuous way ever, and Nick finds the prescription and feels confused.

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Salem

Sundays on WGN at 10:00 p.m.

Big thanks to Rachel Watkins, who tipped me off to some actual queer action on Salem last night. I don’t watch Salem due to the blood blood blood, but Riese does, and she says: “Lips touched lips. Specifically, Xena’s lips touched the lips of the witch Abby and I refer to as Salem’s Talyor Swift. I think it was part of some dark witch magic, though.”

Hurray?

---

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Boob(s On Your) Tube: TV Land Unveils Its First Leading Lesbian Character

It’s time for your weekly run-down of all the queer lady stuff you (maybe) missed on TV this week! A lot of shows are on hiatus for the summer, but there are a few new things to sing about!

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One Big Happy

Tuesdays on NBC at 9:30 p.m.

Good news, everyone: One Big Happy just keeps getting better! I’m still (still!) getting used to the laugh track and multi-camera thing; actors making Reaction Faces while the “audience” guffaws makes me feel weird inside. But my fears that the show was going to spend all its time setting up and focusing on a rivalry between Lizzie and Prudence over Luke were completely unfounded. The jokes keep getting funnier. I seriously cackle-laughed at least three times this week. And the main thing about the show is Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie. Lizzie is the main character, after all. (Thanks for psyching me out, NBC promo department.)

This week, Lizzie has a meet-cute at a woman at her gym, and it is for real super cute. Lizzie sets up a fake bowling league at the Bowl Hole so her friends can help her figure out if Kate from the gym is a lesbian. It hits all the notes of The Mission to Ascertain the Disposition and Intent of One Ms. Lara Perkins, and even name-checks The L Word in a sweet, nostalgic way. Kate is definitely gay. Kate is also definitely a nurse for Lizzie’s new gynecologist, The Baby Whisperer. They dance around each other hilariously as Lizzie tries to keep her open-backed paper gown closed, answer all the awkward questions about her bowel movements, and ultimately spills her urine sample all over Kate’s shoes.

It’s not that Kate doesn’t want to get involved with Lizzie; it’s that her boss has really strict rules about dating patients. It’s a no-go. But, instead of announcing her due date at the next appointment, Kate says, “Only 238 days until you’re not pregnant or a patient here!”

Lizzie has kissed two women on the show, has had two relationship episodes (last week’s with her ex, and this week’s with Kate), and Liz Feldman was right when she said One Big Happy finds a good balance between poking fun at lesbian stereotypes and also embracing them. It’s like being in on all the jokes, and that’s such a rare and wonderful feeling when you’re watching broadcast TV as a gay lady.

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Younger

Tuesdays on TVLand at 10:00 p.m.

It was a sad day when ABC Family pulled the plug on Bunheads. (I still firmly believe the show didn’t have traction because there wasn’t a queer woman on it; that’s where ABC Family’s bread is buttered, man.) But Sutton Foster is back on TV Land’s brand new comedy by Sex and the City‘s Darren Star, and this time her character has a lesbian best friend! Oh, and also Hilary Duff makes a triumphant return to TV here. So, there’s truly no reason you shouldn’t be watching.

The premise seems trite, but the writing is very good and Sutton Foster is the gosh dang best, so don’t judge it too harshly by what I am about to say. Younger is the story of Liza, a middle-aged woman whose teenage daughter is overseas doing a foreign exchange program, whose ex-husband left her for a younger woman (after refinancing their house four times to pay off his gambling debts), and who has been out of the workforce for almost 15 years because she was raising her daughter. She gets sidelined on every interview she goes on because she’s too old for the publishing industry, so her lesbian BFF, Maggie, decides she’s going to give her a makeover and help her pass for 26.

Liza lands a job as an assistant for a Diana Trout, a woman who is basically her age at a publishing company; befriends Kelsey Peters (Hilary Duff!), who is definitely 20 years younger than her; and starts accidentally dating a dude from Brooklyn who is in his early 20s. The show is smart and funny — the best joke is a book cover for a Pride and Prejudice relaunch that is Elizabeth Bennet all tied up in red silk like 50 Shades of Grey. The pilot was great.

There are so few TV shows aimed at women over the age of 35, and finding one that’s laugh-out-loudable, that features a leading lesbian character, and that promises four (of five) main cast members are women? Yes, please. Yes, forever.

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The Good Wife

Sundays on CBS at 9:00 p.m.

This weeks The Good Wife pays lip service to marriage equality and offers up some pro-gay commentary on bills like Indiana and Arkansas’ new RFRAs, but only in one of Diane’s mock trials, as a bunch of rich white people sit around pretending to pretend to debate conservative and liberal ideology about the Gay Agenda. I would have much rather seen Kalindaa being integrated back into the show for Archie Panjabi‘s final episodes, because story is so much more powerful than talking points. Alas.

The once greatest bisexual character on TV spends the whole episode completely detached from the other characters. She has finally been fingered (sadly, no, not like that) for “falsifying email metadata” to keep Cary from going to jail. She runs to and fro, trying to plan and plot, and thinking hard about a way to silence the hacker who helped her — to keep herself out of trouble, and to keep Diane out of jail — but Finn finally takes a dollar from her, declares himself her council, and says, “Kalinda. You’re caught … I hate to say this because I like you, but if I were you, I’d come clean.”

Maybe she’s leaving the show by going on the lam. Maybe she’ll find out who killed Jenny Schecter.

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Arrow

Wednesdays on the CW at 8:00 p.m.

What if Nyssa al Ghul is destined to be with Black Canary, no matter which sister is wearing the costume? Huh? WHAT THEN? Because that’s exactly the vibe Arrow is giving me right now as Nyssa continues to train Laurel, and keeps intervening to save her life.

This week, Nyssa dimes out Masao after some emotional manipulation from Oliver, whose go-to these days is, “This is what Sara would have wanted!” every time he needs Nyssa to do something for him. She gives Oliver & Co. Maseo’s location, but she refuses to go fight the League of Assassins with them because she loves Sara but isn’t ready to go to heaven yet. She says eleven different ways that she’s not going to be a part of their ambush — but when Laurel’s life/freedom is on the line, she does show up and she rescues her (which actually is what Sara would have wanted, Oliver.)

Oliver ultimately gets arrested by Sara and Laurel’s dad, but then Roy arrives on the scene claiming to be the real Arrow, and my straight white man face blindness strikes again. I honestly don’t care which one goes to jail.

Now how about some actual training scenes with Lauren and Nyssa, hmm?

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Newlyweds: The First Year

Tuesdays on Bravo at 10:00 p.m.

Sam and Laura finally go on their honeymoon to Thailand and Cambodia on this week’s Newlyweds, even though Sam gets super panicked about mosquitos at the last minute and they spend a good chunk of time seeing doctors and modeling their mosquito jackets. But Laura buys lingerie too! Their honeymoon is like The Amazing Race, except with more canoodling and less running around like some headless basnhees hollering at each other. (Remember that horrible lesbian couple from TAR four seasons ago? Carol and Brandy? They were so mean.)

Anyway, here are some of Sam and Laura’s honeymoon photos. Next week, I think they’re having a baby.

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Person of Interest

Tuesdays on CBS at 10:00 p.m.

Shaw’s not back on Person of Interest yet, and I’m still getting caught up, but she’s coming back and I’m close to finished with season three! We’re both so close!

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Bold and the Beautiful

Weekdays on CBS

Well, B&B continues to fumble its new trans storyline. The show is still playing the fact that Maya is trans as some dirty little titillating secret, with Maya’s sister, Nicole, using the information to blackmail Maya while continuing to use Maya’s dead name and say things about how she was “born male.” According the spoilers I read this morning, the men in Maya’s life are going to “uncover her secret” this week, so it should be really fun to see how that shakes down in a culture where black trans women are victims of brutal violence more often than any other members of the queer community. “We’ve been involved, right? I would have known,” is what her boyfriend yells when his arch nemesis finds out Maya is trans and tells him. At this point, I wish they’d never even started this storyline. It’s doing more harm than good, in my estimation. Like even just a bare minimum of Googling would have opened the writers’ eyes to how awful they’re being.

Our trans editor, the marvelous Mey, is working on a list of shows about trans people that are coming soon, so get excited for that, instead of this!

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Weird Loners

Tuesdays on Fox at 9:30 p.m.

Weird Loners premiered last week, and it was pretty good! It has a very Happy Endings feel to it, and it is filmed in real live New York City, so you can see what Friends tried to convince you that you were seeing a million years ago! Apparently, Zara will be bisexual on the show. No hints of that in the pilot, but I’ll keep my eyes open for you.

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Team TV coverage you may have missed

+ “Fresh Off the Boat” Balances Stereotype and Authenticity in a Very Gay Episode

+ “The 100” Gives Canon Bisexual Representation and A Queer Girl Ship, and It Taketh Away

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Two more weeks until Orphan Black is back! What are you watching on the Boob Tube this week?

Boob(s On Your) Tube: One Big Happy’s Second Episode is Better, Bold and the Beautiful’s Trans Storyline Is Not

Hey there, kittens with mittens! Welcome back to Boob(s On Your) Tube, your one-stop shop for all the queer lady happenings on TV. I’ve got lots of goodies for you this week, so let’s get to it.

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One Big Happy

Tuesdays on NBC at 9:30 p.m.

One Big Happy made me laugh so much this week! Maybe I was more used to the aesthetic and the laugh track? That’s probably a big part of it. But also, there were some jokes that made me laugh out loud because they resonated with me as a lesbian person, and some jokes that made me laugh out loud because they were just really funny. And, best of all, the story took the focus off of Prudence and Lizzy fighting about Nick and gave them each other own stories.

Prudence encourages Lizzy to meet-up with her ex-girlfriend to give her back her stuff, but Nick thinks that is a terrible idea because Lizzy’s ex was toxic and Lizzy could never say no to her and she spent three years trying to get over her. (“Lesbians move in fast, but they break up reaaallly slow,” he explains to Pru.) Lizzy takes Pru’s advice but ends up sleeping with/falling for her awful ex all over again. But after being stood up, Lizzy’s friends and family stage an intervention. Lizzy kisses her ex on screen and Pru on screen, so that takes care of my worry that NBC was only okay with opposite sex affection on the show.

And the relationship between Nick and Lizzy was very sweet this week. I understood why they love each other so much and what they mean to each other.

I’m all in for all six ordered episodes now. (The ratings were down four-tenths of a point over the pilot, which probably has more to do with The Voice‘s ratings dropping slightly than anything else.)

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The Good Wife

Sundays on CBS at 9:00 p.m.

Poor old Kalinda continues to be underused/misused in her last few episodes of The Good Wife. Her storyline doesn’t tie into anything happening in the show’s larger narrative, Lana is nowhere to be seen, and honestly, Archie Panjabi seems bored out of her mind. Remember when a woman of color became the best bisexual character on television? Sigh times infinity.

This week, Kalinda spends half her time denying that she had sex with Howard Lyman, and half her time being the deus ex machina in the Wharfmaster case. And she isn’t even really in character the whole episode. She’s flipping furious and indignant about the Howard Lyman accusations. She would have been so calculating and unshaken by that same thing even just a year ago. The real Kalinda Sharma doesn’t care what people think!

Ah, well, at least she got to kiss Gillian Anderson on The Fall.

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The Walking Dead

Sundays on AMC at 9:00 p.m.

Good news, everyone! Tara has survived another season of The Walking Dead. According to my sources*, she awoke from a coma during last night’s season finale, which means even more stock photos of dogs and cats dressed as zombies** for you!

*my girlfriend
**or at least until Shutterstock figures out what a zombie is

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Chasing Life

Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.

On the season finale of Chasing Life, Brenna could have really used a Greer to cuddle with. Sadly, her girlfriend is still off in Nantucket and she has to deal with her sister’s cancer relapse alone. On the upside, it looks like she’s going to be a bone marrow transplant match for someone else with cancer. (On the downside, it’s probably going to be a dude and she’ll fall in love with him because gosh dang John Green and the dang cancer love story syndrome he caused.) (Or was that really Nicolas Sparks? I can never really tell.) Anyway, Brenna and April celebrate her birthday early and Brenna agrees to video the world outside of the hospital so April doesn’t forget what she’s fighting for. It’s very sad. Not as sad as if Greer is gone for good, though.

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Hart of Dixie

Fridays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Hart of Dixie aired its probable last episode ever on Friday night, and while screen time for Crickett and Jaysene was as limited as it has been all season (and the force field that keeps them from ever touching remained firmly in tact), I am happy to report that they did announce their plans to move in with each other.

I didn’t even watch Hart of Dixie until Crickett came out because I grew up in the actual heart of Dixie, and now I wish I’d spent all the hours I invested catching up on the first three seasons of this show catching up on Person of Interest. (See below!) These writers could have done so much with Crickett coming out as a lesbian in a group of tenth generation southern belles, but it only did the bare minimum. It wasn’t offensive, but it wasn’t engaging either. It was crumbs. At least Crickett didn’t die at the hands of a Baptist homophobe, I guess.

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Newlyweds: The First Year

Tuesdays on Bravo at 10:00 p.m.

Sam and Laura go on a “big, gay, pink” carriage ride around Central Park on the most recent episode of their Bravo reality show. “It’s important to me to keep the romance alive in our marriage,” Laura says. “If we’re going to freeze, we’re going to do it together.” I can attest to the reality part of this episode because I walked right by them the day they were filming this carriage ride and it was cold as nards. Buuuut it’s not all ponies and hot chocolate for the lesbian newlyweds. Laura trying to get her freelance writing career going, but she’s running up too much of a tally on their shared credit cards while she’s trying to make some money, and that doesn’t make Sam very happy at all. This week, they’re finally going on a honeymoon!

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Black Sails

On Demand on Starz Literally Always

Well, so! I was very skeptical about Black Sails because my friend who recaps it, Valerie, can handle watching any kind of blood and guts get spilled and revels in shows about stalkers (at the cost of constantly thinking she’s getting murdered, but that is what floats her beautiful boat). But I am very glad I decided to get caught up on it because it’s like Mad Men of the sea, really. You think it’s a period piece where the men are in charge, but it is the ladies who triumph in the end.

In this week’s season finale, Max — who was a pretty disenfranchised prostitute when this whole thing kicked off — rustles up enough money to make an offer to buy the pub Eleanor used to run. (Her former lover is still in chains and might get hanged next season for piracy, but I don’t know yet.) Also, Max’s other former lady lover, Anne Bonney, returns to Nassau with her partner, Jack, and y’all, they’ve got about one hundred bazillion gadrillion gold coins with them, which they’ll be splitting with their business partner, Max. It’s a really happy ending to what can be a really brutal man’s world kind-of-a-show, and that two of the three happy-havers are queer women? What a wonderful world!

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Person of Interest

Tuesdays on CBS at 10:00 p.m.

Like I said above, I haven’t had time to get caught up on Person of Interest yet, and I actually stopped my marathon once I thought that Shaw got killed, but last week in the comments, you guys told me that Root and Shaw’s kiss wasn’t the end of them, that Sarah Shahi just had to leave the show to go have a baby, and she’s coming back and Root is going to find her! I am trying to get caught up on that, so I can start freaking out in real-time with you.

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Bold and the Beautiful

Weekdays on CBS

Last week, Bold and the Beautiful told us that Maya Avant is a trans woman, which is a huge deal. A huge, huge, huge, huge deal. We need trans women of color — especially black trans women — on our TVs in a major way. And having a black trans character on daytime TV is so revolutionary that it made me drop the water bottle I was holding when I read the announcement. I haven’t watched B&B since Crystal Chappell and Joanna Johnson were playing a lesbian couple on the show, but I got caught up as much as I could this weekend, and I’m sorry to say this story with Maya is really problematic.

Here’s the deal: Maya Avant is a model and actress who is in a serious relationship with bazillionaire Rick Forrester. Last week, Maya’s sister, Nicole, came to town and Maya was not happy to see her. Nicole wondered why Maya left home and never reached out to her, wondered why their parents never mentioned Maya, and finally (after monologuing for five minutes), Nicole says she knows Maya’s secret: that she was assigned male at birth. And that her parents disowned her when she came out as transgender. Unfortunately, the show goes for sopay reveal in the grossest possible way, with Nicole saying, “You’re not my sister, Maya. You’re not Maya at all. You’re Myron. You’re my brother.”

Purposeful misgendering, using Maya’s dead name: That’s bad enough, but then the story goes all in on our cultural fetishization of trans bodies, and now the storyline has progressed to Nicole blackmailing Maya. Nicole wants a job as a model, or else she’s going to out Maya to Rick.

I just really hate what’s happening so far, and I’m scared for how this is going to shake down in the coming months. I grew up on Days of Our Lives. I understand soapy tropes. But sometimes you’ve got to value doing right over being melodramatic. Mays is the only regular trans character on TV, and that’s wonderful, but only if the show is going to learn how to talk about trans people with respect.

You can watch two clips of Maya’s interactions with her sister here and here.

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More, More, More

+ Banana (and it’s co-series’ Cucumber and Tofu) are on my list of things to track down and watch. We don’t get them here in the States.

+ Thanks to Meghan for the tip that Saving Hope is adding a lesbian character. I’ll find out more about that this week.

+ And thanks to Stefanie for letting me know that this week’s Bones featured a dead, psychic lesbian (and some of her alive former partners). You can watch that full episode here.

+ You’re getting your Pretty Little Liars finale recap tomorrow!

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Team TV Coverage You May Have Missed

+ Grey’s Anatomy Episode 1117 Recap: They Always Come in Threes, Don’t They?
Derek comes back and is worse than a leech trapped in your face.

+ 15 Of Those Actresses Who Were In That Show
You know her face, but you’ve got no clue what her name is — 15 of the actresses who aren’t on magazine covers but have shown up in small parts on so many queer-adjacent shows and movies lately that you’re really THIS CLOSE to looking them up on imdb.

+ Fan Fiction Friday: 8 Carmilla Stories To Warm Your Misanthropic Heart
And a profile with series creator Ellen Simpson, who writes all kinds of fan fiction too!

+ The Fosters Episodes 220-221 Recaps: Dystopian Robot Apocalypse
Jude and Connor come out, and Monty finally stops keeping her lips to herself.

+ Glee Episodes 612-613 Recaps: Last Stop On The Midnight Train
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and now it’s over.

+ 18 Questions We Have About the X-Files Reboot
Oh god, is anyone on this show a medical doctor? ANYONE

+ 50 People Who Are Definitely A on Pretty Little Liars
The PLL thinks it knows who A is, but it’s wrong.

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That’s all I’ve got for you! What have you got for me? Teach me something good!