Jai Rodrigez Might Give The CW Its Best Gay Character to Date

After his recent appearance in Lady Gaga's "Telephone" music video, Jai Rodriguez is headed to The CW network for a promising pilot. Looks like The Queer Eye for the Straight Guy alum has moved well beyond his somewhat dubious reality show credential of "culture expert" and is now quite credibly a successful actor.

Jai has booked a role in an upcoming pilot for The CW called H.M.S. That's H.M.S. as in Harvard Medical School – not H.M.S. as in Pinafore, which is too bad really, as I wouldn't have minded seeing  the man in a Gilbert & Sullivan musical.

Instead of comic opera he'll be playing Carlos Guerrero, a sassy gay Latino med student. According to the sides we've seen, when viewers first meet the character he's wearing tennis shoes that light up when he walks and he's brazenly checking out a handsome fellow med student's derriere.

Despite the lighthearted and somewhat stereotypical early characterization, the part could wind up having some real depth. For starters, Carlos has overcome a lot of obstacles to get to med school. He grew up poor in El Paso, Texas – the child of immigrants. He also had leukemia as a kid, so he spent much of his childhood in hospitals. Since his parents were often on the road for work, his "family" were the doctors and nurses who treated him. That's what gave Carlos the inspiration to pursue medicine as a career.

According to a tweet from Jai, Carlos is a series regular. That means, if H.M.S. gets picked up The CW could finally have a scripted program with a substantive gay character. While it's true The CW has had some recurring gay characters – Like Eric on Gossip Girl, or Caleb on Melrose Place – the only other gay main cast member we're aware of was Marco on Privileged, and despite that character's "regular" status you hardly ever saw him.

We've given the network a hard time recently over their poor record of gay male representation, but this pilot order might be a step in the right direction. Congrats to Jai for booking the role, and here's hoping H.M.S. is good enough to get a pickup.

Interesting side note: Heroes star Hayden Panettiere is attached to H.M.S. as co-executive producer!

Hat tip to Craig Byrne over at KSITETV.com for first bringing this item to our attention.