It's a bird! It's a plane! It's gay dads on Danger Force!
The Nickelodeon comedy—a spinoff of Henry Danger—included a story that featured a rainbow family.
The episode, "Say My Name," which aired April 11, is a little complicated (it involves a jailbreak and a mistaken identity for a villain named The Toddler), but essentially, a team of kid superheroes-in-training help reunite a lost child named Ellis with his parents, who turn out to be a same-sex couple named Justin (Tommy Dickie) and Dustan (Brandon Claybon).
Captain Man (Cooper Barnes), an adult superhero who is an instructor for the team at the Swellview Academy for the Gifted, is initially confused when two men arrive to pick up Ellis. Beforehand, the tech guru Schwoz (Michael D. Cohen) created a gadget that printed out a picture of what the boy's mother looks like, which turned out to be an attractive woman Captain Man was looking forward to meeting.
"Excuse me, who are you guys?" Captain Man asked the couple when they entered.
"We're Ellis's dads," Dustan said.
"OK, where are Ellis's moms?" the superhero responded, before presenting the photograph of the woman he was looking for.
"That's Ellis's birth mother, Samantha. We adopted him. She lives in Nova Scotia," Justin explained.
The chiseled Captain Man was shirtless during the exchange, which was because Ellis had previously spilled a pureed cheeseburger smoothie on his shirt.
Danger Force only premiered it March, but it already has featured an impressive number of LGBTQ+ actors. Frankie Grande and Alec Mapa were guest stars in the premiere. And Cohen, who publicly came out in 2019 about transitioning while on Danger Force, is a series regular on the spinoff.
Dickie, who is gay, told PRIDE that he is proud to help bring a story about same-sex parents and adoption to family entertainment.
"As a gay man who grew up with no visible role models of gay relationships in my community or entertainment content, I am grateful that this representation is happening on Nickelodeon, moved by the difference that it is surely making in the minds and hearts of children, and grateful to have been a part of this slow but important change," Dickie said. "Thank you for caring and for making a socially conscious choice, Nick."