Enough Ronnie bashing. You totally overlooked Steven Carrington on ABC's Dynasty. Huge advance for gay visibility in the Reagan era.

The Moral Majority and other evangelical groups of the day staged organized, sustained letter-writing campaigns and boycott threats over any perceived portrayal of what they considered degeneracy on television. They were influential well beyond their actual numbers, and their tireless efforts to exercise a heckler's veto over prime time television for a time appeared to succeed.

Don't forget that Murder, She Wrote was designed to appeal to the 90+ demographic.

And It's pretty hard to get enough Reagan bashing. Among other things, bringing the Moral Majority into a position of influence set the country back halfway to the Salem witch trials.

@1, @3: There's no benefit, and much potential harm, to overlooking what an epic failure Reagan was as POTUS. The marginalization of gays on American broadcast television, which Matt recounts here, is the snowflake atop the tip of the iceberg, and that's just on the topic of treating gay Americans as if they were actual human beings. We should judge Reagan very harshly on gay rights, because as a creature of Hollywood (and a big-time liberal when head of the Screen Actors' Guild), he personally knew many gays. His capitulations to Bible-banging bigots harmed a lot of innocent persons. His pursuing such hateful, destructive policies with an affable smile on his face ("Ronnie") makes it all worse, not better.

Matt will get around to the 1979 episode of Lou Grant “The Cop,” where a gay bar is firebombed and Lou’s neighbor’s body is found in an apparent assignation turned murder, solved by a closeted LAPD cop.