Thanks to Netflix and Hulu, if you don’t catch a series in its first season, you can binge watch till you do catch up. Some shows have a slow buzz. Arrow is one of those shows, getting a middling review for season 1. That buzz got a whole lot louder this season when critics raved. If you haven’t been watching, you should, since the CW just signed onto season 3 last week. Season 1 is on DVD, ready for binging.

Out gay showrunner/writer/producer Greg Berlanti is well known for some groundbreaking TV.  Berlanti was a writer and producer for the iconic Dawson’s Creek and has been a writer and producer for award-winning series: Everwood, Brothers&Sisters, No Ordinary Family, Dirty Sexy Money and now Arrow.
Berlanti brought us the first teenage boy kiss in prime time on Dawson’s Creek, the first transgender actress in a leading role on Dirty Sexy Money and a whole lot of gay on Brothers&Sisters. Arrow airs on the CW Wednesdays.
 

5. Green Arrow’s a Straight Shooter
In a series based on the DC Comics series, Green Arrow, Oliver Queen (Stephen Arnell) a/k/a Green Arrow is a hunky, leather-clad and be-masked billionaire-turned-vigilante. Arnell loves his multi-faceted character, "There’s Queen the casual playboy, Queen the wounded hero, Queen the brooding Hamlet, Queen the lover, Queen the man of action and so on." We love all Arrow’s sides. Especially the social justice one.
　
 

4. Mother Knows Best
Moira Queen (Susanna Thompson) is the mother of Oliver and his sister, Thea (Willa Holland). She’s also much more that she appears. Mother has her own agenda and it fairly pulses through the show as she prepares to take down Starling City and rebuild it in whose image? Call her the Evil Queen.
 

3. A Touch of Sin
Anywhere we can see Bex Taylor-Klaus, who played the young lesbian Bullet on The Killing and Lex on House of Lies, we’ll tune in. When Bex T-K joined the cast of Arrow as Sin, it added a fifth star to our four-star rating for the series. Off-screen, the 18-year-old Bex T-K just began a campaign against bullying on Feb. 28.  Keep your eye on her.
 

2. Girls Just Wanna Have Guns
There are so many fantastic female characters on Arrow, all of them in service to either good or evil as the battle for Starling City’s–and Green Arrow’s–heart and soul continues. Among our faves? Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), Queen Consolidated’s tech genius who is also Arrow’s right hand and Isabel Rochev (Summer Glau), his latest nemesis.
 

1. Love Vigilantes
In the Green Arrow comic, Black Canary is totally bisexual. In Arrow the TV series, Black Canary has had a slow reveal to be both Sara Lance and bi. The December cliffhanger left us with Black Canary (Caity Lotz) and Nyssa al Ghul (Spartacus’s Katrina Law) going there. As the season evolves toward the summer finale, what will happen to these two vigilantes when Nyssa almost took Sara out with her famous dagger and Arrow almost took her out?
 
 
Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Post and a contributing editor for Curve magazine, Curve digital and Lambda Literary Review. She is the author and editor of nearly 30 books including Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic and Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability. Her collection, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for Cultural/Historical Fiction. Her Y/A novel, Cutting will be published in fall 2014. @VABVOX