Besides watching all the queer TV I can, I also enjoy watching a specific subset of ‘reality’ TV, which is unscripted live-play. What are those? Well, it’s people playing games. No, not like Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy (the latter of which I do watch fairly regularly). I mean live-play like role-playing games. Yes, Dungeons and Dragons.
My two current favorites are Critical Role (which is why I was so happy to add The Legend of Vox Machina) and Dimension20 by Dropout. The new season of Dimension20, “Never Stop Blowing Up,” started last week and something the dungeon master, Brennan Lee Mulligan, said resonated with me.
All of our culture exists digitally and is stored by private corporations.
Over recent years, I’ve worried more and more about the existence of queer media. Specifically television, but this also extends to books which are being banned and content is being removed from the Internet Archive. Or video games you can’t play anymore because the platforms don’t exist, and Nintendo will sue you if you break open the code and share if even if they don’t sell the ding dang game anymore and come on, you just wanted to play this ancient game!
Ahem.
What Happened Now?
This week, Paramount shuttered the following websites:
- TVLand
- MTV News
- Comedy Central
- CMT
While the sites remain active, if you visit them you’ll get a pop-up notice on each homepage that tells you most of the episodes of each series aren’t available on that website, go watch on TV or on Paramount+. And that’s all well and good, running multiple websites with similar data is a pain in the ass. But the thing is… the content isn’t actually on Paramount+!
This isn’t the first time it’s happened.
Back in 2022, I noted something that scared me at the time when I was looking at the year in review.
Do you worry about a show like BrainDead, which ran for only one season, suddenly being raptured from a platform and lost to time?
MICHELLE There’s way too much to worry about. God bless BrainDead, but I cannot spend my nights awake, worrying about it being taken off Paramount+. (Laughs.)
ROBERT I’ll tell you what I worry about. We don’t have copies of it anywhere. We don’t have DVDs. If I need to remember a line that we used, to make sure we’re not copying ourselves, I go on Paramount+ and find it.
MICHELLE We could probably get copies. Or we could videotape it?
ROBERT With my iPhone? (Laughter.) Well, I’ve got to tell you, you hit on a sore point for almost all showrunners everywhere. They’re horrified by this sense that the work that they spent so much time on could just be, as you say, raptured up into the sky. And sometimes it’s being done by people who don’t have a creative bone in their body.
MICHELLE That’s the bigger worry. Books go out of print. It’s not the first time this has happened, but it does seem to be happening for all the wrong reasons.
Well last year, Willow was removed by Disney+ before most people got a chance to watch it. The L Word: Generation Q was unavailable in Germany (though still in the US) after it was canceled and many people missed the end of the series.
Oh and don’t forget the 87 shows and movies removed from HBO Max last year!
In short? Our fear is becoming reality. It feels like every day another show is deleted and gone.
Piracy: Beware The Seas
Someone is going to ask how we get our screenshots and info if the show is off air.
There are legit archives of TV shows and we make use of them but even so there are legal issues and concerns with those! Sources like the Internet Archive (IA) have come under fire recently. At its heart, it is a phenomenally wonderful idea, trying to save things for the masses. But recently they were slapped with a loss in court and forced to remove around 500,000 ebooks because they were not licensing the requisite rights from the authors and publishers. The IA argued it’s fair use, publishers (and writers) argue it takes money away from them, and it goes on and on.
Note: We do not condone nor endorse the use of any Torrent site to download licensed and trademarked content nor the use of VPN to get around restrictions and tracking.
Now there are sites like Torrent sites which come at their own risk. The biggest is that technically, legally, they’re all hosting illegal content they don’t have the rights to, same as the IA. Just for an example, if you used AT&T internet and went to illegally download a CBS show, you might get a physical letter telling you that your IP address was used to access an illegal download site. You could use a VPN to try and get around that, but those also come at a risk of sharing your information.
And on top of that, you have the risk of not getting the content you want, if it’s there at all! Those download sites, like our lists, are fan-run. If there’s no fan who wants to have every episode of a TV show, then no one downloaded it.
The Most Fragile Are The Fringes
While the reason for removal of content is monetary at its most base (HBO removed shows in order to appear more profitable to Discovery, Paramount is doing it to avoid having to pay people for views). But the people who will take the most damage from such thing are people like us, the queers who have limited content in the first place. It’s the percentages. A higher percentage of our content is being removed because we’re still not seen as a valuable enough commodity.
And while we queers have a large number of passionate fans (many of whom are technical enough to figure out how to download TV shows from streamers), the re-hosting of the content is illegal and given the current legal drama against queers around the world, few are willing to take the risk. This creates a higher than average risk when content is lost.
If you look at some of the statements people make about how queerness is a ‘modern’ creation, you can draw a line between the lack of common historical data to the ignorant claims. Queers have always existed, and in many cultures we are documented. But history is written by the winners and the majority, so our stories are deemed less important and omitted.
It is my belief that the casual representation on television is a large part of how we made strides in recent years. By making it clearer that queers are here, have always been here, and will always be here, we normalize the view for those who perhaps are less aware of the queers in their life.
What’s the Solution?
Sadly, it would be releasing physical media. And the various companies won’t do that unless there’s a financial benefit. Since having a bunch of BluRay/DVDs in storage isn’t sustainable, it would only be possible if we ended up with some instant print feature like we have with T-Shirts.
Actually that’s not a half bad idea is it? Except the networks would need to be willing to pay out the show runners and actors for every printing, and history has shown they’re not so willing to do that.
For now? If you can download your media and keep it locally, I recommend you do that. In twenty years, that may be the only way to watch The L Word.
