Dan Clarendon

In the fall of 2004, Fox didn’t have a trusty procedural like NBC’s Law & Order and CBS’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. So the network took a chance on House, a medical drama with episodic storylines driven by conditions, not crimes, and a British actor little known to stateside audiences playing a diagnostician with zero bedside manner.

In case you missed it, pop star and Internet boyfriend Shawn Mendes told the crowd at an October 28 concert that his sexuality is still TBD. Mendes’ candor about his personal life became viral news, with many people misinterpreting his comments as a coming-out. Of course, people have been making assumptions and insinuations about Mendes’ sexuality for years now, despite his many pleas for a stop to the speculation.

Viewers have been enjoying sunny days sweepin’ the clouds away for 55 years now: Sesame Street debuted on TV on November 10, 1969. To celebrate the show’s latest milestone anniversary, we’re naming the best Muppets from the show — of the regular cast, at least — from the goofy to the Grouchy.

Suspend any skepticism: Suspenders, once the domain of Steve Urkel and Larry King, have become fashionable. And social media has all the proof you need.

Does Lost have you feeling lost, even 20 years later? You’re not alone. ABC’s hit castaway drama created a mythology that vexed even the fans who dissected each revelation on message boards in the late 2000s. So as we mark the 20th anniversary of Lost’s series premiere, we’re taking a swing at some of the show’s biggest mysteries.

In 2011, WSJ reported that networks were fielding around 500 pitches a year but commissioning only 70 as scripts, then producing only 20 of those scripts as pilots, only for a handful to make it to screen. So a pilot script has to hook a reader, and a pilot episode has to leave a viewer eager for more, as did all of the following series-starters. Here are our picks for TV’s best pilot episodes.

As The Leftovers attests, there’s no telling what will happen after one of every 50 persons on this planet — and three out of four Perfect Strangers cast members — vanish into thin air. Some people want to be (non-fatally) shot in the chest. Some opt for orgies aboard ferries. And some start heralding the return of Gary Busey.

Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein died in 1955, but the story of his brain has continued for years now, all because of one man who took the gray matter into his own hands and kept it for decades, even crossing state lines with the brain. What happened to Einstein’s brain? Believe it or not, it was the pathologist who conducted Einstein’s autopsy who just took the brain without permission, as detailed in last year’s documentary film The Man Who Stole Einstein’s Brain.

Hang out on Reddit long enough, and you’ll eventually see transphobic attitudes show up—explicitly and implicitly—in queer communities on the platform. And social media is, of course, a microcosm of a society which some think LGB equality is an acceptable substitute for LGBT equality. One Reddit user recently shed light on transphobia in the gay male population, saying that although he loves being gay and trans, his interactions with cis gay men “[have], by and large, been less than ideal.”

Paria Hassouri and her husband were thousands of miles from home, on vacation in Thailand, when they got a call from their daughter’s school. A teacher told them that Ava, then 13, was questioning her gender identity. During Ava’s coming-out experience, Hassouri educated herself about how best to support her daughter. Other parents are trying to do the same, as children and teens are opening up — sometimes even earlier in their lives — about their placement in a galaxy of queer existence.

Fans’ love for Hogwarts’ witches and wizards need not snuffed by the ramblings of a 50-something cisgender white lady. They have used Vanishing Spells on the woman whose words hurt trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people around the world. Call it the Fandom That Lived.

On March 13, the American College of Surgeons recommended hospitals across the country minimize, postpone, or cancel all scheduled elective surgeries because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As many hospitals took that advice and shed certain procedures from the books, many transgender people were left with devastating setbacks as gender-affirming surgeries were canceled or indefinitely postponed as the question of which procedures are “elective” looms.

After declaring the violence epidemic against transgender people a “myth,” journalist and self-described “gay conservative” Chad Felix Greene is now attacking the idea of the use of “they” as a singular pronoun and criticizing the APA for endorsing the usage.

Color photography was developed, so to speak, with a definite bias toward lighter skin — a reality cinematographer Ava Berkofsky sought to overcome when she was hired to light season 2 of the HBO comedy Insecure.