Ranking All the WLW Rep I've Seen In TV Shows

It's my blog and I can do what I want to, whoohoo! And that means the second post in as many days. I had so much fun writing this post that I decided to do something similar, but with TV shows this time. Basically, I'm going to list all the wlw rep I've seen in TV shows and rank it.

What's wlw? It's a catchall term for "women who love women", covering gay, bi, pan, etc. I would do LGBT+ representation in general, but unlike the first post, I'm not ranking these are overall pieces of media, but specifically for their representation. (Which may explain why a show that I overall like more could rank lower, because I like their handling of representation less).

Some caveats:

• Representation isn't a replacement for true liberation and anti-oppression action, and diversity on screen should be matched with diversity behind the scenes. There are also a lot of times when representation ends up being more harmful than it is helpful; for an obvious example, harmful tropes like the "predatory lesbian" or whatnot. So a show having "good representation" is not a measure of how helpful it is to a liberation movement. It also isn't a measure of its quality as a work of fiction. However, I do think that it's important to take a look at the way that media represents underrepresented and marginalized identities, because media representations inform a lot of people's worldview and art can be an extremely powerful venue for a lot of ideas.
• Like I said, I'm not reviewing LGBT rep in general, because as a cis lesbian, I feel like I can only really speak to a certain sect of the LGBT experience. Obviously, I don't represent "wlw" as some sort of monolith, but I do think that I sort of "get it" due to being a gay woman.
• In this post, I am going to be counting only TV shows that I've seen, because, duh. 
• I also am only going to count shows with explicit, major-character representation. No side characters that show up once, no women who say "I dunno, I guess I'm a little open and flirty, wink wink" and everyone loses their minds. I appreciate the place that queer coding and subtext have had in the history of queer media, and I love viewer interpretations and headcanons, but I'm leaving that stuff to a second, smaller list I'm gonna tack on at the end of this article. And I'm definitely not counting characters whom I personally believe to be 100% gay but the show never acknowledges it at all (for example, Annie Edison from Community).
• I'm only counting shows that I've either seen all the way through, seen everything that is currently released, or seen at least like 3/4 of. So even though I watched the first season of Orange is the New Black, I'm not counting it because I gave up after that season. However, I watched almost 4 seasons of Broad City and there were only 5 seasons, so I will count that. But I cannot, of course, speak to content I haven't seen. So in the case of Broad City, I'll be discussing Ilana's bisexual identity, which is explicit in the first 4 seasons, but not Abbi's, which emerges only in season 5 and which I never saw outside of online articles.
• And this is going to be full of obnoxious ranting because like I've been saying, it's fun to be unobserved and just go wild with my annoying personality. But the nice thing about this is that it's always fun to read intense opinions about shows that you've seen, so feel free to just skip to whatever shows you have seen and drink up that discourse juice or whatever.

Now, in order from worst to best....

19. Game of Thrones
Pains me to even call this show "wlw rep" which is such a cutesy term for whatever the hell was going on there. While I did enjoy a lot of the plot elements and character moments of this show, it's impossible to ignore the serious misogyny that the creators had (and the racism) (and how the show just went off the rails somewhere around season 6) (and just everything, dear God). Anyway, I put it here because there's no real "main character" and a couple of the recurring characters, namely the badass Ellaria Sand and equally badass Yara Greyjoy, are explicitly into women sexually and unlike most of the gratuitous "LOOK, there's BOOBS... and BUTTS" type sex scenes on the show, their sexual moments with women were filmed about as tastefully as you can get for Game of Thrones. But like. I wouldn't call this representation so much as it was fan-service for specifically me. And if they really wanted to appeal to me, they would've made Brienne of Tarth gay, too.

18. The Haunting of Hill House
Full disclosure, I don't fully remember this show because I watched it in like a week when it was super popular and then more or less erased it from my memory. It was a mildly interesting horror show about a family who lived in a haunted house and how the trauma of that sort of ruined their lives. One of the siblings, Theo, is a lesbian, and her story arc involves her learning how to open up to a relationship, which is difficult because if she touches someone with her bare hands, she learns all their dark secrets through her magic powers. As far as representation goes, it was sort of whatever, but then I learned the context: one, this show is based on a Shirley Jackson novel and it was extremely unfaithful to the source material in ways that really misrepresented Jackson's intentions. And two, the actress who played Theo was the male director's IRL bisexual wife, and her sex scenes were filmed pretty gratuitously. So... take all that as you will.

17. Brooklyn Nine Nine (this one is long, sorry everyone)
You may be surprised to see this show so low on the list, seeing as it's been highly praised for its LGBT representation, and for being a pretty funny show. I think those attributes do apply for the most part to the first three seasons, where the show is an enjoyable sitcom full of genuinely good jokes and recurring bits, heartwarming character relationships, and even some mild good social commentary. I've been lucky enough to not have many interactions with police in my life, so that made me unaware at first of the ways in which this show (like many TV shows) minimized and excused many instances of corrupt police behavior as "justified because the good guys are doing it" or "just part of zany antics!". There's been lots of analysis of that so just, like, Google "Brooklyn 99 police propaganda" if you want to read up on that. But for the first three seasons, it was pretty clear that the show was sort of removed from reality, like many sitcoms are, and while it is always good to be on the lookout for subconscious propaganda even in the context of a silly sitcom, I think that it was definitely possible to enjoy some mindless humor and still understand real-world police are not funny friends. And in terms of the LGBT rep: the captain of the precinct in this show is a gay Black man, and that identity is depicted really respectfully, in my opinion. His sexuality is not used as the butt of jokes, but it isn't glossed over. He has a rich personality and his relationship with his husband as well as his struggles with racism and homophobia in his job are handled pretty well.
But that was all before the show became what I'd like to call One Long Very Special Episode. You see, Brooklyn 99 was popular for being funny, and the way they wrote the gay captain was pretty good, so it started getting a ridiculous amount of praise for being, like, the most progressive show in the history of the human race or whatever. And I guess the writers felt some sort of pressure to live up to that reputation and that's when the show really took a dive in quality. All of a sudden, every season had to have like, six different episodes that were Big Issue episodes. Not episodes that tackled a big issue, like the season 1 episode where Jake realizes that it was tough on his captain's marriage to deal with homophobia from his colleagues. Instead, these felt like a badly written after-school special, where the entire episode was just telling us over and over, "Look! We know what #MeToo is! Guys we know what #MeToo is!" or whatever. And for like three weeks before an episode would come out, all of social media would be going on and on about how "there's gonna be a Brooklyn 99 episode about racism oh my god HISTORY IS BEING MADE" and everyone would hype it up, and NBC would release clips, and then the episode would come out and there'd be one billion articles about how amazing it was. At best, these episodes were a mostly-tasteful look at an issue affecting one of the characters; at worst, issues were shoved in edgewise and it'd essentially be Jake, the straight white man protagonist, sitting there making off-color jokes (because it's still a sitcom) while his Latina coworkers had a serious discussion about misogyny. It was so bad. So badly written. Dear God.
And you know what, bad writing isn't the worst thing ever- so they were a bit clunky in their attempt to start a conversation about serious issues! At least they were making an attempt! Sure, I guess, but once you're full-steam-ahead about talking seriously about racism and homophobia in America, the fact that your show takes place in a police precinct all of a sudden becomes a bigger and bigger elephant in the room. And since, like I said, it's still a sitcom, they can't REALLY go full-steam-ahead on the issues, because that would entail either admitting that all the main characters are complicit in a horrible system that is destroying the lives of people in their communities, or having the main characters really truly deconstruct the system in some sort of alternate-reality anti-capitalist political literary fiction, which would also contradict a lot of the "jokes" about stuff like illegally harassing suspects from the first few seasons. So the show instead defaults to either ignoring the reality of policing, or giving little hand-wave acknowledgments to it while still letting their characters do illegal, unjust things in the name of jokes. Makes for bad writing AND bad ethics, yeah.
Why did I go on this super long dissertation that's unrelated to the wlw rep? Well, first of all, because as I said it's my blog and I do long rants and I wanted to get this out of my system. And two, because this gives some much-needed context to the wlw rep that does happen on the show. After several seasons of having a gay captain, the show revealed in season 5 that Rosa Diaz, one of the detectives and main characters, is a bisexual woman. Her actress, Stephanie Beatriz, is also a bisexual woman, and her real-life experiences informed the way this was written a lot. So in many ways, her coming-out arc was very true to life and beautifully written. The thing is, it was clearly copy-pasted into the plot. Stephanie Beatriz is not Rosa Diaz. Her personality and life are very different. Rosa Diaz being bi does make a lot of sense; you can see hints at this in her early-season dialogue, behavior, gender presentation, interaction with women, etc. (Plus anyone can be bi, regardless of personality).
But the way she came out, and the way she subsequently talked about her identity, felt forced. It felt like a Very Special Episode. Rosa awkwardly reveals to her coworker that she's bi, seemingly embarrassed, and then tells the whole precinct because she realizes her coworker can't keep secrets so she might as well tell. Then she invites her friend to dinner with her parents in the hopes that he'll help her come out to them. It's a tender and emotional set of episodes, and it's sweet in many ways, but it didn't fit in with the way Rosa's character had been written on the show thus far. She was the type to hook up with random girls and if her coworkers found out, she wouldn't care. Her family had never shown up on screen before and never showed up again since. She was never written as openly emotional before or since, especially not for the length of two episodes, especially not when it came to what people thought of her. While characters can certainly change, it didn't feel like that was what was happening. It felt like Rosa was getting the Emotional Spotlight because she was the Special Issue Of the Week, and once she was done with her coming out story, she could go back to being funny and silly. It felt like they weren't writing a character; they were writing an invitation for articles about how progressive they were. So yeah. I didn't love it.

16. Stranger Things
Stranger Things is mostly a cutesy show that banks on 80s nostalgia and campy horror fans. It's a fun watch every two years when they release a new season. In season 3, they introduced a new character, Robin, the snarky coworker of the formerly popular Steve who had somehow become the adopted dad of a bunch of meddling kids. She and Steve worked for the summer at an ice cream joint in the mall, and it turned out the mall was some sort of cover for an evil Soviet conspiracy or whatever, blah blah blah, the point is that she was delightfully snarky and also very smart. And she turned out to be a lesbian. She and Steve have a lot of platonic chemistry, and Steve asks her out after they have a couple near-death experiences, and in a very touching scene, she confesses to him that she actually always hated him because she had a crush on a girl who was into him, but now she thinks he's a good friend. It's cute and I'm always a sucker for dumbass straight guy/genius lesbian dynamics (WATCH THE HALF OF IT DIRECTED BY ALICE WU) and it works well in the context of the show with all its adorable friendships and awkward romances. That being said, Stranger Things is sort of a mediocre show and all the stuff about the evil Soviet conspiracy was weird.

15. Broad City
Like I said above, I've only seen about 3 and a half seasons of Broad City, so I can't speak to any happenings in season 5. This is only about Ilana Wexler's sexuality. (Fun fact: I actually saw Ilana Glazer at my first pride. She was on a Broad City float and I waved to her and she waved back. It was pretty cool!) Ilana is one of two main characters in this show, which is about she and her best friend Abbi living in the big city in their twenties and getting up to all sorts of misadventures. Ilana is depicted as the more childish one, unable to hold down a job or a relationship, and always making horrible decisions like holding a pay-at-the-door party to pay for the exterminator she had to get to remove the rat who would steal her weed, and then discovering that the rat was still alive but it was pregnant so she decided the rat was her new favorite woman? Abbi, on the other hand, tries to be a little bit responsible. Ilana is for the most part in an on-again, off-again relationship with a dentist named Lincoln, but she's also very clearly bisexual, and she has a few affairs with women on the show. At one point she almost has a threesome but backs out because she's Realizing She's An Adult Now; at another point she's sitting with her parents in the park and catcalling everyone who walks by with references to sex acts she'd like to perform on them. In one particularly terrible episode, she goes to see a sex therapist because she hasn't had an orgasm since Trump's election, and she finally manages to orgasm while imagining a slideshow of Hilary Clinton speeches. What I'm saying is that Ilana is not my favorite representation of the bisexual woman community.

14. RWBY
Another show I stopped watching about a season back. This is an animated webseries that a beautiful woman at my college liked and I'm an idiot so I watched it and tried to bond with her over it. It's kind of fun and cute and has some good worldbuilding, although the writers don't know how to stop themselves when they have an idea. I can't remember how many ancient powers the characters are contending with now. Most of the fandom ships two of the main girls, Blake and Yang, who are clearly in love. In season 5 or 6, I don't remember, the show did finally put in some LGBT rep, revealing that one of the main guy's parents are two women, and then revealing that Blake's childhood friend from her dark past is a lesbian that was in love with Blake. I really liked those moments and I thought they were done well, if trope-y, and I love the childhood friend, Ilia, who represents an interesting point of view about the political factions in this world. It's a fun show and I like the lesbians but the plot just got too big, and honestly if they're not going to make Blake and Yang canon, there's not much point anymore.

13. Riverdale
Riverdale is... a lot. If you've ever read Archie Comics, then you still have no idea what Riverdale is about, because they really just took a hammer to Archie Comics and smashed it to bits. It's an edgy, "sexy" teen show with drama and nonsense and all the confusion of a soap opera with none of the charm. There's approximately 2 serial killers per season, more cults than I can count, several mob bosses, and worst of all, singing cheerleaders. All the main characters are in high school but they act like adults, which makes sense because all the actors are adults.
So why, you may ask, is this ranked higher up on the list than some of the others? Because as I said, I'm ranking these based on wlw representation, not on overall show quality. In season 1, we meet Cheryl Blossom, Riverdale's queen bee and heiress to a maple syrup fortune. She seems like just a popular mean girl, but we soon learn that she has a tormented past, and in season 2, we find out that she's a lesbian, and was forced into the closet by her evil mother. She develops a romance with the delightful punk girl Toni Topaz, and is sent to the local Convent of Evil Nuns for conversion therapy, and in a beautiful scene, Toni breaks in to rescue her, and they kiss in front of a projector playing homophobic propaganda to a group of closeted teenagers. Cheryl continues to stand up for LGBT rights and she and Toni are a well-rounded and beautiful couple. It's cheesy and campy, and it fits right in with the bubblegum nightmare that is Riverdale, and it genuinely touches my heart.

12. Crazy Ex Girlfriend (get ready for another long one)
If this list was about gender politics in general, Crazy Ex Girlfriend would be right at the top. Let me just be clear about that. It is a musical show about a mentally ill woman, Rebecca Bunch, trying to find happiness by following the narrative she was fed by media that if she develops a fairytale romance with her soulmate man, she will become happy. She unlearns this lesson throughout the show and it is such an EXCELLENT deconstruction of this idea that I think everyone ought to watch it.
Now, I never saw season 4 of Crazy Ex Girlfriend, and let me explain the colossally ridiculous reason why. In season 3, we have to endure a character named Nathaniel Plimpton. I hate Nathaniel Plimpton. He is a horrible rich man who has no redeeming qualities in my eyes. This is not a joke: when I have stomach pains and I want to know if I'm actually gonna throw up or if it's just a passing nausea, I think of Nathaniel Plimpton to kick-start my gag reflex. But I understand why he was in the show, and I even understand why he was depicted as some sort of dreamboat- it was part of Rebecca's narrative arc. However, at the time season 3 was coming out, I was in a very weird phase of life, and I thought of Nathaniel's existence as some sort of personal hate crime against me. And then, near the end of season 3, as the show got a little more ridiculous than it normally was, it seemed as though Nathaniel was actually going to be murdered, by this stalker side character they'd brought back for plot reasons. I was elated. I was going around telling people stuff like, "Oh happy day! It's Nathaniel Gets Murdered Day" because as I said, I was in a weird phase of life. Anyway, he obviously didn't actually get murdered, and meanwhile my real life was going to hell, and out of spite I decided I wouldn't watch season 4. I now do want to watch it, and I'm just waiting for a good time for me emotionally, but I haven't seen it, although I do know more or less what happens. So I can really only speak to the first three seasons.
On to the wlw rep stuff: there's a character named Valencia in the show. She's the girlfriend of Josh Chan, the boy that Rebecca has decided is her soulmate. In the first season, Rebecca paints her as the villain, the hot skinny girl that is keeping Josh away from her, and who doesn't get along with other girls clearly because she thinks she's so great. (However, in the second episode, Rebecca pretends like she doesn't hate Valencia to prove how rational she is, and she ends up making out with her to prove this point, and Valencia screams, "Why does everyone want to have sex with me?" and it's just repression city). After Josh leaves Valencia for Rebecca, and then subsequently leaves Rebecca to move back in with his mom, Rebecca and Valencia accidentally fall into a friendship, and we find out that Valencia- surprise!- is super likable. She's been trying to be the perfect girlfriend all these years, and much like Rebecca, she was trying to follow a narrative that she didn't fit into. Now she realizes that she doesn't want to be perfect and skinny and Instagram model-y and have a fairytale wedding with her high school sweetheart- she wants to be her own person.
The show had LGBT characters already, one of whom got a solo musical number coming out as bisexual in which he plays the saxophone in front of a bi flag and has a nuanced and complex coming out arc. So when I found out a spoiler that Valencia was also going to come out as bisexual (at the time, it was just vaguely LGBT, but I think she's been confirmed as bi), I was ready for another amazing arc from this show that handled gender stuff so well. And then the episode came out, and it was about GODDAMN NATHANIEL, AGAIN. What happens is, the episode starts with Rebecca hooking up with Nathaniel even though he has a girlfriend, and then we go to a bar where we see all the main characters doing different stuff, and then we zoom in and zoom out and they're all there again but now eight months have passed so, like, the guys talking about getting a puppy now have a dog, and the woman who just got pregnant is now eight months pregnant, etc. This was done to show that Rebecca and Nathaniel kept hooking up for eight months. And in this shot, we see in the "Before" part, Valencia meeting with a woman to chat about business, and in the "After" part, we see the two of them kissing and now dating. It's not expanded on, it's not addressed, nothing. This is a random woman we'd never seen before.
There IS something to be said for casual, not-a-big-deal LGBT rep, but this is not how you do it. A woman who clearly went through a lifetime of repression that was deeply tied to her heterosexual identity, suddenly and with no preamble being sprung into a romance with a woman we never met before? On a show where the ENTIRE CONCEPT is about deconstructing narratives related to trauma, repression, romance, and gender? And all in service of a plotline revolving around NATHANIEL GODDAMN PLIMPTON????
Anyway, this is high up on the list because I've heard it gets better in season 4, I really like Valencia as a character, and the show's handling of gender is very good, which affects the way it handles sexuality even if they made a stupid decision here.

11. Sense8
Honestly, I only saw one season of this, so I probably shouldn't have put this on the list, but I really loved Nomi and Amanita. I thought they were the sweetest couple. That's pretty much my entire analysis LOL.

10. The Legend of Korra
By my own rules, this shouldn't really count, since I said I wouldn't count "wink wink nudge nudge" representation. However, this was a landmark moment in representation of LGBT couples in children's shows and animation, so I'm counting it. Korra and Asami were a very subtly hinted-at couple, but they had good chemistry and I really liked their relationship buildup, even if it could easily have been read as friendship buildup. In the very last shot of the series, we see Korra and Asami holding hands as they go on a vacation, just the two of them, to the spirit world, and they look in each other's eyes as the camera pans up to a golden light, mirroring the way the original series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, ended with the Avatar kissing his romantic interest. The creators immediately confirmed it as a canon romance online, explaining that the network wouldn't allow them to make it explicit on a children's show, and later they released comics where Korra and Asami's romance was explicit and it also revealed the LGBT identity of other major characters. I really like the Avatar series and Korrasami was such an important moment for so many people, so this is probably the first item on this list that I don't have any major problems with. (Sense8 being a show that had its own problems)

9. Killing Eve
This outranks Korra on the basis of being a bit more explicit and in-your-face, but it is a little less wholesome. OK, a lot less wholesome. In some ways, that's a really good thing- LGBT women, and women in general, deserve to be depicted as complex, messy, flawed, and having less-than-perfect relationships. We deserve our versions of stuff like Breaking Bad, where the protagonist is clearly not a good person, but that moral messiness is explored in depth. Killing Eve is like that, and I think there's a place for narratives like that in prestige television: messy, morally messed up, complicated. The main character, Eve, is an M16 agent hunting down a highly skilled Russian assassin who goes by the name Villanelle. Villanelle, despite being a cold-blooded killer, is so much fun to watch, and her backstory is fascinating. Eve as a character is fantastic, and while she at first seems like the straight-man to Villanelle's wild/hilarious/evil counterpart, we discover that she holds a dark side and complexities that emerge from underneath the surface. Sandra Oh does a fantastic job playing her, and honestly her character is underutilized in a show where she's in the title.
Killing Eve doesn't delve deep into issues of sexuality or gender, but the relationship between Eve and Villanelle is fantastic specifically because it's not deep in that way- because in this context, that's what works. Their relationship is about the interplay of two complex minds and two players on a global chess board with lethal stakes. It's fascinating and sexy and played perfectly.

8. Doctor Who
To clarify: I mean "new Who," the reboot of the show that started in 2005 and continues today. I have seen very little of classic Who, the TV show that ran for decades starting in the 1960s, though I do know it was about as weird and ill-organized as the modern version.
Doctor Who is a vastly expansive show, whose setting is literally all of time and space, and whose main character regenerates into new versions regularly and gains new companions even more frequently. So it's tough to assign a "main cast," or main plot. That being said, there are some common threads, and the way it handles relationships is one of them. Relationships on this show are deep and interconnected, full of love and loyalty and bravery, and personal identity is very meaningful. That goes for the LGBT characters as well, who are written in campy ways much like the rest of the show, but are also genuine and loving and well-rounded, much like the rest of the show. My favorite example is my angel, Bill Potts, the lesbian from season 10. Her lesbianism is a fact of life, brought up in the first story she tells the Doctor to introduce herself, and shows up as she commiserates with Roman soldiers about sexuality, has a date with a girl interrupted by the Pope and a group of alien monks, or gets saved from Cybermen by a woman she loved and thought she'd lost years ago. Bill's lesbianism subtly informs her relationship with the Doctor, he himself having a less-than-normative relationship to sexuality and gender, and they have an understanding about being weirdos in many ways.
Sexuality also crops up with the character of Clara Oswald, who has a more "wink wink nudge nudge" representation of her sexuality, but is canonically bisexual and has made out with Jane Austen. There's also recurring characters Jenny and Madame Vastra, the lizard woman from Earth's prehistoric ages who's now married to a Victorian serving girl. And there are plenty of other members of the LGBT community in the show. I love LGBT identity in sci-fi, so this was naturally going to rank pretty high up.

7. Siren
I have not caught up on this show aaaahhh but I've been meaning to! It's a wonderful show about a ruthless group of mermaids whose habitat is being destroyed, and the marine biologist/fisherman community desperately trying to save them. The wlw rep in this show is an excellently depicted polyamorous relationship between the marine biologist couple, Ben and Maddie, who slowly both fall in love with the mermaid, Ryn. The way they explore learning to love in this new way, particularly for Ryn, who is unused to human mating rituals, is beautiful to see and is depicted so well. I highly recommend this show.

6. The Librarians
This show is also overall AMAZING. Please watch it. It's about an organization called The Library, devoted to cataloguing magical artifacts and information and to stopping that magic from falling into the wrong hands. The main characters are the crew of librarians, all geniuses in their own field, who do this work; their Guardian, a badass female bodyguard who has to learn to contend with this new magical world; and the amazing Jenkins, an immortal knight who just wants to retire to the Library annex and drink his tea goddammit. One of the librarians is Cassandra Cillian, a math genius whose parents treated her as a prize for collecting science trophies, until she developed a terminal illness, and then they treated her as a lost cause. When she joins the Library, she finds a way to make her life meaningful again by using her gift for math and science, mixed with her newfound knowledge of magic, to help with the Library's work. She spends much of the series overcoming her anxieties and learning to face up to her fears, in one episode even facing a magical serial killer who calls herself the Angel of Death, essentially metaphorically facing her own death.
It might be due to her anxiety and her tendency to hyperfocus on math that she doesn't notice that girls fall in love with her everywhere she goes? In one episode, the crew goes to a fairytale town and she accidentally gets cast in the role of Prince Charming, and girls follow her around in a lovestruck haze. In another, her two male coworkers are trying to flirt with an Italian heiress, and Cassandra, completely by accident, ends up mesmerizing the woman. This happens a lot. Cassandra being bisexual was a headcanon a lot of the fandom had, but it didn't become canon until season 3, when the crew goes to investigate a supernatural spa that, no spoilers, involves Cassandra having to think about her own mortality again. In this episode, she falls in love with a woman (and at one point, her two coworkers are very clearly rooting for her in the background, which I love) and at the end of the episode, the woman saves her life and then they kiss in a beautiful and cinematic scene. Like most of the romances on the show, it's a one-episode arc that doesn't come up again, but it was really beautiful and I loved it.

5. Anne with an E
This show has gotten a reputation for having an extremely annoying fanbase, because it got cancelled early and the fanbase wouldn't shut up about it online. I think it's unfair to characterize the whole show based on that, though. It's an adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, which was one of my favorite book series as a child, and it not only does the books justice, but in my opinion it improves on them. It explores the parts of the book that were only subtext, and gets into issues that the book ignored but that would have been relevant to turn-of-the-century Canadian agrarian life, such as residential schools, antiblack racism against migrant workers, and the abuse Anne endured from her foster families before arriving at Green Gables. One of the subplots that the show brings out of subtext is Diana Barry's Aunt Josephine, a woman who in the books is depicted as simply an eccentric spinster. In the show, she is explicitly written as a lesbian whose lifelong "bosom friend" was actually her partner. Anne, Diana, and an original character, Cole, who is a gay boy, go to visit Josephine for the weekend, where they learn of Josephine's true identity as a gay woman. Diana is shocked at first but grows to accept it. Anne is delighted to see that there are different ways to love, and she thrives in the environment of the turn-of-the-century gay community that hangs out at Josephine's house, which is explored and depicted so well and so beautifully that it made me cry. Cole, the original character, finds himself in this environment and realizes the reason why he felt so different from the other kids and why they bullied him, and he finds acceptance there and ends up moving in with Aunt Josephine. Watching one of my favorite childhood books open up to make room for my identity in such a caring way was really healing, and that's why I ranked this one so high up.

4. Dickinson
Emily Dickinson, who you may also know as my wife, is by far my favorite poet, which may have influenced my views on this show a little bit. I studied Dickinson's work in college at length and visited her house in Amherst and basically I love her so much, so of course I watched this show immediately, and I probably would have loved it no matter what, but trust me it DELIVERED. It has absurdist elements, plays with vernacular so that the show will alternate between modern-day slang and poetry and more era-appropriate language, fills the scenes with fantasy creatures of Dickinson's imagination such as Death in his carriage or hallucinogenic bees, and explores all sorts of historical issues and stories of the Dickinson family and associates. In one episode, Emily goes to visit Henry David Thoreau, played by John Mulaney, and her image of him is shattered when she finds out that he was a bit of a hypocrite about his living-independent-in-the-woods thing. The show, of course, depicts Emily Dickinson, as is historically accurate, as a bisexual woman who had an affair both with her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert and a male fellow writer whose name I forgot but he was a real guy. I know that most people, thank God, have learned by now that the image of Emily Dickinson as some bland needlepointing spinster who wiled away looking at butterflies is totally inaccurate, and that she was actually a firecracker who lived on the razor's edge of death and religion and sex, but it's nice to see a show that so fully depicts her love and her poetry. Yes, Emily Dickinson's love of women is vital to the show and is dear to my heart. Who but a woman that loves women could understand language the way she did?

3. Steven Universe
Wow, I have written a lot so far. Sorry. Yikes. Anyway. Steven Universe is an undeniably gay show. There's not much I can say about it that hasn't already been said, but basically, it depicts all sorts of relationships between women, including romantic ones, including unhealthy romantic ones. Which I love. The "women" in question are female-presenting aliens from outer space who are technically manifestations of light emitting from gemstones, but they pretty much all function as women. The relationship between Ruby and Sapphire is one of the things that made me realize I was gay, because I was crying about them constantly. Their relationship also manifests in a metaphor for commitment that is a "permafusion", aka where they stay permanently fused into one body, the character of Garnet, who represents their love. There's a lot of discourse about What That Means, but honestly I think it means that they're aliens so the way they express love is obviously going to be different than it is for humans.
I also love the relationship between Pearl and Rose, specifically because it is not healthy. Rose Quartz was the leader of a rebellion in the alien society, and while she is charismatic and was a leader in a movement for good, she could be incredibly selfish. Pearl lived to serve her (in more ways than one, which is due to a spoiler that I won't give away) and saw her identity as inextricably tied to Rose. When Rose dies (before the beginning of the series) in the process of giving birth to Steven, the protagonist, Pearl feels as though she's lost her purpose, and sometimes tries to make Steven the new person she follows everywhere. She was very obviously in love with Rose, but that love was not reciprocated. Sure, Rose probably had romantic feelings for Pearl, but she treated her like a given, like an object to use, not someone to cherish, like Pearl did for her. And as Steven grows up and becomes a teenager and expresses to Pearl that he doesn't want her to worship him, and that he wants Pearl to be able to be her own person, Pearl learns just how unhealthy her relationship with Rose was- and she grows as a person. That story is really important to me. And in general, the fact of these relationships existing in a show for kids, being depicted in such a good way that is digestible for kids but still teaches lessons about the ways that you can love and how to care for yourself and others, is very important.

2. Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet
I'm getting exhausted because I kind of shot for the moon in this article which no one will ever have the patience to read LOL. Anyway.
This show is an absolute GIFT and everyone should watch it. It's an office comedy about the makers of a video game called Mythic Quest, created by a narcissist named Ian Grimm who has to learn how to balance his own ego with respecting his co-creator, Poppy Lee, a neurotic yet chaotic nerd whom I love. And it has Danny Pudi, aka Abed from Community, aka the most underrated actor of all time, in it. And it definitely created the best one of those "quarantine specials" that shows have been making. Anyway. Two of its main cast, Dana and Rachel, are wlw. They're the video game testers who spend all day in a room going through the video game to find bugs, and it is absurdly clear in episode one that Rachel is over the moon in love with Dana. She comes out as a lesbian so that she can have an excuse to join a diversity committee and spend more time with Dana (I mean, she is a lesbian, but she only comes out to join the useless committee). Her crush is adorable and hilarious and extremely relatable, and it's clear that Dana has feelings for her too, and their relationship is the best thing ever. They're clearly going to be a bit of a slow burn and I love the fact that lesbians can also get dorky office romance stories, and not only that, but actually well-written ones.

1. She Ra and the Princesses of Power
You knew this was going to be number 1! If you have ever seen this show, you knew it was going to be number 1. Due to my headache from spending too long writing this, and the fact that I can't talk about this show for too long without getting emotional, I won't be going into TOO much detail (that's a lie lmao). But oh my god this show is perfect this show is amazing I love it so much... yes, yes, I know, nothing is perfect and it has flaws, but seriously, this show is so good. It's a reboot of the 80s She Ra, but with a lot more nuance to the characters. If you remember a bunch of Internet dudes losing their minds a few years back about how a cartoon girl had been redesigned and now you can't see her boobs as much and oh no the feminists are taking over, it was probably about She Ra. The show just... oh, I can feel myself going into talking about it too much. Perhaps I should have showed this restraint with some of the other shows on this list. Just. This show's characters are written with such love and attention. The way this show depicts trauma... so accurately, and so carefully... the redemption arcs... the characterization... the worldbuilding... Google it if you want to know the plot, because I suck at summarizing plots succinctly, and I will definitely suck at it with this show. But it is about an alien planet full of magical girls and most of them are extremely gay. The main romance is an enemies-to-lovers slow burn full of forgiveness, childhood trauma, long distance flirting, and at its core, just beautifully written love. There is also my favorite character, Scorpia, a butch lesbian who's been raised by the Horde, the colonizing force created by a clone from an evil empire, and who despite her brainwashing has always tried to be positive and kind and loving to everyone she meets. She loves another girl in the Horde with all her heart (it's ambiguous whether it's platonic or romantic) and the girl treats her terribly for it. Eventually, she has the courage to stand up for herself and make her own choices, and (SPOILER ALERT) by the end she has a romance with a princess who is just as loving and open-hearted as she is. It's making me cry right now just to think about it, not to make my own personal traumas too obvious ha ha ha... And that girl from the horde who treated her badly? That's Catra, who is written with just as much nuance, and who is given the narrative space to find herself and fall in love with a girl who treats her right, too. There's also gay men, m/f relationships, nonbinary representation, and a married lesbian couple who have a beautiful arc about loving each other. The show depicts amazing loyal friendships that have their own ups and downs, too. It's a show that's good for kids and adults alike, that I think just about anyone would really enjoy- though it will make you cry! The creator is a lesbian and an absolute sweetheart. I've really seen nothing but positive response to this show, even from people critiquing parts of it.


OK! Whew! And, as promised, a very short and in-no-particular-order list of "wink wink nudge nudge" or background/less important wlw rep shows:
1. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina- a Riverdale spinoff, this show is not quite as cringy as Riverdale, but makes up for it by being about a Satanic cult with real magic. One of the main characters is a trans boy, which is great because positive trans representation is very important. The wlw rep is counted here as background because it JUST happened- in the last season finale, Sabrina's Aunt Zelda, a really cool witch, kissed Marie, a New Orleans witch who had been recently introduced to the story. I can't wait to see where their romance goes because they are an excellent pair, but yeah, there's not much content of that yet.
2. The Magicians- oh, the Magicians. I will not get into what happened there. I did stop watching after season 4 but I do mean to finish it sometime. The show has a side character, the delightfully bitchy hedge witch Marina, revealed to be a lesbian, which is pretty cool. Main character Margo, who's also very cool, is VERY subtly hinted to be bisexual, but she unfortunately ends up in the most bullshit heterosexual relationship ever, I will not get into it, I hate it, it's literally with the actor who played Frasier Crane's son.
3. The Good Place- Eleanor is heavily hinted to be bisexual. Like to the point where it might as well be canon. This show takes place in the afterlife and it's very interesting and fun, and Eleanor was kind of an asshole so she's supposed to be in hell, long story, it's complicated, there's spoilers. But due to her assholery, her sexuality consists of a lot of objectifying people? We see her do it to men a lot but we also see her do it to women, namely Tahani, another resident in her afterlife neighborhood. She eventually learns to love and ends up with a man named Chidi who's an amazing character, and becomes good friends with Tahani. She's never confirmed to be bi but it is cool to see a woman so openly flirting with other women and being explicit about her sexual feelings- though the racial dynamics of that are a little iffy when it comes to how she treats Tahani.
4. Russian Doll- a show that would be #1 on almost any list if I were ranking solely by show quality, this show is a masterpiece exploring life, death, trauma, love, friendship, Judaism, the universe, time, mothers, daughters, mental illness, drugs, New York City, the nature of cats, art, and Natasha Lyonne. Surprisingly, Lyonne is not the one who plays a lesbian, but she has a whole host of wacky queer friends who populate the background of the show, and they are all interesting.
5. Fleabag- a fun show that was given too much credit for inventing womanhood or whatever it didn't do. The main character, simply named Fleabag, is implied to be into women, but honestly I read that more as "she was lonely and in a weird place and a recovering sex addict and this show doesn't understand gender as much as it thinks it does."
6. Shrill- watched this show in one sitting and curled up in a ball because it brought up traumas I'd been recovering from and beat them up and then just let them sit there. It's a show about being a fat woman and how that affects the way you navigate the world, and the main character is just treated like garbage by so many people who she continues to appease, but her roommate, a black lesbian who is just as fat as she is but is depicted as being Strong Enough To Handle It And Not Allowed Her Own Vulnerability, she treats her roommate terribly and takes her for granted constantly. The show hit a lot of real-world points but I really didn't like how she treated her roommate, especially considering how many terrible people she let get away with things, and how she was doing what this Twitter user (@maidensblade) I follow calls "vulnerability hoarding"- this whole "well, I'm a fat woman and I deal with soooo much, so I'm the only one who has problems" and her roommate is like, "uh, I'm also a fat woman?" and the writers of the show are like, "shut up, roommate, let the straight white main character speak" and it's insufferable.

Wow, OK! So this was the longest post ever. I think I sufficiently explained in the preamble waaaay up at the beginning all my reasons for making this post, and the conclusions I have drawn is that I have too many opinions! Dear God! Thank you for reading, or not reading, as the case may be! See you when I have another idea for a post!