In MTV’s new female-focused comedy, out comic/actress Scout Durwood is a sexually fluid marijuana delivery girl whose best friend/business partner, Paige (Jessica Rothe) isn’t 100 percent straight, either.
“She’s relatively traditional but… because she has such an exploratory, open roommate, best friend, business partner, all of these things, and also jut the nature of her business, all roads may lead to Rome,” Jessica said. “I think she, without knowing it, is actually an incredibly open person.”
Without spoiling too much, suffice to say that Paige has a few marijuana-induced fantasies that include some famous women.
“I think what’s exciting to see is queer as usual, as opposed to gay and that’s what the show’s about,” Scout said. “So I’m excited the show is about queer as usual. … I think Jordan doesn’t ever define it; she never labels it. So my fingers are crossed, double-crossed, triple crossed that we get some more gender fluidity and gender bending in it.”
Check back for the full interview with Scout and Jessica the week of the premiere.
Amazon will release all six episodes of Tig Notaro‘s One Mississippi soon, and besides the star herself, we’ll meet three other queer women characters who will star as her love interests.
“In my real life, the real life Tig, I was going through a break-up and, at the same time, I had run into this actress I had worked with on a previous project, and I’d always had a thing for her, and it was kind of the perfect distraction in the middle of the hell I was going through,” Tig said, referencing the year she had cancer, an intestinal disease and lost her mother in a freak accident. “Because she really made me feel attractive, and cool, and took my mind off of all of that. Even though I knew she wasn’t a long-term person, she was exactly what I needed at that time And then on top of that, I also had met somebody that I thought had the potential for a real lifetime relationship and it all just kind of overlapped in this crazy way.”
Casey Wilson is introduced in the pilot as Tig’s girlfriend, Brooke, but we’ll also seeing Tig’s real life wife Stephanie Allynne in at least one episode (pictured above), and Jill Bartlett as Jessie in two.
Check back for the full interview with Tig the week of the premiere.
Vanessa Ferlito (Graceland) joins the cast this season as FBI Agent Tammy Gregorio, and CBS President of Entertainment Glenn Geller said Tammy will be an out lesbian.
“They’re doing a storyline a little later in the fall where the audience will understand that and see that,” he said during a TCA executive session.
This week, TVLine reported Tammy has been sent to New Orleans from D.C. “to investigate Pride’s team-triggered by the departure of Meredith Brody (Zoe McLellan) in the wake of that season-ending Homeland Security/Agent Russo hullabaloo.” Described as “a by-the-book bureaucrat,” Tammy will have “a completely different way of doing things-as well as a mysterious past-putting her at odds with both the team and the town.”
Broadway star Carly Hughes is part of the American Housewife ensemble as Angela, one of the “misfits” of Westport, Connecticut.
“I’m the black best friend. Gotta have one,” she joked. As the best friend to star Katy Mixon‘s Katie, Carly commiserates with her friends about the Stepford moms they live amongst. She’s also going through a divorce from her wife.
“I play a lesbian, but the best part to me is that it’s not about her being a lesbian, which was important to me, because I’m not a lesbian, but I also wanted to make sure I did it justice,” Carly said. “And same as playing an African American woman, I didn’t want it to be a schtick or a spiel and neither did [the show]. It was a beautiful match.”Carly describes Angela as “funny and silly and kooky but also down to earth,” and she’s willing to do just about anything for her friend.
“She’s the friend that will be like, ‘Girl, no. Just, no.'”
Check back for the full interview with Carly the week of the premiere.
As we reported last week, comics The Family’s Floriana Lima has joined the cast of Supergirl as out lesbian Detective for the National City Police Department, Maggie Sawyer. Maggie will “take a special interest in the cases involving aliens” when Season 2 returns on The CW, and EPs Ali Adler and Sarah Schecter describe her as a “real life superhero.”
The second season premiere of The Real O’Neal coincides with National Coming Out Day, which is kind of on purpose said Executive Producer Casey Johnson.
“The story is Kenny want to start an LGBT club at his school, nd he thinks that all these fabulous gay guys are gonna come out and join him and we have one solitary lesbian who joins and he’s pretty disappointed,” Casey said. “The story actually takes an interesting turn where she hasn’t come out to her family yet and he’s the one saying ‘You have to be the one to do it. You have to come out to your parents; that’ll get other people to join’ and then he realizes it’s not safe for her to come out to her family.”
That solitary lesbian, Allison, is played by Ramona Young.
“She is hilarious, she’s so droll and funny,” Casey said. “We were excited to tell this story because although it’s been challenging, it’s been fairly easy for [Kenny to come out], but we wanted to show the other side a little bit.”
Allison will be in several episodes this season, including the Halloween episode where Casey says she’ll “takes a shine to a ballerina, so you’ll see some [romantic] things there.”
Out comic Fortune Feimster made a guest appearance as Dougie on Season 1 of the hit CBS series, but when she returns in Season 2, she’ll be questioning her sexuality.
“She’s playing a sexually confused character and we’re building an arc where she comes out of the closet,” creator Justin Adler told TV Insider. “The women, Heather (Betsy Brandt) and Jen (Zoe Lister-Jones) and Colleen are going to take her out to a gay bar and try to meet somebody so we’re super excited to explore that side of things.”
Fortune will also appear in the season premiere and several other episodes this season, as she’s moving in with Matt (Thomas Sadoski) and Colleen (Angelique Cabral).
In Season 1 of Red Oaks, a brief reference is made that Jennifer Grey‘s character, Judy Meyers, is “a lesbian… or I guess technically bisexual.” Later, she seems to take a liking to her yoga teacher and wonders if she’s been living an unfulfilled life.Season 2 takes this idea and runs with it because now that Judy’s marriage is on its way out and her children are grown and no longer seem to need her, she’s ready to explore who she really is.
“For me, this whole season was about Judy Meyers figuring out who she is after 22 years of being in a like, in a time machine. It’s like she comes out, and, like, the world is different than it was when she became a mother and a wife,” Jennifer said during the Red Oaks panel. “…And not knowing if it’s just this marriage that she wasn’t into, or maybe it’s not maybe it’s not men, or maybe it’s just a different man, or maybe it’s a woman. And because it’s then, not now, and because she came from a time when it wasn’t okay to be gay, and it’s just like it’s just so new, the idea of what that is, that nothing she has ever explored.”
Comic Beth Stelling guest stars as Judy’s new friend and possible love interest, because things don’t quite work out with the yoga teacher.
“I would say that I’m kind of tiptoeing into territory of the lesbian community, unsure, not sure if I want that, I don’t want that,” Jennifer told AfterEllen. “And the woman who I was interested in last year, the yoga teacher, she is unavailable—which you’ll see why when this season resumes, because I left too much time between. So she takes out me out with friends and they want to introduce me to different girls. It’s kind of going from being a New Jersey housewife to a karaoke gay club with a bunch of lesbians who are, like, licking their lips!”
