When we talk about the “Golden Age of Television”. The Sopranos era, the Mad Men era, the endless parade of brooding antiheroes, there’s a dirty little secret hiding in the frame. Prestige TV was brave enough to make audiences root for mobsters, ad men, meth dealers, and serial killers. But when it came to queerness, it shoved us straight into the closet.
Prestige as Respectability
Prestige TV sold itself on seriousness. This wasn’t fluffy network fare, this was Art. Complex characters. Moral ambiguity. Slow pans across whiskey glasses. The cultural bargain was clear: tune in for quality, for depth, for television that wanted to be literature.
But literature has always been uncomfortable with queerness unless it ends in tragedy. And so prestige dramas, for all their supposed bravery, kept repeating the same script: a queer character emerges, suffers, and gets shoved back underground.
Mad Men’s Sal: The Invisible Ad Man
Take Mad Men. Salvatore Romano, the closeted art director at Sterling Cooper, was one of the show’s most fascinating characters. Talented, stylish, coded as gay from episode one. His arc? He resists a boss’s advances, gets punished, and disappears.
The point, of course, was that the 1960s workplace wouldn’t tolerate a gay man. Historically accurate, sure. But the writers used that accuracy as an excuse to eject him from the show. Sal’s queerness was treated as a side plot in Don Draper’s story of masculine reinvention. He became the price of historical authenticity, not a character allowed to grow.
I remember watching Sal get written off and feeling gut-punched. Here was the one character whose queerness felt real to me, and he vanished like he’d never existed. It taught me what prestige really meant: straight men’s stories were expansive, everyone else’s were cautionary tales.
The Sopranos’ Vito: Violence in the Closet
Then there’s Vito Spatafore in The Sopranos. His queerness comes out in the most brutal way possible: he’s caught at a leather bar. The discovery sets off a chain of humiliation and violence that ends with his murder.
The show framed it as an honest portrayal of mob culture. Of course Vito couldn’t survive as a gay man in that world. But honesty isn’t the same as imagination. The writers couldn’t conceive of a queer mobster as anything but doomed. And so, again, queerness was reduced to spectacle — titillation, then punishment.
Six Feet Under’s David: Progress in Slow Motion
Six Feet Under did better. David Fisher, the closeted funeral director, had one of the first sustained queer arcs in a prestige drama. He struggled with internalised shame, navigated a long-term relationship with Keith, and eventually found a kind of peace.
But even here, the framing was steeped in suffering. David’s queerness was treated as a moral test, a burden to overcome, rather than just a fact of life. His moments of joy were hard-won, but always framed against darkness.
I loved David. He felt recognisable, flawed, complicated. But watching him also felt like a warning: you can have queerness on prestige TV, but only if it comes drenched in shame and struggle.
Why Prestige Feared Queerness
The closet in prestige TV wasn’t accidental. It was structural. These shows were obsessed with repression: mobsters hiding therapy, ad men hiding their identities, suburban families hiding dysfunction. Queerness fit too neatly into that framework. It was another secret to stash, another wound to poke at.
But unlike Don Draper’s double life or Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions, queer secrets didn’t get centre-stage. They were side plots, seasoning. They existed to reinforce the straight characters’ arcs: look how this world chews up anyone who doesn’t conform.
Respectability Politics in High Definition
Prestige TV thrived on a kind of cultural respectability. Critics applauded its grit and realism. Audiences loved its seriousness. But that seriousness left little room for queer joy, queer frivolity, or queer centrality. If queerness appeared, it had to be “respectable” — tragic, moral, subdued.
That’s why you didn’t see flamboyant characters, camp humour, or queer community on prestige TV in its heyday. Those modes were considered unserious. Too close to soap operas. Too far from capital-L Literature.
My Prestige Awakening
I binged Mad Men in my early twenties, the same time I was trying to dress better, drink old-fashioneds, and pretend I had a handle on adulthood. Sal was my favourite. He was coded, stylish, slightly arch — he looked like the people I wanted to grow into. When he disappeared, I felt betrayed. Prestige TV was supposed to be sophisticated, but its sophistication ended at the closet door.
That’s when I started to see the pattern. Queerness in prestige drama was a warning label, never a destination.
What We Got Instead
Queerness thrived elsewhere — in teen dramas, in sci-fi, in shows considered “less serious.” The very spaces prestige TV dismissed as trash were the ones experimenting with queer characters who could survive, fall in love, or even be funny. Prestige gave us shame closets; Buffy gave us Tara. Prestige killed Vito; Degrassi let Marco come out and stick around.
It’s telling that when queer TV finally started to flourish, it came through streaming platforms, cable comedies, and genre shows. Prestige, with all its self-importance, was the last to catch up.
The Closet’s Legacy
Rewatching those early prestige shows now, they feel dated. Brilliant in many ways, but cautious around queerness in a way that looks cowardly with hindsight. Yet they’re still part of our queer media history. They show us the limits of “serious” TV, and why queerness often flourished in supposedly unserious genres.
The closet of prestige TV taught us that respectability can be its own prison. That sometimes it takes camp, whimsy, or teen melodrama to actually tell the truth. And that the most “serious” shows of the 2000s couldn’t imagine a queer character surviving the weight of their own importance.