if you start with the first campaign, the whole series is on youtube and also available in podcast form! there’s a total of 115 episodes ranging from roughly 3 to 5 hours, so there’s hundreds of hours of content to keep you occupied! it picks up in the middle of their home game with the players at around level 8 or 9, so they have a much more solid grasp of their characters and relationships from the get-go compared to taz, at the cost of the audience missing out on some of the story. there IS a video that summarizes their adventures up to the point where the stream started, though (link). it has a variety of good lgbt representation (including a super cool nb character!!) that comes up throughout the game, both as NPCs and player characters. 

if you’re more interested in picking up with the new campaign, they stream on twitch and youtube (and maybe other sites idk) thursdays at 7pm pt. they’re uploaded to youtube on the monday after the stream and the podcast updates every thursday but a week after the original stream. they’ve made a point of not wanting to spoil the previous campaign for anyone, so if you want to keep up with the current campaign while catching up on the previous one that’s totally possible! i can’t make any absolute statements about representation or anything as of yet since we’re only two episodes in but let’s just say it looks promising!

as for the first campaign it’s suuuuuper long but i’d say you could start around episode 14 or episode 24ish, a lot of people aren’t too fond of the episodes in the beginning where orion is still in the cast for..Various Reasons, so picking up at 24 would avoid most of that! here’s a post with a list of recommended starting points for critical role C: