TCA Awards – KitschMix

Sarah Paulson went home with the 2016 Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Drama on Saturday night thanks to her role in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.

Paulson was supported by her partner Holland Taylor, who proudly cheered her on as she accepted the award.

The show, created by AHS mastermind Ryan Murphy, also landed three awards, including program of the year and outstanding achievement in movies, miniseries and specials.

Also to be awarded was Lily Tomlin – a Hollywood lifer who’s appeared on TV for decades on shows like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, Murphy Brown, The West Wing and Desperate Housewives – was given the Career Achievement Award,

The presentation came on the heels of Thursday’s announcement that the Screen Actors Guild will award Tomlin with a lifetime achievement award in their ceremony in Los Angeles slated for January 29, 2017.

Other queer ladies to be acknowledge with awards, was the couple behind Making of a Murderer, Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, who won Outstanding Achievement in Reality Programming. Samantha Bee (Outstanding Achievement in News and Information), Rachel Bloom (Individual Achievement in Comedy), Black-ish (Outstanding Achievement in Comedy) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Heritage Award). I congratulated Sarah on behalf of us all.

Here! queer! And stealing awards from straight people! Conservative news outlets would probably run with that headline like a steam train, when in actual fact some brilliant LGBT-themed TV shows have this year scooped up awards at the prestigious TCA Awards (Television Critics Association Awards) to signify that they were amongst the best things on our telly boxes/mobile devices or laptops (if you were watching on Netflix) in the past year.

The TCA are a wise old bunch and so their deemed quality of TV shows amounts to more than the ratings and what the majority of us are spending times vegging out on our couches watching, which means that anyone worth it has a chance at winning and it also really tells you what the good stuff is.

This year, the two big LGBT winners were RuPaul’s Drag Race and Orange is the New Black. Two shows that couldn’t be further from each other on the telly spectrum.

While OITNB’s award for Outstanding New Program is undoubtedly deserved for the way that the Netflix-only prison drama portrays the lives of its incredibly diverse prisoners (many characters are LGBT and/or of colour too) with empathetic realness.

Whereas RuPaul’s drag-based competition was often peppered with transphobic language that is distinctly unlike its network (Logo TV) which has been a long time supporter of LGBT projects.

Luckily though, another wonderful show was kicking ass and taking names (and TCA Awards too!) to offset RuPaul’s sometimes-grossness and to back up OITNB in fantastic shows with fantastic LGBT characters.

The Fosters, whose two lead characters are an interracial queer couple with an interracial family on a channel (ABC Family) that originally launched in an effort to promote conservative TV shows. So a triple win of sorts? Absolutely and we can only hope that the next year is as great for LGBT-related TV shows too.