AfterEllen.com - Lesbian Miss Match Episode a Missed Opportunity

So Kate sets her up with the only lesbian she knows, a woman who shows up for dinner with her newborn baby (because the baby-sitter didn't show), proceeds to talk about baby's bowel movements, nurses her at the table, and then angrily confronts an ex-girlfriend who has followed her to the restaurant. The final scene is Michelle holding the baby while she spits up all over her expensive outfit.

Dismayed to hear of Michelle's date from hell, but having run out of lesbians, Kate arranges a Ladies Night at the bar where her friend works so she can meet more lesbians. When Ladies Night comes around, it is the usual Hollywood version of a lesbian gathering--i.e. strange outfits, no butch lesbians, and a woman wearing the ever-popular sailor hat--with "Ladies Night" playing in the background. Kate proceeds to interview several women, including a Lord of the Rings fanatic, a woman with a large libido, and a straight women who hasn't yet realized she's in the wrong place, until Kate finally meets a witty, intelligent woman named Joanna (Kathleen Rose Perkins), whom she thinks will be a good fit for Michelle.

Michelle calls Kate to tell her the date went really well, and she was going to introduce Joanna to her mother at lunch later that day. When Kate runs into Judy later that afternoon, Judy tells Kate that when Joanna was in the restroom, Judy told Michelle that Joanna is way out of Michelle's league. "Joanna is a glamorous lipstick lesbian. She is vice president of a movie studio. She's friends with Ellen," she explains to Kate. "Michelle's a bohemian. Trust me, a month from now, Joanna is gonna be dating a beautiful young starlet with perfect breasts and Michelle is gonna be back on Zoloft. I'm just trying to spare her some heartache."

Kate chastises Judy for not giving Joanna a chance, and Judy reluctantly agrees to ease up on her criticism for now. Next we see Kate and Judy meeting up with Michelle and Joanna and Joanna's father Morty (Barry Pearl) at an opening at Michelle's gallery; the two women are holding hands and looking very happy. But when Morty teases Kate for being "the one who corrupted my daughter," Judy misinterprets it as a slam on her daughter, and goes off on him and then on Michelle when she says she wasn't offended by his comment and storms off.

That's the last we see of the lesbians as the storyline now segues into a matchmaking session for Judy and Morty, as Kate successfully conspires to get them together over their mutual love of shoes.

Both Michelle and Joanna (as well as the unnamed breast-feeding date) are interesting characters who don't fit neatly into stereotypical categories--at least as much as we can tell from the thirty seconds devoted to their characters. Michelle and Joanna's personalities are far less fleshed-out on-screen than most of the dateless-heterosexuals Kate sees every week; Michelle's breast-feeding date doesn't even get a name. It's almost as if the writers believed that introducing the women as lesbians was enough--because what else is there to know about someone besides that they're gay?

Judy as Michelle's heterosexual mother, on the other hand, gets plenty of attention. She is very pro-gay, even aggressively so, a woman who clearly has no problem with her daughter's sexuality. At one point, Judy even says wistfully to Kate "You are such a beautiful girl. Why couldn't you be a lesbian?" Kate just shrugs with an apologetic smile.

Judy's unwillingness, however misplaced at times, to tolerate any negative statements about her daughter's sexuality is refreshing to see on television. It would have been even more refreshing, however, if Judy's feelings about her daughter's relationship hadn't overshadowed the relationship itself.

The episode gets some credit for demystifying lesbian dating and humanizing the lesbian characters by showing Michelle's love life to be just as awkward, challenging, and full of potential pitfalls as that of the heterosexual women Kate is usually trying to set up. In this way, Miss Match is subtly sending the message that lesbian relationships are equal to heterosexual relationships--no small statement in the current U.S. political climate of proposed Constitutional Amendments to ban gay marriage.

Unfortunately, Miss Match undermines this message by subordinating the lesbian characters and relationship to the heterosexual matchmaking storyline (with Kate's female gynecologist and a con man) running concurrently throughout the episode, as well as to the Judy-Morty relationship at the end. It's as if in one breath Miss Match is saying "lesbian relationships are valid and important," and in the second breath adding "but not as important as the heterosexual relationships and characters on the show."

And that to the the fact that Kate's first (and probably only) lesbian match-up this season was during November Sweeps, and it's hard not to feel just a little bit exploited.

This episode of Miss Match succeeds at expanding the show's definition of love to include lesbian relationships, but fails to give them the same attention as heterosexual ones. In sending such a mixed message, the Miss Match writers may have maximized ratings in the short-term, but they also missed an opportunity to make a more lasting impact--and to attract more lesbian viewers in the future.