It’s official: Robert Greenblatt loves him some lesbians.
Greenblatt ran Showtime during The L Word‘s hay-day and is the same man who encouraged supporting gay and lesbian characters in Nurse Jackie and United States of Tara. The same man who greenlit The Real L Word.
He left Showtime rather abruptly last year and landed at NBC as the “Entertainment chairman” – and guess what he did as his first order of business: he ordered a lesbian romantic comedy TV pilot titled I Hate That I Love You!
The show was created by Will & Grace and Murphy Brown producer, Jhoni Marchinko. This bodes very well as Will & Grace and Murphy Brown were extremely sophisticated and progressive for their time, IMO.
Here’s the pitch: “A straight couple introduces two of its lesbian friends to one another and what results is both instant attraction and a pregnancy.”
Now, just because NBC ordered a pilot doesn’t necessarily mean the show will get picked up and even air – we’ll probs have to wait until the summer find out the show’s fate.
Ironically, our very own Liz Feldman had written a different lesbian-pregnancy themed show titled A Lot Like Us for NBC, so unfortunately (for our girl Liz) it looks like they went with the Marchinko show instead. In case you’re curious, here’s the pitch for Liz’s show: “a sitcom about an alternative LA family, centering around an expectant lesbian couple and their donor who lives with them.”
I really want to rant on here about every piece of mainstream lesbian entertainment centering around pregnancy/sperm donors/kids but I’ll leave that to you in the comments. I know you feel me.
Either way, this is a huge deal and can potentially be the first time a major network will lead with lesbian characters since Ellen’s second sitcom, The Ellen Show in 2001 (her first show was picked up in her pre-gay TV days).
Basically, lesbians are pretty f*cking funny. I mean name five gay male stand-up comics. You can’t, right? (If you can, just keep it to yourself.) But lesbians!? SO MANY. Why has it taken this long for our sitcom?! (That’s rhetorical.) We’ve got Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Kate Clinton, Julie Goldman, Marga Gomez, Suzanne Westenhoefer, Liz Feldman, Fortune Feimster, Lily Tomlin, Judy Gold, Elvira Kurt, Sandra Bernhard, Gloria Bigelow, Sandra Valls, Margaret Cho, Lea DeLaria, Wanda Sykes, Carol Leifer, Deanne Smith, Erin Foley, Nicol Paone, Kate McKinnon and you know, Stamie.
whomever picked that photo from the brady bunch for a thumbnail is a GENIUS
mte
I thought that was clever, too.
You forgot Wanda Sykes!!!!
I just remembered her! Added!
“A straight couple introduces two of its lesbian friends to one another and what results is both instant attraction and a pregnancy.”
OH DEAR, why do I get a bad feeling about this? Maybe it’s because we’ve been burned so many times in terms of representation of lesbians on TV. I just hope if this show does get picked up it won’t have yet another ‘”lesbian” sleeps with guy’ storyline.
Margaret Cho isnt lez!
I second this.
She is bi, though…
Where’s the L Word spin-off starring Detective Lucy Lawless?? Still hoping….
When my gay roommate told me about this show, I was like, “OH NO NOT ANOTHER LESBIAN PREGNANCY STORYLINE.”
I kind of felt like it was my duty as a lesbian, I don’t know.
all lesbians do is get pregnant. its all we do. ever.
Two steps forward, one step back kind of thing – Yay possible show! Boo cliche pregnancy storyline!
So are we saying that gay or straight, women are destined to be baby factories? fail. Are lesbians less scary to the mass populace if they TOO can re-produce? arrgh.
What happened to the good ol’ days where we just had cats?