It's not that there aren't already gay characters on television. But all those characters are either peripheral or part of an ensemble. That's why, in a country that still has a lot of conflicts about homosexuality, this formerly innocuous, intermittently funny series is now pushing buttons in a way that other shows with gay characters haven't. Clearly, the answer is both, that TV and culture play off each other in ways that are hard to codify. It would be a mistake, however, to think of TV history as one long, uninterrupted drift toward untrammeled license.
Moral values are, of course, relative.
Party of Five features yards of premarital sex, yet is also a warmer celebration of family bonds than, say, Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show. Today there are new taboos. He's referring to the famous episodes of Maude in which Bea Arthur's title character not only considered having an abortion, as a number of TV characters have in years since, but actually went out and got one. Marta Kauffman, co-creator and executive producer of Friends, complains that her series wasn't allowed to show an actual condom, whereas just a few seasons earlier, Seinfeld was. You couldn't do the masturbation episode of Seinfeld today.