Both Huffington Post and Queerty are reporting that Logo has made a huge decision: To abandon the mission to program “gay TV.”
According to the reports, the attempt to get gays and their haggish friends watch a network just because gay people were on it didn’t work. The evidence: The A-List: New York netted about 150,000 viewers per ep; Bravo’s Real Housewives averages about 4 million. Apparently, the lesson was: Gays won’t tune into awful, cliche-ridden, badly produced reality shows just because they feature gay stereotypes.
Uh-huh.
This is, to me, ridiculous news. What Logo is basically doing is blaming its audience — “gays should want to watch other gays, but they won’t,” seems to be the message. It has nothing to do with, say, the programming being terrible.
Logo, to me, has always struggled to produce quality shows targeted to gay viewers. I don’t mind 1 Girl, 5 Gays … except that it’s shot in Canada and airs first on MTV. Imagine, gay Texans not caring about a bunch of Canucks offering their opinions on Avril Lavigne and what they did in “grade 8!” Surprise! Hey, maybe if you did the same show with Americans, gaymericans would watch.
True, Real Housewives has taken some critical drubbings; on the other hand, not all have been successful (when’s the last time you saw an original RH: Miami or RH: D.C.?). And let’s face it: The quality on many of the Logo shows is not great. The one about the gay guy who shoots Angelenos full of Botox? Ugh. Who could stomach such nonsense? And the movies they air tend to be older, heavily edited (to remove offensive content… you know, like gay stuff) and irrelevant, not to mention overladen with ads. Plus, the network itself is horribly managed: Shows are pulled or start late all the time, so you set your DVR and miss that last five minutes… or see the ending of the movie you were about to rent.
Please, Logo, stop blaming the gays for your network not working. You used to cover some news (with a straight guy who was pretty but with the personality of a pencil in brief segments ), but don’t do anything serious; I love RuPaul’s shows, but that can’t be the only thing on your network.
So consider this: Program better TV. Schedule better shows. Pick better movies. Hire smarter (gayer?) producers. Don’t assume all gay people are — or want to watch — bitchy 20something queeny boys who would sooner so take meth than mention politics intelligently. You make better shows, I guarantee you, we’ll tune in.
Well, not now. Abandon us, will ya? Just wait to see how quickly we abandon you.
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