The acclaimed American novelist Robert Coover, who recently passed away, once explained why he skipped out on reading perhaps more high-brow fiction in favor of “sci-fi, detective novels, Westerns, pornography, spy stories, horror and romance,” likening them to “folk and fairy tales” because he found them “so much more alluring to a writer trying to burrow inside the collective psyche.”
A quick glance through the small-screen fare on sale during the many decades of the TV market known as Mipcom yields much the same pleasure. Look down your nose at the kiddie shows and action hours, telenovelas, thrillers and endless permutations of horror, and risk missing the heartbeat of a global culture that continues to change in marvelous ways, year to year, day to day.
Related Stories
Just one example is in the portrayal of LGBTQ lives in films and television. With transgender rights front and center in the current U.S. presidential campaign, it’s worth noting that one of the essential components of progress is representation.
Popular on Variety
As in once upon a time, for queer audiences, it was much harder to find.
The great British actor Tim Curry, who played the delightfully wicked Frank-N-Furter in the legendary film version of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” recently took to social media to counsel young viewers who might find that ’70s horror spoof archaic, or worse, troubling.
Curry wrote on X, “Ah the ‘is Rocky Horror problematic’ chat. Through a 2024 lens — of course it is. But babies, being gay was illegal in England 6 years before Rocky was first staged in ’73.”
Which brings us to one of the highlights of Mipcom 31 years ago, the breakthrough TV production of Armistead Maupin’s timeless fictional series, “Tales of the City.”
Today, you wouldn’t be startled by its wonderful cast of beautifully drawn eccentrics, but in the late 1970s, when Maupin began writing his “Tales,” and in the early 1990s when the series won a Peabody and a GLAAD Award, a show featuring a marijuana-growing transgender landlady was not just entertainment, it was downright revolutionary.
With its gays, straights, bisexuals and all colors of the rainbow, “City” might have, at first glance, appeared as a local yarn about the always bohemian San Francisco. But looking back, it’s clear that 28 Barbary Lane was the address of America, but TV hadn’t found it yet. And then it did.
