In the mid-to-late 2010s, one of the best places to tell stories about queer characters was kids TV. A boomlet of shows following in the footsteps of Cartoon Network’s whimsically dark series Adventure Time, shows like Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe and Netflix’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, featured characters not just discovering but celebrating their queerness.

But by 2023, almost all of those shows have gone off the air, and few similarly themed series have replaced them. In an environment where several red states have pushed laws that hope to keep kids from encountering queer identities or exploring their own queerness, it can seem like children’s TV has made a cautious retreat from discussing LGBTQ+ issues.

One of the last shows from that period still airing, the Disney Channel’s The Owl House, is not just one of the best kids shows on TV, but one of the best shows on TV, period. Its blend of whimsical humor, unsettling horror, and rich mythology made for a series whose appeal reached beyond kids to teens and adults. And from its very first episode, it’s been frequently, aggressively queer in a way even many shows aimed at adults can’t touch.

The show’s central love story is between two girls, whose process of self-discovery becomes an elaborate metaphorical dance. (And sometimes, a literal one.) Our heroes are opposed by a rigid, puritanical figure who longs to put hard and fast barriers on the wild magic that powers the series’ world. It’s a surprisingly deep allegory for the ways in which reactionary ideologies all have the same aim: stamping out that which is different.

Even in the world of queer kids TV, The Owl House stands alone. “We don’t have many, if any, [kids shows] who have taken queer relationships, made them explicit early on, and then made them central to the characters’ evolutions,” says Dr. Kyra Hunting, an associate professor of media arts and studies at the University of Kentucky who studies children’s media.  

Yet now The Owl House is ending too, its truncated third season wrapping with a series finale that will air Saturday night. The Owl House was the best queer kids show. Will it be the last one as well? 

The Owl House centers on Luz, a normal girl who travels to the mystical Boiling Isles. A fantasy novel nerd who’s genre-savvy enough to twist the situation to her advantage, Luz decides to learn magic herself, apprenticing to a rogue witch and later attending a magic school. There, she meets Amity, the daughter of a powerful witch family. The two initially clash, but irritation gives way to affection and, finally, romance. While other kids shows have had queer romances, they either involve supporting characters or are made explicit in the show’s series finale if they involve the protagonist. “Lumity,” though, is a full-on enemies-to-girlfriends arc.

The Owl House’s characters also include a nonbinary witch who is the great lost love of Luz’s mentor, the gay dads of one of Luz’s best friends, and a host of queer side characters, including a shape-shifting lizard (a metaphor for basically any queer identity you’d like). The show has so many queer characters that when a boy and girl character start flirting in the third season, they can almost seem like the show’s token heterosexuals. (The show also has maybe my favorite character in all of television, a seemingly infinite cylindrical owl-faced tube creature who irritates everyone he meets but also serves as an enormous, annoying guard dog. His name, of course, is Hooty.) The series goes beyond basic representation too, as the characters’ queerness always informs their story lines. Luz and Amity, for instance, become both better witches and better people when they’re able to be together.

While the show has never been a smash hit, it performs well, especially online. On YouTube, the series’ first episode has almost 9 million views; its most recent has just over 6 million. Even on good, old-fashioned television, the show’s ratings have seen a bit of an uptick of late. It’s also won awards, including a Peabody. 

In the immediate wake of Adventure Time—a series that spanned 10 seasons and 283 episodes—those qualities might have won The Owl House a long run. Instead, it was just barely renewed for its third and final season, which consists of three roughly hour-long specials. When series creator Dana Terrace tried to explain the cancellation, she cited the show’s popularity with demographics other than tweens as a contributing factor. One executive within Disney decided the show didn’t fit the “Disney brand,” she said in a post to Reddit, because “the story is serialized…[and] our audience skews older.” (Vanity Fair reached out to Disney for comment.)

Terrace also said the show’s queer representation had made it a difficult sell in some international markets, and gotten it outright banned in others. But she doesn’t believe that was a contributing factor to the cancellation. Indeed, much of Disney’s new programming post–Owl House’s cancellation has featured queer characters as well. Yet the show’s central love story has been a huge draw for its teen and adult viewers—and if The Owl House was canceled for drawing in an older audience, then its queerness would seem to be inextricably intertwined with its appeal to that audience.

So is The Owl House a canary in a coal mine? Is kids TV becoming less queer? 

GLAAD’s 2023 survey of queer representation on television found that the number of LGBTQ+ characters on television, across all platforms and formats, has declined very slightly since the 2021–2022 season. Kids TV is included in that roundup, and GLAAD’s report repeatedly points out The Owl House as boosting the diversity of queer characters on both kids TV and cable TV in general, before also noting that The Owl House is one of many shows featuring queer characters that has been canceled.

Hunting says that queer representation on kids TV is still light-years beyond where it was even five years ago, but how that representation happens is shifting. It’s much harder to get a kids show on the air now without a tie to some sort of existing intellectual property, and it’s much easier to make a brand-new character queer than to make queer an already existing character. These newer shows aren’t wholly devoid of queer characters—Marvel’s new Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur features trans characters, for instance—but they’re unlikely to be as central to a series as Luz and Amity were to The Owl House. It also remains difficult to get serialized stories on kids TV, and some level of serialization is often a prerequisite for a romance story line that might show queer kids figuring themselves out. 

The current political climate could be making some networks more skittish about queer kids content, says Hunting, but not necessarily. She points to how many kids shows started featuring immigrant characters and bilingual characters during the early days of the Trump administration. 

“People who produce kids TV are massively aware their audience is significantly less white than the audience for adult TV, and it’s significantly more likely to identify as nonbinary or LGBTQ,” Hunting says. “If that’s who your audience is and you want to create content that reflects and appeals to your audience, that is going to have to be more diverse than it was historically.”

There are signs that queer kids TV is only in a brief lull. Hunting points to Cartoon Network’s Craig of the Creek as a series that has added LGBTQ+ characters without breaking a sweat, and she says the number of shows aimed at preschoolers that feature kids with same-sex parents or kids who fall somewhere under the trans umbrella has steadily gone up in the last several years. 

The fact also remains that right now, it’s hard to keep any TV show on the air for long. You don’t need to seek out an antiqueer conspiracy for that to be true. Or maybe this moment in queer kids TV feels so perilous almost entirely because The Owl House itself is ending. Without this show’s fresh take on telling stories about queer kids that are about more than just the kids’ queerness, TV is going to feel a little duller. 

“Are shows going to be skittish about doing what The Owl House did, which is making that queer relationship the very center of the narrative? There was nothing like it, so it’s really hard to say!” Hunting says. “Nobody else has done it. Nobody else has pulled it off.”