This television season brought the end of two of the most significant scripted shows of the streaming era, and with them, some beloved queer characters left the screen for good — the latest casualties in what is shaping up to be a troubling decline in representation for LGBTQ+ people.
Netflix’s “Stranger Things” aired its series finale on New Year’s Eve, ending the run of one of the streamer’s most successful shows. The final season featured a much-discussed scene in which Noah Schnapp’s Will Byers came out as gay to his friends and family, just before helping save the world from the evil Vecna.
And last month, HBO Max said goodbye to “Hacks,” its most Emmy-awarded comedy series to date, which featured a bisexual co-lead in Hannah Einbinder’s Ava Daniels and a mix of recurring characters who identified as LGBTQ+. The final season featured a standout episode in which Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance enlisted a reluctant Ava to masquerade as her lover as part of a scheme to steal an outfit (it’s a whole thing).
These notable goodbyes took place a few months after GLAAD, the media group which advocates for queer representation, warned that 41% of the 489 LGBTQ+ characters in the 2024-25 TV season would disappear from television the following year due to series endings, cancellations or character exits.
None of the characters mentioned in this story so far were among those included in that report, signaling a larger and worrisome reduction in LGBTQ+ representation that might not be made up for anytime soon. This trend comes as Hollywood and other U.S. industries face pressure to cut DEI initiatives or face retaliation from the Trump administration, and as television’s declining audience and streaming services’ slowing growth put pressure on executives to cater to what they think of as safer, mainstream audiences.
“When media companies want to expand their subscribers, they do a lot of very quirky, original, edgy programming that brings new audiences and Emmys attention. Once they’ve done that they’re like, ‘We’ve appealed to the gay people and all the hip other people. Now we can go back and concentrate on the mass market with more generic fare,’” Cornell University gender studies and queer media professor Katherine Sender told TheWrap. “Both Netflix and Prime Video have gone much more toward mass-market blockbuster shows that get a lot of attention. The more quirky, edgy programming seems much less their priority right now.”
While “Stranger Things” and “Hacks” represented graceful exits, there were more abrupt endings for LGBTQ+ shows. Netflix canceled its gay military drama “Boots” and sci-fi series “The Boroughs,” which features a gay series regular in Denis O’Hare’s Wally, after one season. Both shows boasted solid ratings during their run. “Heartstopper,” the platform’s groundbreaking queer YA drama, ends in July with a finale movie.
On broadcast, NBC’s “Brilliant Minds,” the first broadcast medical drama to feature a gay male lead in Zachary Quinto’s Dr. Oliver Wolf, along with other queer recurring characters, was canceled after two seasons, citing low ratings. “Grey’s Anatomy” said goodbye to Dr. Teddy Altman (Kim Raver) at the end of its 22nd season — the fourth queer character to depart the ABC drama in less than two years.
“It feels harder to sell things that have queer leads at the center of it [these days],” an agent from a top Hollywood agency who is part of the LGBTQ+ community told TheWrap. “What is challenging for a lot of these buyers is this question of audience … They assume if there’s a queer lead, it’s inherently non-commercial. It’s insane.”
The business case for diversity
Two different shows from this TV season fly in the face of that assumption. “Heated Rivalry,” a lower-budget series adaptation of a popular romance book series, produced by Canada’s Bell Media for streaming platform Crave and later licensed to HBO Max, turned into a surprise hit after its premiere at the end of 2025. The show follows the R-rated sexual relationship-turned-gay love story between two professional hockey players from rival teams.
After releasing to little marketing and media attention in late November, a vociferous, mostly straight and female fandom from the book series and word of mouth propelled “Heated Rivalry” to become HBO Max’s most-watched acquired series ever, reaching almost 11 million viewers by February. It turned lead actors Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams into big stars in just weeks, and scored a second season expected to premiere in early 2027.
Then there’s “Pluribus,” Vince Gilligan’s opus for Apple TV, which follows a novelist who finds herself isolated after an alien virus transforms most of humanity into a hive mind that seeks to bring her and other immune individuals into the fold. In the series premiere, Rhea Seehorn’s Carol suffers the loss of her wife in the outset of the contagion, infusing her dystopian journey with a grief-stricken but relatable ambivalence. Apple touted “Pluribus” as its most-watched show ever in December, without providing specific viewing figures.
As Hollywood faces an overall reduction in content spending, the hope coming from industry observers and insiders who spoke with TheWrap is that these successes help convince executives of the benefits of including queer and diverse characters — and creatives behind the scenes — in their programming slates.
“It’s too early to have a real sense of exactly how this year’s report is going to stack up ultimately, but it is clear that the shows audiences are connecting with, and those that are shifting the cultural conversation, are all queer shows,” said Megan Townsend, GLAAD’s senior director of entertainment research and analysis, citing “Pluribus” along with Netflix’s “The Hunting Wives,” “The Four Seasons” and HBO’s “I Love LA” as other notable examples.
“We know our stories have universal appeal,” she added.
Making sense of the decline
Television’s cooling of queer representation and other underrepresented groups goes hand in hand with the sector’s overall contraction, as Hollywood rolled back spending on entertainment content. The bursting of the industry’s Peak TV bubble in 2022 brought a 37% reduction in the number of scripted TV series ordered by U.S. distributors in the last three years.
That year also marked the peak for LGBTQ+ representation recorded by GLAAD’s Where We Are on TV report, noting 637 queer characters across broadcast, streaming and cable during the 2021-2022 season. The organization noted a decline in characters the following season with 596, then further down in 2023-24 with 468 and slightly up in 2024-25 with 489. The organization also noted the percentage of queer vs. non-LGBTQ+ series regulars for broadcast series, which also showed a two-year decline until a rebound in the 2024-25 season.
But GLAAD sounded the alarm in its latest report in November, pointing out that 201 of the characters it counted would not return the following season. Final numbers are expected near the end of 2026.
Trans representation is in the steepest freefall, with landmark shows like Prime Video’s “Transparent” and FX’s “Pose” ending their runs years ago and few new programs picking up the baton by including trans-identifying characters.
“We’re seeing three trends right now: One is fewer LGBTQ television characters, then we’re seeing a lot less money going into LGBTQ organizations, including things like Pride celebrations. People organizing parades are having to deal with 30% less financial investment from corporate sponsorships from two years ago,” Sender noted. “We’re also seeing a retrenchment in political opinions. The Gallup polling companies found a real pullback on support for LGBTQ+, and particularly trans rights, which is very worrying.”
GLAAD’s 1996 launch of its annual TV report — one year before Ellen DeGeneres broke ground by coming out in her hit sitcom — helped push LGBTQ+ representation on TV to worthy heights through the 2010s, before taking a hit with COVID-induced production halts in 2020, the CW ceding to new management in 2022 and the Hollywood strikes of 2023.
Still, there’s a caveat to GLAAD’s November prediction of a queer TV crisis.
“There’s a huge amount of churn in programming, and when GLAAD makes its predictions about the demise of gay characters, they don’t know what the next season is necessarily going to look like,” Sender said. “We saw this huge peak of queer characters in 2022, and since then we’ve seen a reduction in making programs overall. The market was totally bloated, but because we’re in very uncertain financial times, programmers become much more conservative and go for things that have that mass-market appeal. In general, people think mass-market appeal doesn’t equal complex, queer shows.”
Hope for a rebound
With the 2025-26 TV season wrapped in May, the success of shows like “Heated Rivalry” and “Pluribus” offer a spark of optimism for representation — even if the highs of 2022 are seemingly out of reach.
Townsend highlighted other upcoming sports series with LGBTQ+ characters coming up, including Crave’s anticipated softball comedy “Slo-Pitch” from Elliot Page’s Pageboy Productions, set to premiere this year. Amazon is developing “Playing the Field,” a TV adaptation of the sports romance novel “Cleat Cute” by Meryl Wilsner, centered on the sexy and messy lives of four female soccer players in New Orleans. And let’s not forget Prime Video hit series “Off Campus,” a hockey drama filled with straight love stories but featuring a non-binary character in Julia Sarah Stone’s Jules.
The agent who spoke with TheWrap noted the television marketplace operates two to three years ahead of the programming cycle, and said there’s already evidence of course-correction as buyers take chances on spec scripts from less experienced producers — some of them queer voices as well as people of color.
“I don’t necessarily think everything needs to be a fundamentally queer story, whatever that means … We need queer characters and also LGBTQ+ people making TV and behind the camera,” the agent said. “The jury is still out on if we corrected or are even close to where we were pre-strikes. But I do see [the market] course-correcting a little bit.”
Already on the air is AMC’s “The Vampire Lestat,” the renamed third season of “Interview With the Vampire,” centered on the volatile romance between gay vampires Lestat (Sam Reid) and Louis (Jacob Anderson). There’s also HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” led by queer queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy); and the final season of Netflix’s “Survival of the Thickest” premieres in July, which features trans “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alum Peppermint as a fictionalized version of herself.
On Peacock, upcoming shows “The Five Star Weekend” and “The Good Daughter” will feature queer characters. And later this year, Starz is set to air “Tip Toe,” a British queer drama starring Alan Cumming. FX will bring back its ensemble comedy “Adults” for Season 2 and debut Ryan Murphy’s latest thriller extravaganza “The Shards” in August.
On broadcast, Fox’s “Baywatch” reboot, one of the most anticipated shows of the upcoming TV season, will feature at least one recurring queer character in Kylar Miranda’s Diego. The network’s medical comedy “Best Medicine” also recently promoted two queer characters, played by Stephen Spinella and Jason Veasey, to series regulars for Season 2. CBS shows like “NCIS,” “NCIS: Origins,” “Ghosts” and “Matlock”will continue to feature LGBTQ+ characters in their main casts. And on ABC, “Grey’s Anatomy” ended with a messy cliffhanger for Dr. Amelia Shepherd (Caterina Scorsone) and her latest love interest Dr. Toni Wright (Jen Landon), setting up juicy drama in Season 23.
Netflix, which frequently holds the largest number of LGBTQ+ characters among streamers, greenlit a limited series adaptation of the queer novel “Enigma Variations” from “Call Me by Your Name” author André Aciman and starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson in March. The platform will also debut “Bridgerton” Season 5 in 2027, its first featuring a same-sex central couple in Hannah Dodd’s Francesca and Masali Baduza’s Michaela.
Many of these characters will trickle into GLAAD’s report over time. Let’s hope there’s even more to come.
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