Kevin Fallon interviewed Warren Littlefield, who ran NBC’s Entertainment division during the fertile years of 1993 to 1998 to talk about his new book, an oral history of Must See TV. He doesn’t have anything illuminating to say about the present, dismal state of NBC—does anybody?—but Littlefield does have some interesting context to offer on the fight to get NBC to go forward with Will & Grace:

Management said, “What the hell are you doing? Why are you developing Will and Grace?” It’s network television, and we have advertisers to answer to. Advertisers are not ready to embrace, at the core of a show, a relationship between a gay man and straight woman. What are you doing?…As I looked at the world, we lived in a world where I saw that relationship all the time. It was this gap. Television had ignored it. I knew that Max and David had a great feel for that world and those characters. They just needed to be convinced that we would actually go forward with it if they wrote it. I said to them, “If you do a great job, we’ll have to.” And that’s what they did. So then in order to kind of hip-check my management, I made sure that I went to Jimmy Burrows. When Jimmy fell in love with the project, I knew that no one could stand in the way…Lo and behold, advertisers said, “Oh, this is a really funny show.” That’s all they saw. So there was no protest. There was no advertiser boycott. It just went on and continued to carry the torch of what Must See TV stood for.

It’s one of the clearest cases I’ve ever seen of executives being afraid to greenlight something they didn’t have personal experience with, and overestimating the negative reaction as a result. I’m sure there are others. It’s rather sad to me that if someone doesn’t see a potential audience or kinds of relationships with their own eyes, they’d be unable to imagine that it exists. I don’t assume that my experience is the sum total of the world, and I do believe it’s incumbent on me to broaden that pool of experiences I have to draw on. Gay men and their straight female friends aren’t unicorns. Neither are middle-class black families. It’s infinitely irksome that gatekeepers wouldn’t have learned this basic lesson, and that it keeps the world of entertainment smaller and more limited by poverty of imagination than it has to be.

There will be a lot of new television shows competing for your attention over the next couple of weeks, but there’s only one that will only take a couple minutes of your time each week and is pushing forward the pop culture conversation about marriage equality, sexual orientation in sports, and the relationships between gay men and straight women. That’s Husbands, a new web series from Jane Espenson, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica and director Jeff Greenstein, a veteran of Friends, Will & Grace, Parenthood , and Desperate Housewives . I spoke with them and the rest of the show’s cast and crew for a two-part series about the state of web television, and the state of gay relationships in popular culture:

“When we did Will & Grace, we were attempting to extend the recent gains Ellen had made when it revealed to America that the spunky gal they were already in love with happened to be gay,” says Husbands director Jeff Greenstein, who won an Emmy in 2000 for his work on Will & Grace, and is a writer and executive producer on Desperate Housewives and State of Georgia, which premiered this summer. “Over the course of eight seasons, we were able to gently move both these men into mature relationships. And by that I don’t just mean two guys lounging on the sofa watching Funny Girl, but falling in love, planning a life, kissing on the lips and sleeping together. Which for the time was kind of a big deal. It’s been six years since Will & Grace, and gay guys on network TV are still lounging on the sofa watching Funny Girl.”

Rather than emulating dramas like The Kids Are All Right or comedies like Modern Family as a way to explore the realities of marriage, the creators of Husbands looked to stories about young married couples no matter their gender. Jane Espenson, the show’s co-creator and a veteran of shows ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Battlestar Galactica, took television shows Mad About You and Dharma & Greg as inspiration, while Greenstein looked to Barefoot in the Park. While most looks at gay couples tend to treat them as if they’re established, Cheeks, the show’s co-creator, says he and Espenson stumbled on the idea of looking at the beginning of a marriage. “It seemed like such a classic, yet timely, premise,” he says, as couples line up to marry in New York.

“Yes, the issue is serious, but every individual marriage is funny,” says Espenson. “And just making that point is making a point about marriage equality—look how this is just a normal marriage in every way, including all of its own personal craziness.”

The show premieres at 9:30 EST/6:30 PST tonight on its website. I’ve read through the first season’s worth of scripts, and it’s a fresh, funny show, a genuine bridge to something new and different. And more to the point, Husbands is effectively a pitch to a network. This first season is really a first-episode pilot. If an audience comes together around the web series, a network won’t have to speculate about whether there’s an viewership for an irreverent equal marriage comedy — they’ll know for sure that audience exists. Tuning in is mostly an abstract way to show support for something fresh and different unless you’re a Nielsen viewer. This is a time when we can actually cast countable votes with our mouses.