Alan Cumming is making TV history

The Good Wife star Alan Cumming is also an activist and openly bisexual actor who has never shied away from exploring sexuality in his roles, from the pansexual M.C. in Cabaret to the sexually fluid Joe Therrian in The Anniversary Party.

And he’s doing it again, this time for the CBS series Instinct. In the crime drama, he plays Dr. Dylan Reinhart, a former CIA operative turned psychology professor. Oh, and the character is both gay and married (yes, to a man).

The basic premise of the show is that a killer is using the doctor’s book – Freaks, a treatise on abnormal behavior – as inspiration for his (or her) murders. Reinhart is needed to help track the killer down.

And even though it is 2018, this will be the first hour long network drama to feature a gay lead (and to be carried by an out bisexual man).

“What’s fascinating is that I am taking a story with a gay person at the center and also showing a same-sex relationship to many millions of people who probably have never seen that before,” Cumming said. “And that to me is a very, very exciting point. It’s a mass way of confronting homophobia.”

“It definitely is another layer to the character that makes it interesting to play,” he added, “but sort of socially and politically, and especially in the time that we find ourselves in America where gay people are being persecuted again and their rights are being removed. I think it’s all the more important that we should have a character and (one) with a healthy, successful same-sex marriage on network screens.

“I really do applaud everyone at CBS for having the courage to put that on right now in a kind of environment or a climate that you might think possibly might not be the best time to do that. But I think it’s actually the perfect time.”

You can check out the trailer below.