Perhaps the bravest pop culture moment of 2014 came from an unlikely source: ABC Family's drama "The Fosters." Twenty-week-pregnant Lena chooses to opt for a late-term abortion -- something virtually never seen on television -- after she learns her and her baby's lives are threatened by a serious condition known as pre-eclampsia. As Margaret Lyons wrote for Vulture, "Terminating a pregnancy is not inherently tragic -- women have a variety of abortion experiences -- but for Lena (and Stef), this was devastating." Though they avoided saying the word "abortion" in the episode, the way "The Fosters" portrayed the experience was honest on an emotional level.

(This is just the part relevant to The Fosters. You can read the full article at the source.)

By Stav Ziv
Filed: 10/11/14 at 7:25 PM

When actress Sherri Saum, who has a black father and a white mother, was growing up in Akron, Ohio, in the 1970s and 1980s, she rarely saw people who looked like her on television, she recalls.

“I grew up with precious little in the way of role models on television,” she tells Newsweek, remembering how few black or mixed-race characters she saw on a regular basis outside of The Cosby Show and Facts of Life. “It makes you feel like you're not being seen, not being heard, not part of the society you're living in.”

Today Saum is helping to bring another kind of diversity to television playing one half of an interracial lesbian couple on The Fosters. In the show, which is in the middle of its second season on ABC Family, Saum, who is straight, plays Lena Adams Foster, a vice principal. Her character raises a family of biological, adopted, and foster children with her partner, Stef Adams Foster, played by Teri Polo.

The quantity and quality of LGBT characters on prime-time television has improved in recent years, according to two annual reports by GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) released this October. GLAAD and other advocacy groups see television as an important battleground in their larger mission to create a more inclusive society and eliminate prejudice and discrimination toward the LGBT community. The New York- and Los Angeles–based advocacy group, which has been around since 1985, works with television writers to try achieve those goals and grades networks on their representation of LGBT people.

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This week, we’re presenting our Vulture TV Awards, honoring the best in television from the past year. Vulture contributor Julie Klausner kicked things off with an epic opening monologue, and now we’re straight-up dishing out the virtual hardware. Amy Schumer and H. Jon Benjamin already have their Vultures. Up next: Best Teen Show, as selected by Vulture’s Margaret Lyons.

Back in the day, UPN and the WB — the progenitors of the CW — aired teen shows that were substantive and inventive enough to make grown-ups sit up and take notice: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, obviously, but also Gilmore Girls, Everwood, and Veronica Mars. (Dawson’s Creek gets an honorable mention there, too.) Nowadays, though, the CW is more focused on moody sci-fi and fantasy shows, none of which hold up to Buffy’s wit or even seem to aspire to. Now it’s ABC Family that has staked its claim to the earnest teen-oriented family drama. Switched at Birth paved the way, but this year’s best teen show is The Fosters.

The Fosters, whose second season premiered just last night, centers on 16-year-old Callie, a tough (but not as tough as she seems) girl who grew up bouncing between foster homes after her mother died and her dad went to jail. She devotes most of her energy to protecting her little brother Jude, but the two of them get to loosen up a little when they move in with the Fosters — yeah, a foster family whose last name is Foster. Interracial moms Lena and Stef are already parents to Stef's biological 16-year-old son Brandon and foster-to-adopt 15-year-old twins Jesus and Mariana. The first season of the show covered some of the differences between race and ethnicity, the benefits and occasional limitations of talk therapy, alcoholism, emergency contraception, the strain on undocumented immigrants, ADHD medication and its appropriate and inappropriate uses, the death of a parent, and early-onset dementia. The first half of the season occasionally veered into Very Special Episode territory, but then the show found that strong emotions and corniness are not synonymous; you can have very loving, devoted parents and still have those characters ring true. Kids — teenagers especially — make big mistakes and then make big apologies. That's both dramatically interesting and true to life.

One of the markers of a great teen show is the great teen breakdown, again, something that many of us experienced as teens ourselves. Sometimes you just get so worked up, and things get so out of hand, and everything's your fault. (Think of Angela dyeing her hair on My So-Called Life, and then sobbing to her mother about how sorry she is.) Oftentimes these meltdowns are over nothing: one failed test, one small fight, a minor inconvenience. On The Fosters, though, Callie's big meltdown comes when she runs away: She and her foster brother Brandon have been, uh, fostering a very intense mutual attraction, which she knows could jeopardize her and Jude’s placement, so she decides to bail. She discovers that her dad has been out of prison for some time but hasn't made any attempts to contact her, and then she just snaps. She’s exhausted, confused, scared, and far away from anyone who cares about her, so she flips out in a convenience store, crying and eating packages of food, daring the clerk to call the police. Which he does, and she gets arrested.

Callie’s breaking point feels like it really matters: It’s a moment that sends her back to juvie and then to a court-mandated group home, but it’s also a moment that changes something in her, forces her to confront who and what she wants to be. She’s a kid who had to be a grown-up way too early, but now she's 16, and it's genuinely time to make some more mature decisions; we see her grapple with this all the time, her desire to be taken care of and her deep fear that those who are supposed to take care of her will betray or endanger her. (Maia Mitchell, who plays Callie, gives her the right combination of edge and vulnerability.)

There’s no denying that The Fosters is a teen drama. There’s romance and backstabbing and dance-team auditions and wrestling try-outs and essay contests and sexy times like you'd expect. But it’s also one of the most progressive shows on TV — if not the most progressive show on TV — covering race, colorism, sexual identity, gender identity, recovery from sexual assault, the capriciousness of the foster-care system, and the classism and racism present in the criminal-justice system. That said, I wouldn’t call The Fosters an issues-oriented show. It reminds me a lot of Everwood, not only because Brandon is also a gifted pianist, just like Ephram was, but also because there's a fundamental wound at the center of the show. On Everwood, it was the death of wife and mother Julia Brown; on The Fosters, each kid has a different story of how the Foster family, while great, is perhaps not the family they dreamed of. Brandon is Stef's biological son, but he’s old enough to remember his (hetero-coupled) parents’ divorce, and to know that his dad is an alcoholic. Jesus and Mariana are twins, but they have different relationships with their drug-addict grifter biological mother. Callie’s very hesitant to consider herself “part of the family,” while Jude, who’s much younger, really throws himself into things because he’s so, so eager to leave behind his life of neglect and abuse; Callie is much more worried about betraying her dead mother by allowing someone else, let alone two people, to play the role of mom. But here they all are, together, in a gorgeous, enormous craftsman house, with two beautiful doting mothers who adore them and each other, and, well, that counts for a lot.

Honorable mentions: Switched at Birth continues to engage and delight, and Degrassi, somehow, after 13 seasons, is still going strong.

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Listen here:


On this week’s episode, the critics discuss The Fosters, an ABC Family teen drama about an interracial lesbian couple and their motley household of biological, adopted, and foster children. June Thomas, editor of Slate’s LGBTQ blog, joins the critics to discuss the show’s charms and to debate its political progressivism. Next, the gabbers turn to an essay by Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times, in which she criticizes sentimental New Yorkers for petitioning to save the Kentile Floors sign and other vestiges of Brooklyn’s industrial working-class past. Where is the line between cultural preservation and false nostalgia? And finally, after weeks of collecting listeners’ summer strut-worthy songs, the critics present a playlist of their favorites.

Since the Brandon and Dani storyline keeps coming up in spoilers and interviews, I want to post something that I wrote a few days ago for my lj and tumblr.

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So, this is me liveblogging the last episode of The Fosters 'Adoption Day'. We have not watched the episode before this, so expect a lot of ‘WTF?’ and ‘HUH?’. :P But hopefully some ‘aaaawww’ and ‘squeee’ too. If you really like Brandon or white guys in general (except Jude and Connor), you should probably steer clear of this.

Here we go:

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There is a commentary about The Fosters on tumblr right now and it only has 100 notes at the moment, so if any of you have tumblr, go over there and reblog and like it, because it's fantastic and needs all the notes it can get.

This is it and I'll also quote it here so that you know what I'm talking about. :)

"Obviously people don’t understand the gift we have been given with The Fosters. Every queer lady I know has always been crying and begging for a queer female couple that isn’t stereotyped, isn’t a cliche or created for the purpose of pleasing the gaze of the male viewer. They have been asking for story lines that don’t end in death or running back into the arms of a man or cheating or hypersexualization. And we fucking have it.

We have two women who have been canonically together for 10 years without straying, without falling out of love, and without the interference of a male presence - despite the fact that one of them is divorced from a man who fathered her son and is therefore still present in her life. We have a household headed by two women who communicate, who work together, who love and share and raise their children. We have lesbians being portrayed as average people without their sexuality being a constant plot device. We have queer women who fight, who make up, who love and forgive, who apologize. We have a lesbian couple whose relationship isn’t being torn apart at the seams every other week for the sake of drama. We literally have everything we’ve been asking for and yet so few of you are watching.

I understand the show isn’t going to be for everyone and I know that some of you looked at the channel it was on or the genre and thought, “This isn’t for me.” I know because that’s what I thought when I first heard about the show. But if you can watch a show simply for the subtext of a lesbian plot, what the hell is keeping you away from the most honest representation of a lesbian couple we’ve ever seen?"