Out actress Jane Lynch has plenty of awards on her mantlepiece, including a trio of Emmys (one for playing Sue Sylvester in Glee and two for hosting the gameshow, Hollywood Game Night). Now she’s added a fourth, picking up the Outstanding Actress in a Short Form Comedy or Drama Series Emmy for her role in series, Dropping the Soap.

Lynch, who also produced the show and helped bring it to the screen, plays Olivia Vanderstein in Dropping The Soap, the new producer in charge of a struggling daytime soap. That cause issues for everyone on the show, but none moreso than self-centred, closeted leading man, Julian Draker (Paul Witten).

The series debuted via the LGBT-focused streaming service Dekkoo earlier this year, and is now available via the likes of iTune, Google Play and Amazon Instant Video.

It’s not been revealed whether we’ll see another season of the show, but perhaps its Emmy win will give it the shot in the arm it needs to ensure we see a few more episodes.

Jane Lynch has been brilliant for years, but people only really started properly paying attention after Glee. Since that show ended, TV has been looking for the right spot for her, and now NBC is hoping they’ve found it, as Variety reports she’s been cast in the pilot for the new comedy, Relatively Happy.

It’s a bit of gender-blind casting – sort of – as the role was originally written for a man, before the producers (including Will & Grace’s Max Mutchnick) decided it would be perfect for Lynch. Thankfully though, it doesn’t appear they’re changing much, as that just as when the character was a guy, she’ll be a bit of a womaniser.

The show ‘follows adult siblings Henry (John Rudnitsky) and Heather (Genevieve Angelson) who wind up living together for the first time since they were kids, after one of them suffers a big loss. They become each other’s wingman, shoulder to cry on, best friend and punching bag as they navigate love, loss and work while helping to get each other “un-stuck.”’

Lynch will play ‘Bobbi Martin, a fast-living, Scotch-drinking, three-piece-suit–wearing, womanizing divorce attorney who is Henry’s boss, mentor and “father” figure’.

Sitcom directing legend James Burrows will helm the pilot, with the show angling to premiere this autumn.

For a few years now the It Gets Better Project has been encouraging people to make short videos letting young LGBT people know that while it’s tough as a youngster, things do improve. With It Got Better they’re going a little deeper and that includes Jane Lynch, who goes into some depth in a new video, talking about the difficulties she faced growing up gay.

It’s a pretty moving interview and well worth watching, where she touches on plenty of things LGBT people will recognise about the fears in the early stages of realising you aren’t quite like most other people around you – but that things do most definitely improve. Lynch says, ‘There were certain ways you behaved. Boys did certain things, girls did certain things and I did not fit in that.

‘I identified more with boy things. I enjoyed dressing like a boy. Boys stopped wanting to play with me when I got to about 10, I had to fight to play baseball. Every day I didn’t know I was going to be received because I would just hang out until I got to play. Deep down inside I knew that there was something else going on.

‘I finally had a word for it when I was about 14. I had these friends and they said, ‘‘You know on the beach sometimes you’ll see guys walking together holding hands and they’re gay for each other’’ and I thought,  ‘I am the girl version of that’.

‘It was almost like I had a disease, I felt like I had been diagnosed.’

Things have definitely changed for her though, as she adds, ‘Now I live in a world where I don’t give a shit if you have a problem with who I am.’ [Read more…]