We’re staring down the barrel of 2025, a year that was supposed to usher in record diversity onscreen (and, ideally in real life), yet a recent UCLA report found that white men continue to dominate the most-watched streaming shows like Suits and Blue Bloods. This might seem anachronistic—after all, those guys had their say back in the earliest days of cinema, theoretically making this the era of BIPOC and otherwise marginalized creators like Shonda Rhimes, Tanya Saracho, Mindy Kaling, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, and Jaclyn Moore. But in the era of Trump 2.0, are viewers are making a beeline for “second-screen content” that offers the least possible stimulation and capitulates near-entirely to the status quo?
Obviously, it doesn’t have to be that deep (some people just like Suits! Not me, but some people!). But it’s difficult not to link this trend to Hollywood’s decline in LGBTQ+ representation since the COVID pandemic and the WGA and SAG strikes of 2023. Diversity within the industry is, in fact, declining in general; while the percentage of Asian actors with speaking roles in films skyrocketed in 2023, Black and Latinx actors did not see the same increase, and it’s no secret that most Hollywood writer’s rooms remain very white, very male, very cis and very straight.
When queer, racially and ethnically varied, female-centric shows like Amazon’s A League of Their Own are unceremoniously canceled, allegedly because focus groups were uncomfortable with its strong LGBTQ+ focus (a decision that creator Abbi Jacobson called “bullshit and cowardly”), it’s difficult not to wonder whether various streaming platforms’ search for “a signature, audience-pleasing but roundly inoffensive breakout hit” is getting in the way of telling stories with an actual viewpoint that might reach a new and less frequently represented segment of the American population. You can’t legislate taste or compel people to watch any particular show, but if we keep serving up Suits binge-watch sessions to viewers while cutting down on series with diverse leads, is it any wonder that people’s tastes will become more and more geared toward the palatable, the bland and the depressingly familiar?
