HGTV shows seem to embrace gay people, why doesn’t the rest of TV?

Asked by Kardamom (33292) February 28th, 2018 from iPhone

I watch a lot of home improvement and house hunting types of shows on HGTV. It’s very common (not in a novel way) to show gay couples looking for a home, or having a home built. Also, some of the hosts are gay.

On the rest of TV, showing gay characters is still kind of a novelty. Even though Will and Grace was a big hit 10 years ago, and is now a delightfully refreshing and funny (and relevant) show as a comeback in 2018, gay characters are still very rare, and still often a novelty.

Orange is the New Black kind of broke down some barriers, although the gay characters on that show are prisoners, not exactly main stream characters.

Yay for shows like Ellen (which is hosted by a real life lesbian) and Modern Family, which shows a fairly normal, albeit funny and slightly neurotic, gay couple, and one of the actors in the couple is a real-life gay man, Jesse Tyler Ferguson.

My favorite new show, Grace and Frankie, depicts gay people “of a certain age” hooray! But OITNB and Grace and Frankie (a Netflix original series, depicting an older gay male couple) is on a subscription cable channel.

It seems kind of funny that HGTV, a very tame network, seems to be the calm pioneer in showing real gay people on TV.