Best. Gay. Week. Ever. (September 5, 2008)

Six gay characters gone too soon
All this talk thinking about what the fall TV season has in store got me thinking about past shows and characters who didn’t really get a chance to catch on before the Grim Reaper of Cancellation struck its death blow. So here are the gay characters I wish we’d got to know a little better before they shuffled off to TV heaven. I’m not saying the shows were all great, just that there was something different and good about them. And keep in mind what we've got in their place such as, oh say, Joshuah from Big Brother.

Fred Savage, Zachary Quinto, Anthony Azizi

1) Mitch Crumb, Crumbs Okay, this sitcom created by out scribe Marco Pennette wasn’t brilliant, but it deserved a much better fate than ABC’s axing it after only five episodes. Crumbs got just that with ABC treating it like a poor stepchild. Maybe if Mitch (played pitch perfect by Fred Savage) had been a bitchy gay assistant, a fashionista, or the heroines best gay friend instead of a pretty typical gay guy, it might have lasted longer. Did I mention it also featured Jane Curtin? There is no justice I tell you…

2) Vince Taylor, Commander in Chief A show with an out, HIV positive character of Middle Eastern descent? Okay, that was never going to last. To be fair, the demise of this show, which debuted on ABC in 2005 and ran for eighteen episodes, had nothing to do with Vince’s character played by Anthony Azizi, but was instead killed off by behind the scene’s drama and network incompetence. But it just figured that it took down one of the more complex, interesting gay men on television. Did I mention it also starred Geena Davis? What is it about show’s with cool women biting the bullet?

3) Sasan, So NoTorious Before he was Sylar on Heroes and Young Spock on the new Star Trek movie, Zachary Quinto was the fictionalized version of Tori Spelling’s real life best gay friend. And he was hilarious and sexy even if he was a bit of cliché. The fictionalized Sasan may only have had ten episodes, but the real Sasan – named Mehran – lives on and even shows up on Tori’s reality show now and again.

John Benjamin Hickey and Christopher Sieber, Christopher Wiehl, Wilson Cruz

4) Simon Banks, Philip Stoddard, It’s All Relative Yet another ABC show (Hey, since they are just about only network putting on gay characters, it makes sense they’d have all the canceled shows,) this one featured two out actors – John Benjamin Hickey and Christopher Sieber – as a gay couple who were also the parents of a grown daughter. The network pulled the show two episodes short of its first season finale in 2003 allegedly due to poor ratings though, in truth, it was doing just fine. Speculation was that the network was nervous over featuring such a positive gay couple. 

5) Enrique “Rickie” Vasquez, My So-Called Life Volumes have been written already about this fine show meeting an early demise. However, I still felt compelled to mourn it just a little bit longer. If there were any justice in the world, Wilson Cruz would have his own series by now instead of showing up as a barely-there gay cliche in dreck such as Raising the Bar.

6) Jake, Love Monkey This CBS show, sort of a Sex and the City for guys (doomed from the start, no?) featured Jake (Christopher Wiehl), a closeted former baseball player turned sportscaster. The show only lasted eight episodes and in that final episode we saw Jake pondering coming out. Oh, what could’ve been…