[A]s much as I love her, Lauren Graham was miscast.  / After 7 yrs. as Lorelai, it was just too much. Couldn’t get past it in the pilot; swear I heard Sam Phillips’ “la la las”

In a recent Twitter exchange, Derek Kompare and I were discussing the new NBC series Parenthood, and while there were several issues we disagreed on, his ultimate argument was incredibly visceral and personal: Lauren Graham didn’t work for him as a single mom in her thirties with teenage kid(s) who’s imploring her parents for help. Or rather, it seemed that for him Lauren Graham was too much Lorelai Gilmore to fully inhabit this new role – a role not fully alike, but ultimately too close.

Among actors, character bleed usually references the way days and weeks of playing a character can be difficult to shed right away. Method acting, in particular, is often caricatured as a full immersion that extends into the actor’s real life. I want to think of character bleed not as a function of the actor but rather as a function of our reception. In other words, character bleed is the aspects of a character that we as viewers bring to the text.

In a comment discussion about Treme here in Antenna, one of the most interesting things to me was the way we all brought our different viewer expectations and contexts to the show and to a degree expected others to have similar associations. So while I might realize that my interlocutors didn’t go to school in New Orleans and thus have a different sense of the city, it was much more difficult to talk about what watching Treme against The Wire brought to the text for every one of us. It’s not just that audience reception is multiply complex but that the same intertexts can create fundamentally different responses.

Likewise, seeing Graham as Sarah Braverman evokes for both Derek and myself her role of Lorelai, but whereas I emotionally view Sarah as maybe a little snarkier and wittier than she’s written in the show, for Derek the roles crash. The bleedover breaks the illusion, or maybe it’s simply snarky thirtyish mom with teenager overload.

As a fan scholar who is interested in media fandom and fan works, I’m all too familiar with this readerly/viewerly character bleed. Fans follow actors to new shows and often the fannish characterizations are indebted to earlier roles. Sometimes this is done explicitly in truly marvelous and imaginative narratives. Supernatural’s John Winchester here can also be engaged to Grey’s Anatomy’s Izzy Stevenson, since Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays both roles. Amnesia and undercover police procedures can explain how The Professional’s Ray Doyle is indeed the same character as The Chief’s Chief Constable Alan Cade, both played by Martin Shaw. And Stargate Atlantis’s John Sheppard can have a past that includes being Murphy Brown’s much younger lover of one episode or that connect him to his FBI past in the TV movie Thoughtcrimes (all three characters played by Joe Flanigan).

But more interesting are actually the implicit and possibly unconscious bleedovers where characters get written with particular habits that may indeed be attributable to another character. If Ray Kowalski in Due South fan fiction smokes a lot, I lay that mostly at the feet of Callum Keith Rennie’s role of burnt out punk rock star in Hard Core Logo. Likewise, SG-1’s Jack O’Neill is often characterized at surprisingly adept at McGyvering his way out of situations, which may very well be the result of both roles being played by Richard Dean Anderson. The actors themselves may bleed over into their characters’ fannish representations as in the multiple present day Merlin AUs in which Merlin is written as a vegetarian, one would assume because Colin Morgan is.

Whereas these character bleeds are writ large via collective community assumptions, all of us certainly have these moments where our previous encounters with the actors and the characters they have embodied influences our affective responses. At heart then remains the question as to how much of a character is steeped in the writers, the actors, and how much we bring to it as viewers.

In GLAAD’s recent report they mention that the total number of LGBT characters on television actually decreased this year. In part this was a result of the cancellation of the L-Word, the majority of whose character’s were LGBT. However, I believe that this year we actually saw an increase in the visibility of LGBT characters on TV. Because, some new shows have LGBT characters and other have recently added them,  a relatively large number of prime-time network television programs, both dramas and comedies, have gay and lesbian characters. Nearly every network has at least one clearly gay or lesbian central character on one of their shows. On Sunday you can see LGBT characters on Desperate Housweives and Brothers and Sisters on ABC, Monday there is House on Fox, Tuesday has Modern Family on ABC, Wednesday there is Glee on Fox, Thursday Grey’s Anatomy on ABC. Friday ABC has Ugly Betty, and Saturday there is Mercy on NBC. (This is not an exhaustive list) CBS alone seems to have ignored the trend. These representations are not all perfect, far from it, but looking back only a short decade ago when Will and Grace was considered unusual, being able to find an LGBT character on network TV every night is a pretty amazing thing.

Network prime-time has not until recently been the location of most LGBT visibility on television. In the past networks confined  LGBT characters to daytime soaps. HBO and Showtime have longed featured LGBT characters on their shows and have provided many of the characters that made up the numbers that  were counted in  drama and comedies on television. LOGO on cable has certainly also punched up these numbers. But these shows weren’t on network prime-time televison. I was a fan of Showtime’s LGBT heavy shows, Queer As Folk and The L-Word, but if you were uninterested or even hostile to LGBT issues you would be unlikely to tune in. In contrast, you may not be interested in LGBT issues but if you are a long term fan of Grey’s Anatomy  you would likely continue watching the show now that a lesbian relationship is among the major story lines. Many of the shows with LGBT characters and themes in the late 90s and early 2000s took place in primarily LGBT worlds and contexts, interaction with the “straight” world often took the form of narratives of conflict. Integrated shows, like those we now have on network prime-time television, play a different role. They may show conflict, but they also show cooperation. LGBT characters are part of workplace communities, families, and friendship groups with both LGBT and straight members. This integration lets these show tell different stories and let them tell more familiar stories differently. Callie can be horrified and hurt at her father’s hostility to her homosexuality and Arizona can advocate patience on Grey’s Anatomy in part because they are addressing a more integrated (and possibly ambivalent) audience and because they have a more integrated cast of characters; filled with many heterosexual characters who are supportive of their relationship. I certainly don’t suggest that these kinds of shows should replace programs that represent LGBT communities and worlds more extensively, as the programming on LOGO and the Showtime do. But I think the long-term goal for LGBT representation on television should include both kinds of show. Representations are still too problematic and too few, they are not, and most likely never will, be perfect. But as Kath Weston has observed in her work a group cannot fully be accepted until they are seen as “fully social persons” who are part of families and communities. Integrated shows may be a step towards this. Paired with increased visibility I would like to hope that this season does not represent a loss at all but a different kind of gain. Am I just a wide eyed optimist? What do others think?