New TV Season LGBT Roles

We always look forward to GLAAD’s “Where We Are on TV” their comprehensive report of LGBT primetime characters in the new television season. This 2015-16 season marks the 20th year that GLAAD has tracked the presence of LGBT characters on television & this year includes LGBT characters on original series which have premiered on the streaming content providers Amazon, Hulu & Netflix. On broadcast primetime scripted programming out of 881 characters expected to appear only 35 or 4% were identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. There were also an additional 35 recurring LGB characters. The highest percentage of LGBT characters GLAAD has ever counted on primetime scripted broadcast programming was 4.4% back in the 2012-13 season. So unfortunately we have some slippage. However the number of regular LGBT characters counted on cable increased from 64 to 84, while recurring characters increased from 41 to 58. For the first time, GLAAD counted LGBT characters on original series that premiered on Amazon, Hulu & Netflix & GLAAD found 43 series regulars & 16 recurring LGBT characters across 23 series. Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO & President of GLAAD stated, "Each of us lives at the intersection of many identities & it's important that television characters reflect the full diversity of the LGBT community. It is not enough to just include LGBT characters; those characters need to be portrayed with thought & care to accurately represent an often tokenized community." Surprisingly with all the success of Amazon’s “Transparent” & the media blitz surrounding Caitlyn Jenner there weren’t any transgender characters counted on primetime broadcast programming, while only three recurring trans characters were counted on cable (2%). Streaming series boast the highest percentage of trans characters at 7% (4) with two notably being series leads.
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