ABC has announced that it’s giving a second season to freshman season The Real O’Neals, possibly because it felt the need to balance out all the hordes of angry Marvel nerds and Nashville fans currently yelling at it by re-scandalizing the religious right. Focused on a conservative family that begins to publicly fall apart after all its secrets—gay son, divorcing parents, anorexic oldest kid—are revealed to the community, the show brought down a firestorm of mostly unearned heat when it was first announced. That was largely due to the involvement of sex columnist Dan Savage, upon whose life the series is loosely based. [Full disclosure: We’re one of several outlets that run’s Savage’s Savage Love column.]
And while the actual show turned out to be a lot tamer than talk of fisting or redefinitions of “Santorum,” it’s not like the kind of people angry about Savage’s involvement—which is largely nominal—had seen the show the first time they got mad about it, either. In any case, fans of watching Martha Plimpton try to de-gay her son, or Scrubs-esque daydream sequences, should be happy to get another season, which will presumably continue to air on Tuesday nights alongside its lead-in, the already renewed Fresh Off The Boat.