You know the feeling of finding a really, really, good show. You’re twenty minutes into the first episode, it’s actually funny, well-written, the love interest is leng, and in a rare case the central character is openly lesbian, AND the show doesn’t revolve around her trauma, the dream. You go online, only to find the cancellation announcement from three weeks ago, it’s already over.
If you’re a queer person who watches TV, you know what I’m talking about. You’ve probably stopped letting yourself get too attached, what’s the point?
Let’s go back to 2020, where Netflix cancelled three shows with lesbian leads within a single week. I Am Not Okay With This, The Society, and Teenage Bounty Hunters, all gone. The reason given was COVID-related production challenges. However, COVID, notably did not cancel Queer Eye, or Hearstopper, weird? The cancellations had a very specific and highly targeted effect on stories about queer/lesbian women.
First Kill, a lesbian vampire show, was cancelled two months after its first season dropped. In those two months, it had accumulated 100 million viewing hours on Netflix and sat in their own Top 10 for several weeks running, so why would it be cancelled? Riverdale, on the other hand, continued to live on, a show that by that point had its fans begging for it to end.
2022 was also a sad year for lesbians: The Wilds, Warrior Nun, Gentlemen Jack, A League of Their Own, all axed within the same year. And don’t even bring up 2024’s Everything Now around me, I’m still at the restaurant.
According to Save Queer Stories, an independent study of over 350 scripted television shows that aired in 2024, half of all queer shows were cancelled that year. They found that queers shows were cancelled more than twice as often as non-queer shows, and were more likely to be axed after just one season. GLAAD has been making similar findings for years, queer women’s stories are cancelled at rates that don’t reflect their viewership, their critical reception, or their cultural impact.
This is a direct result of homophobia and misogyny working together in that efficient way that only deeply embedded biases can manage. Gay male narratives have been absorbed into the mainstream palatability, Heated Rivalry, a newly beloved cultural classic, will be getting its second season and I doubt it will stop there. Queer male love has been marketed as ‘safe’ for a broad audience, and this isn’t not a win but it has happened at a speed and scale that has not been extended to queer/lesbian women.
Lesbian relationships onscreen have historically been handled in one of two ways: as tragedy, or as spectacle. The Bury Your Gays trope, that grim tradition of killing off queer characters to generate pathos for straight ones, has been well-documented and widely criticised. But now that trope has evolved, they’ve stopped killing the characters, now they just cancel the show, same message, less blood.
This one might’ve hurt the most, the BBC’s decision to cancel I Kissed a Girl (and I Kissed a Boy) is the more recent example of a company announcing, with enormous sincerity, that it is exceptionally proud of something it is in the process of abandoning. Meanwhile, the straight version of The Ultimatum and Love Is Blind has international spin-offs, and Love Island is a franchise that we now have to watch twice a year. The infrastructure built around straight romantic reality television, the merchandise, the reunions, the spin-offs, the second and third and fourteenth chances, has simply never been extended to its queer equivalent
Research on media representation and adolescent identity development is unambiguous, seeing yourself reflected, as a full person, as a romantic subject, as someone whose love life is treated as worthy of prime time, has measurable effects on how young people understand themselves and their place in the world.
So when a show like I Kissed a Girl gets two seasons and a gracious goodbye statement, what gets communicated is that this is the amount of story you get. Two seasons. Be grateful.
The argument most frequently cited is that these shows are cancelled because they are underperforming, partly because they draw smaller audiences. This is extremely convenient for the people making it, given that these shows are routinely given smaller budgets, shorter marketing windows, and less promotional support than comparable straight programming.
The shows that have survived, like The L Word, and Orange is the New Black, prove that longevity is possible. The list is just very, very short. And every time another show gets added to the cancelled column, the implicit argument that these stories aren’t viable gets slightly more entrenched.
So what would progress actually look like? Same marketing budgets, same renewal criteria, same willingness to let something find its audience over more than one season. The same basic assumption that this story is worth seeing through to the end.
Until that happens, we’ll be stuck in this cycle. Another show will premiere, another fandom will form, and another cancellation statement will be announced, full of pride and regret and absolutely no plans to do anything differently.
