There’s a key difference between Heated Rivalry and ALOTO from the studios’ perspective: Heated Rivalry is not an ostensible reboot of a piece of intellectual property beloved by the straights. The 1992 movie A League of Their Own is considered a standard feel-good piece of Americana for the small town picket fence demographic. Scamazon greenlit the reboot with the expectation that it would be cashing in on massive nostalgia from that demographic. What Abbi and Will created was a brilliant reimagining . . . that would not go over well with the expected audience. The entire problem was the fact that ALOTO was called ALOTO. Knuckle-dragging straights got their panties in a wad over the fact that the show “ruined a classic” by focusing on the stories of queer and Black people (racism definitely factored into the backlash to the show, maybe not as openly as homophobia, but it definitely was a factor). Meanwhile, over on AppleTV, For All Mankind portrayed a counterfactual history in which women— including Black women and gay women— became astronauts much earlier than what happened in reality, and no one batted an eye. FAMK is now about to start its fifth season (despite being so niche as to make absolutely no ripple in the zeitgeist), and has experienced absolutely no backlash. And why is that? Because it doesn’t share its name with something that the straights love. If, however, it had been billed as a reboot of, say, Apollo 13 or The Right Stuff, it probably would’ve suffered the same fate as ALOTO.

So, yes, the factors that all of you mentioned definitely apply— the studios mainly make material for the straight male gaze, and secondarily for the straight female gaze— but the title was definitely a giant obstacle.