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In its first episode, Ryan (creator Ryan O’Connell) gets hit by a car shortly before starting a job at an obnoxious new-media publication called “eggwoke.” When his co-workers assume that his limp is due to the accident, rather than his cerebral palsy, he’s thrilled that he’s not being pitied for his disability, but for just […]

At its peak, Will & Grace made Nielsen’s Top 10 with more than 17 million weekly viewers. And while the series received as much hate mail as adoration — an inevitable byproduct of being the first show to have openly gay male lead characters — it lasted eight seasons before ending in 2006. It was […]

Armistead Maupin’s fictitious Barbary Lane has unfolded over the past 40 years in the form of nine books, three miniseries, and, now, a Netflix limited series. At the heart is Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney), a cheerful 25-year-old Midwestern rube who is seduced by Seventies San Francisco, and upends her life to discover a whole […]

Adapted from gay director Justin Simien’s breakout film of the same name, about black college students coming to terms with a “post-racial America,” the series explores themes of race, gender, and sexuality by skewering just about everyone for hypocrisy and double standards. In the first season, Lionel Higgins (DeRon Horton) has a rough time coming […]

Over the course of its four seasons, Tituss Burgess was nominated for four Emmys for playing Kimmy’s roommate, actor-on-the-rise Titus Andromedon, and he’s often the one who steals the show — despite Ellie Kemper’s comedy chops. The series (created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock) is all about being strange — after Kimmy spent 15 […]

In many ways, GLAAD-nominated Oz was the HBO show that paved the way for so much of Peak TV when it debuted way back in 1998. Amid all the brutality, abuse, racism, murder, and chaos of this prison drama — that at times played out like a nearly all-male soap opera — was the most […]

Euphoria supplies such an overload of examples of what it means to be an American teen at this moment in time — living amid a complex cacophony of stimulus more overwhelming than anyone ever thought imaginable — that you may find it hard to swallow and end up retching it out. Focused on unreliable narrator […]

While CW shows — from Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars to Riverdale — have always toyed with hot-bodied teens and their sexual shenanigans, the titillating thrills often leave the queer characters on the sidelines. Not so for Spanish Netflix original Elite. Sure it sticks to the salacious high school drama playbook, but here the […]

In Desiree Akhavan’s The Bisexual — which she co-wrote, directed, and stars in — we finally get an honest portrayal of the complications of and confusions around the most-overlooked (and mocked) facet of queer sexuality. Leila is a thirtysomething Iranian American woman living in London who’s identified as a lesbian for most of her life, […]

Fifteen years after Russell T. Davies brought Queer as Folk to British televisions (and had a successful run as a writer for Doctor Who and the sexually fluid Torchwood), he returned with three interconnected LGBTQ shows: Banana and Cucumber for television, and the web series Tofu. The hourlong Cucumber focuses on middle-aged Henry Best and […]

Please Like Me, Australian comedian Josh Thomas’ hyper-realistic, cringe-inducing (but still funny), and deeply autobiographical first TV series, begins with a character, also named Josh, breaking up with his girlfriend, kissing a boy for the first time, and dealing with the fallout from his mother’s attempted suicide. It was a lot to digest, but that’s […]

Gentleman Jack, starring Susanne Jones, is about Anne Lister, an extraordinary woman circa 1832 who’s a barely closeted lesbian English landowner trying to figure out how to take a wife. The HBO and BBC One collaboration feels like the sort of period drama that used to be reserved for Merchant Ivory movies. The fact that […]

A wealthy family loses their entire fortune and is forced to rebuild their lives in a small town — their only remaining asset, with an off-putting name. Co-created by Eugene Levy and his son, Dan, Schitt’s Creek is the sort of slow-simmer, quirky comedy that could only exist in our current TV landscape. It was […]

When Ilene Chaiken’s The L Word appeared in 2004, featuring queer women front and center, there was nothing else like it. Although the characters may have lived in a mostly white, affluent soap-opera version of West Hollywood, filled with big romances and betrayals, the series became destination TV for a large swath of queer women […]

From its debut, Pose was trumpeted as a groundbreaking series, proving how far LGBTQ people had progressed in Hollywood. Not only does it feature five transgender actresses in series-regular roles — the most for any prime-time show — it also has the largest queer recurring cast in TV history. Plus, it’s largely written and produced […]

This exceptional, exceptionally LGBTQ-friendly Cartoon Network kids’ fantasy series follows adolescent Steven (Zach Callison) as he learns to save the world under the tutelage of three of his late alien mother’s partners from a race known as the Gems. The Gems are entirely female, and members of various subgroups (quartzes, sapphires, pearls, etc.) have historically […]

It’s been 15 years since Six Feet Under shocked fans with its upsetting, yet perfect, montage of death for the Fisher family and other characters — which was hailed by many as having one of the best finale’s in TV history. Alan Ball’s unusual drama about a family of morticians was always full of surprises, […]

Lee Daniels’ 2015 prime-time hip-hop soap opera on Fox had a phenomenal debut and became a mega hit. Which felt revolutionary at the time due to its focus on Jamal Lyon, the R&B-crooner son who’s vying for music-mogul dad Lucious’ crown. Plus, it managed to change many conservative viewpoints in the black community — including Timbaland, […]

When Looking’s creators — screenwriter Michael Lannan and director Andrew Haigh (45 Years, Weekend) — kicked off their dramedy about three young men looking for love in San Francisco in January 2014, same-sex marriage wasn’t legal for all U.S. citizens, and yet things looked hopeful with Obama as president. The show, always handicapped by expectations […]

There’s a long history of fantasy and sci-fi fans finding queer subtext in shows that presented themselves as entirely straight (the original Star Trek, where the notion of Kirk and Spock hooking up invented slash fiction) or at least quasi-straight (Xena: Warrior Princess, which leaned into the chemistry between Xena and Gabrielle in later years). […]

Most of the Arrow-verse shows (a.k.a. CW superhero dramas based on DC Comics characters, produced by Greg Berlanti) feature at least one prominent queer character. In a few cases, they’re the lead. Since Batwoman is in the midst of recasting its title role in the wake of Ruby Rose’s messy departure, we’ll recommend the most […]

An utter charmer about a gay, recovering addict comedian (co-creator Mae Martin) and a previously straight teacher (Charlotte Richie) who fall deeply, dangerously in love with each other. Think Catastrophe, but queer.  —A.S.

The clothes, music, and other background details can create the illusion that this British high school comedy takes place in the United States in the Eighties, if not earlier. But as uptight Otis (Asa Butterfield) sets up a bootleg sex-therapy practice at school inspired by the work of his mother, Jean (Gillian Anderson), the discussion […]

Imagine if Hogwarts was in America, and a college, and its students liked to use magic to get high and/or enhance their sex lives, and you have the fundamentals of this recently-concluded Syfy series adapted from Lev Grossman’s book trilogy. In the show’s early days, queer student Eliot Waugh (Hale Appleman) is mainly there to […]

Always Sunny played a very long game with the idea that macho idiot Mac (played by Sunny creator Rob McElhenney) was deeply closeted. The FX comedy hinted at the idea for years, then spent a few seasons with the rest of “the Gang” imploring Mac to come out already, before he finally did in Season […]

For decades, bisexuals were largely invisible on television, with characters only revealed as bi on rare occasions for a shocking plot twist or to help generate a titillating sweeps-month promo. The past few years of TV, though, have featured a lot of prominent bi characters, including Piper on Orange Is the New Black, Rosa on […]

Yes, this drama about the feud between a self-righteous New York prosecutor and a sociopathic hedge-fund boss is mostly a celebration of straight male energy. But it’s also not a coincidence that Billions went to another creative level with the introduction of Asia Kate Dillon as Taylor, the numbers wizard who was briefly Axe’s protégé, […]

In this half-hour drama, a pair of estranged sisters — Type A corporate exec Emma (Mishel Prada) and free spirit Lyn (Melissa Barrera) — reunite to run their mother’s East L.A. bar after she dies. Both are startled to discover their mother had a wife, Eddy (Ser Anzoategui) — particularly Emma, whose bisexuality had previously […]

Budding mogul Lena Waithe gets autobiographical with this dramedy about three friends — one of them, the very Waithe-ish Hattie (Jonica T. Gibbs), is a soft stud with self-destructive taste in women — navigating life, love, and the entertainment industry. Lived-in and sharply observed, with what should be a star-making performance by Gibbs. —A.S.

One of the best — and, unfortunately, most overlooked — of the late-2010s wave of memoir-style dramedies, One Mississippi stars comedian Tig Notaro as a slightly fictionalized version of herself, returning to her Southern hometown in the aftermath of her mother’s death and her own bout with cancer. The show covers a lot of big […]

A spy story that’s really a twisted love story, where messy, American-born British intelligence analyst Eve (Sandra Oh) becomes obsessed with glamorous, immature assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer). The cat-and-mouse game soon turns into one where the role of predator and prey keeps shifting, the fashions (particularly Villanelle’s suit game) keep getting more striking, and anyone […]

One of the more clever twists the Hulu series makes from the Nick Hornby novel (and the John Cusack movie it already spawned) is to essentially split the main character in two. Zoe Kravitz’s Rob gets most of the raw material: the name, the self-destructive romantic history, ownership of the record shop. But one of […]

This appealing spinoff of Crystal Moselle’s 2018 indie film Skate Kitchen follows a quintet of female skaters in a pre-pandemic New York. Some of the girls are straight and others not, but all are struggling to fit into a traditionally male subculture and battling various problems regarding race, class, and sexuality over the course of […]

Admittedly, this one’s now tricky to consider. Jill Solloway’s trailblazing dramedy was TV’s first series with a trans main character, following the story of college professor Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor) as she comes out to her family late in life, and the ripple effect that announcement has on ex-wife Shelley (Judith Light) and adult children […]

The Wachowski siblings’ first TV series, the globe-spanning Netflix sci-fi drama Sense8, was already extremely comfortable in its own queerness, with main characters including a trans woman in a long-term lesbian relationship, a closeted Mexican actor, and a superpower shared by all its heroes that allowed any or all of them to experience each other’s […]

The first show truly made for the streaming era, the prison drama features an enormous cast of women covering a remarkable array of experiences across lines of race, class, sexuality, and gender. The show’s central character, Piper (Taylor Schilling), is an irritatingly privileged white woman, but she’s also a bisexual woman whose on-again, off-again affair […]

The entire run of this delightful throwback sitcom has queer-friendly content, but particularly its first season (still streaming on Netflix, even though the latest season was made for Pop), which slowly but carefully charted the journey of Elena (Isabella Gomez), a Latinx teen coming to the realization that she’s gay, and gradually discovering how to […]

This Claire Danes high school drama — perhaps the greatest one-season wonder in TV history — was ahead of its time in many ways, but none more so than in its depiction of Rickie Vasquez, the queer friend of Danes’ Angela. Rickie wears makeup and hangs in the girls’ bathroom with Angela and Rayanne Graff. […]

Before Queer as Folk premiered on Showtime in December 2000, people passed around bootleg VHS tapes of Russell T. Davies’ original British version because the show shocked and impressed and was full of gritty cinematography and irony. Sure, it told a story of mainly urban gay white men (the original was set in Manchester, U.K.) […]

ABC Family’s breakout hit drama about two moms and their very modern mix of biological, adopted, and fostered kids, is a big mess — but that was exactly the point. Co-creator and executive producer Peter Paige (yes, Emmett from Queer as Folk), along with the other queer producers and showrunners, wanted to address how complicated […]