My chat w/ABC boss Steve McPherson...

There's a reason why ABC got the highest marks by GLAAD this week as far as LGBT representation. (I would have written about the GLAAD study but it was never sent to me). The network's shows are not only the most hip and cool, but the diversity is fantastic. Scotty and Kevin got married on "Brothers & Sisters" and Uncle Saul came out of the closet; on "Ugly Betty," Marc St. Clair is gay and Betty's little brother Justin is on his way there and Rebecca Romijn plays a transexual; "Desperate Housewives" has a gay teen (Andrew) and a gay couple who got married at seasons's end (Lee and Bob), on "Dirty Sexy Money" Billy Baldwin's politician character carried on an affair with a transsexual woman played by transsexual actress Candys Cane; and "Grey's Anatomy" ended its season with a lesbian kiss that wil develop into a relationship this season.

When I saw network president Steve McPherson at the ABC party last night, I asked him about this wonderful inclusion:

Q. Has there been any kind of problem from sponsors or other groups about some of these storylines?
A. We really haven't. It is good a sign, I think, that the world has changed a lot. People are now so much more accepting and are more concerned about the storylne. I never hear anything like, 'Oh that;s too edgy because it's about homosexuality' or 'That's too edgy because it's about race.' People really don't do any of that. 'Lost' did an episode in Korean and it was one of our highest-rated episodes.

("Desperate Housewives" creator) Marc Cherry talked about it today how he had a gay couple move onto the street and nothing happened. That's life. It's not like a gay couple moves onto the street and the street burns down! I think that's a great statement about society that that's where we've gotten to.

As a broadcast network, we're looking to do what's right for business tro some extent and what's right for business is to have the broadest representation that we can. I've gotten a lot of accolades for the efforts of a lot of other people in terms of the diversity on the network. I always say, it might be the right thing to do but we don't do it because of that. We do it because it's good business....If you were to put a show on and it was all white men, people would go, 'I don't get it. It's not my world'"
Steve gives all credit to people like Cherry, Greg Berlanti ("Brothers & Sisters" and "Dirty Sexy Money"), Silvio Horta ("Ugly Betty") - all of whom are gay - as well as Shondra Rhimes ("Grey's Anatomy" and "Private Practice") and others for the diversity on these shows: "A great deal of my job is collaborating with great talent and it's really about them at the end of the day. It's really about them crafting these worlds and them demanding that it be a realistic representation of what they're telling stories about."

And finally, I asked Steve about the GLAAD kudos: "It's fantastic. I think that organization does an amazing job and represents themselves enormously well. For us, I think it's another maybe recognition that we have this diversity on our air. To me, it's not about diversity, to me it's about honest representation about where we are today in our society. If it's an accolade about that, then we're really glad to get it."