It’s just going to be a week of LGBTQ kids’entertainment news, and I’m okay with that. Streaming service Hulu has announced the premiere of The Bravest Knight, the first mainstream children’s television series that centers a family with same-sex parents. Watch a trailer here!
The show is based on the 2014 book by Daniel Errico, The Bravest Knight Who Ever Lived (now available in an updated new edition). In the book, a young pumpkin farmer named Cedric meets and marries the prince of his dreams. The Hulu series builds on this story, showing Cedric and Prince Andrew now with a daughter, Nia. Nia is training to be a knight herself, and Cedric shares tales of how he transformed from day-time farmer to full-fledged knight. Along the way, Nia “learns important values such as honor, justice and compassion, proving that knighthood is much more than slaying dragons,” says the network.
The first five episodes will premiere on Hulu June 21, starting with “Cedric & the Troll,” followed by an additional eight episodes later this year. While other children’s shows have shown LGBTQ characters in single episodes, a few others have secondary characters who are LGBTQ or have LGBTQ parents (such as the queen with two moms in Netflix’s The Dragon Prince), and even fewer have ongoing queer characters (as detailed in the long piece I wrote for Xfinity last year), this is the first children’s series on a major network that focuses on a family with same-sex parents.
The show boasts a star-studded cast including T.R. Knight as “Sir Cedric,” Bobby Moynihan as young Cedric’s troll sidekick “Grunt,” Storm Reid as Not-Yet-Knight “Nia,” and will also feature the voice talents of RuPaul, Christine Baranski, Wanda Sykes (also a real lesbian mom), Wilson Cruz, Teri Polo (who plays a lesbian mom on Freeform’s The Fosters and spinoff Good Trouble), Steven Weber, Donna Murphy, AJ McLean, Dot-Marie Jones, Maz Jobrani, Chance Hurstfield, and more. The Bravest Knight’s opening theme song was written and performed by Grammy-nominated musician, songwriter and activist Justin Tranter.
Hulu is owned by Disney, which has shown LGBTQ-inclusive children’s content before on its various networks, including single episodes of Doc McStuffins (Disney Junior), Good Luck Charlie (Disney Channel), and Gravity Falls (Disney Channel), with an ongoing character on Andi Mack (Disney Channel). Disney also owns ABC, home to Modern Family, which includes gay dads in its ensemble cast, and Freeform, home to the now-cancelled The Fosters and spinoff Good Trouble, about a two-mom family and their children.
As Alabama Public Television unfortunately proved this week, however, there are still some people who don’t want children to see LGBTQ characters on television. They feel that showing them means talking about sex and sexuality—but that’s a load of bunk. My own son knew he had two moms long before he knew what sex was. Nor did his friends need any explanation of our family beyond, “Sometimes, children have a mom and a dad, sometimes they have two moms or two dads.” The Bravest Knight thus offers a lovely counterbalance to the kind of thinking that has kept children from seeing LGBTQ people and families on TV that reflect the world today. Bravo to Hulu!
(If you still can’t get enough queer fairy tales, here’s a royal roundup of books with them.)
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