Last week, ABC aired the pilot episode of a new series, My Generation. The show is a mockumentary about the class of 2000. Cameras follow a group of nine classmates, catching up with them 10 years after graduation, and splicing in “flashbacks” from their senior year.

The mockumentary style feels pretty inauthentic, the characters are mostly predictable stereotypes, and the relationships that have occurred between them are contrived for “interesting” storytelling.

What struck me as most lacking was their sexuality. All characters appear to be straight. Granted, we’re only one episode in, but based on the relationships that have occurred between the characters, past and present, all of them are straight. Only one character has not had a relationship with one of the other eight, although a comment made by his character about a female classmate makes it pretty clear he’s straight (or at least straight-acting).

I’m not sure exactly whose generation this is. I haven’t looked into it, but I doubt any of the writers graduated from high school in or around the year 2000. The creators of the show made an attempt at diversity (there is at least one of each when it comes to commonly seen minorities on primetime: black, Asian and Hispanic) but fell short of including sexual diversity. Perhaps that will come out in a later episode. If it does, that is also pretty inauthentic. These people are 28-years-old. They grew up in a time of Ellen, Will & Grace, Rupaul, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It would be odd for someone of that generation to have made it that long without coming out of the closet. So I’m going to take a tiny leap and assume they are all straight.

Which is odd for my generation. I’d like to think my high school was relatively average. I had quite a few classmates who were out (at least to their friends) in high school or who have come out (or come further out) in the years since graduating. Gays being out of the closet from teenagers to adults wasn’t shocking for our generation. Maybe I’m giving us too much credit, and I’m not going to pretend like it was perfect, because I know it wasn’t. But it wasn’t hidden. And for a show to obviously go through the effort of attempting “diversity” it missed the mark.

But I’ll tune in for a few weeks at least, to see what the series holds. I am curious to see how mainstream media portrays “my” generation. And who knows maybe we’ll find out that hold out character (the one that hasn’t had a relationship with a classmate) was merely straight-acting in his comment.

I purposely didn’t mention the characters names because the show goes so far to stereotype them that after watching the one-hour pilot, you barely remember that they actually have names.

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