Earlier this week ABC Family's sci-fi teen mystery Kyle XY aired a gay-friendly episode in which the main characters learned a lesson about discrimination against same-sex couples. The response from gay and lesbian viewers was one of pleasant surprise, although the haters of course came out full-force on the show's message boards with the usual bigoted rhetoric in tow.
AfterEllen.com's Malinda Lo had the opportunity to nab Julie Plec, supervising producer/writer of Kyle XY, at yesterday's TCA conference and get a few comments on the episode and series in general, and we're tickled to be able to share it here.
AfterElton.com: The episode, "Free To Be You and Me," was so positive and so inclusive, and I was wondering if Kyle XY would ever take the next step and have a gay character on the show.
Julie Plec: I think that it's always a possibility. I mean, I'm a big believer that what you never want to do is … just introduce a gay character for the sake of having a gay character. You really want it to be born out of who that character is and what they're going through in life. And because we're a tight-knit group of seven, it would take a lot of time to evolve the ability to bring somebody like that into their life so that it's not just the guest star of the week. I love it when they do it on other shows because it's very important, but to just kind of like, "Hey guess what? This character is coming out, and it's very painful," and you know we'll never see them again — I don't want to do it that way. I think that as seasons go on, there's always the possibility of that, because I think a positive portrayal in television is like sort of the most important thing we can do. We got hammered on some of the chat boards for that.
AE: Did you really? I was wondering if you got any negative feedback.
JP: There was a surprising reaction to what was considered an amoral presentation of the gay agenda, like pushing the gay agenda. … You know, the angry kind of response … it's what you would expect, but I was really surprised and disappointed … because I thought it was such an innocent, positive portrayal, deliberately not heavy-handed and deliberately not guest star of the week-based. Just, you know, a nice story about Kyle who is a person without judgment, without bias, who innocently wouldn't even think anything would be any different than anybody else. I was surprised.
AE: I was wondering if you were going to get that kind of response because it is on ABC Family.
JP: It was that sense of, you know, "I'm protecting my children from —" which, that just makes me want to get angry and get on the boards in the middle of the night and be like, "Listen, you!"
AE: I was also curious as to why you chose to have the two straight girls who are friends kiss each other.
JP: Actually, that was born out of two things. One, those two girls have the greatest off-screen chemistry relationship. They're very good friends; they are very wild, fun, wonderful, great girls who just are so bubbly and sparkly, and we all have this joke because we all love each other so much, it's like we could all make out with each other. And it's not a sexual thing … we just have a lot of love for each other. So it was born out of that joke and knowing that the two girls would be interested and willing to represent that. To me, that wasn't a sexual thing; that was a point to Charlie. That was a point to say, "Look at you, you jerk: You're a cheater, you're a liar, you're judgmental, and we would rather explore this with each other in this one moment than ever get anywhere near you." And so it was … sort of like, "Screw you."
AE: Did you ever consider having some of the gay characters in that episode — there were some at the dance — did you ever consider having them show affection with each other instead of having the straight characters do it?
JP: On a seven-day show that you're shooting on a budget, you tend not to give stories to day players and guest stars in the same way that on a bigger show, where you could have somebody come in, have a nifty little story line and go out — I mean, if you look at the context of all our episodes, with … maybe one or two exceptions … we rarely let other characters have moments that push our story forward, because we have so many characters that we want to service. So if you're looking about breaking a story, we could have our two little guest stars have a cute moment, but then we're taking story away and we're taking moments away from our core group, which is the format of how we do it.
Agreed, shoving a gay