Television transitions, in more ways than one

There's a quiet, little-noticed revolution under way in television. In 2003, when TV did a pair of movies on sympathetic transgendered (or, as they were still widely known then, transsexual) characters, I wrote a story saying it was the first attempt to "break television's seemingly iron link between transsexuals and sleazy criminality." That was no exaggeration. In the months before the story was written, The Shield had a transgender crackhead burglar who gave an elderly woman a heart attack, CSI a transgender serial killer who murdered his own mother and John Doe a transgender psycho locked up in a mental hospital.

Since then, transgendered characters who are neither psycho killers nor AIDS-ridden hookers have popped up with increasing frequency, not only in the two movies I wrote about (HBO's Normal and Showtime's Soldier's Girl) but in regular series including All My Children, Nip/Tuck and The L Word and the Sundance Channel's documentary Transgeneration.

And now it looks we'll have a series in which a transgender character does not merely appear, but stars. FX on Wednesday announced that it has ordered a pilot from Nip/Tuck executive producer Ryan Murphy about a male doctor -- a husband and father -- who realizes he's trapped in the wrong body and starts the long and often painful transition to female. The pilot doesn't have a cast or even a name yet, and there's no guarantee it will be picked up. But FX wouldn't have announced the pilot if its future weren't looking bright. Network president John Landgraf called its script, by Murphy and Nip/Tuck supervising producer Brad Falchuk, "unique, compelling and complex storytelling.”

We don't have to get carried away with political correctness here; television does not need a transgender character on every show. The problem has not been that transsexuals are underrepresented -- America has no more than a handful -- but that they've been represented in such a uniformly awful manner. That's starting to change, and if the Unititled Ryan Murphy Project makes it to the screen, the change will officially be huge.