hi, so i haven’t been following your blog for very long so i’m sorry if you’ve already answered this, but could you recommend me some web series with onscreen gay relationships? i’ve seen a couple with onscreen lesbian relationships but not too many with onscreen gay relationships. can you help me out, please?
I’m happy to help! I’ll go ahead and list all the ones I know of that have gay couples as endgame ships and/or in an onscreen relationship during the run of the series :)
I’m going to go ahead and start with Nothing Much To Do and Lovely Little Losers (based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Love’s Labour’s Lost) because even though representation and webseries in general have come a long way since then, they’re classics and truly excellent, and the m/m relationship does take center stage in LoLiLo.
Another classic LIW with a cute m/m couple is Call Me Katie (based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew). This is a pairing we actually get to see as a couple, which is always nice, and they have a lot of really adorable moments. They also take center stage in the sequel, Nothing Like The Sun, with ridiculous amounts of drama and a lot less success, but NLTS is still worth watching.
My next recommendation is The New Adventures of Peter and Wendy (loose Peter Pan adaptation). The first season is very heterosexual, but the second and third seasons feature an adorable and well-written gay romance that gets lots of screen time. Also the characters have the same first name, which I for one find delightful.
The Emma Agenda (gender-bent adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma) is the most recently completed webseries on this list, and if you’re looking for well-written, well-developed onscreen m/m relationships that exist before the end of the series, this is the LIW for you. It’s very cute, very realistic, and fantastic representation as well as being all those other things.
It’s currently airing, and they’re not a couple yet, but Middlemarch: The Series (based on George Eliot’s Middlemarch) has about the cutest, angstiest, most realistic gay ship ever, and I can’t recommend it enough. It just came off hiatus and will be running for a few more months, so now is a good time to start watching.
The last one that I’ve seen with an onscreen m/m relationship is The Writing Majors (Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Oscar Wilde as college roommates), a series which I personally love–but that particular ship isn’t endgame, and nothing ends well. It is still worth watching, though, especially if you’re a fan of classic literature and the authors thereof.
I haven’t seen Words From Wilde (life of Oscar Wilde), but I’ve been told it’s fantastic, and I know the main pairing is m/m, so that’s definitely one to check out.
The other series in that category is The Better Strangers (based on Shakespeare’s As You Like It, sequel to A Document of Madness), which I’ve heard nothing but good things about and which I know also has a prominent m/m ship.
I also have to mention Twelfth Grade (or whatever) (Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night), which, though it doesn’t REALLY fit the bill, does have one m/m relationship (just not onscreen as such), and two more relationships that exist in the sidelines/post webseries land and more or less do. That series is also just the gold standard for representation in general, so if you haven’t already seen it and you’re looking for queer characters, you definitely need to.
Lastly, I’m just going to shamelessly plug my own webseries. It’s still in development, so it won’t exist for another year, but Ilium is going to be an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad with a VERY central m/m couple.
Thanks for the ask, anon! I hope this was helpful, and that my followers can add any shows I forgot!
And I love answering this sort of thing, so ask away!
