Dualcasting

Pamela Chan

CTCS 412 Blog 

Katherine Sender’s discussions in “Dualcasting” touched upon the various ways in which television networks attempted to market gay and lesbian shows—and how fragile gay representations really are in the current day commercial television marketplace. Today, there seems to be a plethora of story lines that revolve around gay characters—for example, there’s Glee, The L Word, and Grey’s Anatomy. There have also been shows like Will & Grace, Six Feet Under, and Ellen who have successfully “brought new, likable, and increasingly complex gay and lesbian characters” to the small screen. The list goes on.

As Sender mentions: “Whereas, as recently as the early 1990s, the inclusion of a gay character would typically be the focus of some dramatic ‘problem’ to be resolved, today, particularly for programs that aim at coveted younger viewers, it seems that the presence of gay people is a necessary guarantor of realism” (304).

But it was only a decade ago, during the ‘summer of gay love,’ that this new insurgence of LGBT programming came racing forward to dominate American television networks. There was a development in the gay market—“gay and lesbian consumers went from a marginalized and largely stigmatized group to a desirable marketing niche in this period” (305)—and it seems that advertisers and media executives used this ‘change’ as an incentive to target an even broader audience, a “dual” audience.

You would think that the target audience of most gay programming would be aimed directly towards the LGBT community. Sender mentions, however, that with these new shows, gay audiences were actually a “secondary priority to females viewers” (307). It was rather interesting to find out that network executives were actually hoping to use the debuts of Queer Eye and Boy Meets Boy to attract women aged 18-49. Surprisingly, they actually wanted to be associated with the gay market in order to appeal to heterosexual consumers—because by including LGBT characters in shows, two distinct audiences could be attracted at the exact same time. As Bravo President Jeff Gaspin put it, the network had a “dual target.”

Sender, however, seems skeptical of “dualcasting.” Towards the latter half of her article, she brings to light that although these ‘queer marketing strategies’ had proved successful in Bravo’s case, there is always the question of whether or not gay-themed shows are actually here to stay in the long run. “It remains to be seen if executives will remain committed to gay content,” she says. Things change, demographics shift, popular culture strays from one thing to the next all the time—there simply is no guarantee that “once gay programming has successfully boosted ratings and shifted audience demographics” that “gay characters and topics won’t simply be sidelined.” (i.e. the initial success of Queer Eye fell flat just one year later).

In many ways this is all just another marketing rouse-- a novel new plan from Bravo network executives to boost ratings and increase revenue for the time being. But Sender asks us an important question: What happens after all of the “novelty” has worn off? What happens when Gaspin and his network no longer need to develop new gay topics for their shows? When that time comes, will they choose to remain committed to the gay-themed programing that they have been consistently marketing? Or will they choose to kick aside their dedication to marketing gay representations? Only time will tell.