Loving The L Word

The Complete Series in Focus

Dana Heller

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781780764245
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857733245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The complete and groundbreaking "The L Word" is now out on DVD and this book makes the perfect companion, covering the series in its entirety. "Loving The L Word" picks up where Reading "The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television" (I.B. Tauris, 2006) left off. With new, updated chapters by many of the same television writers and scholars who contributed to the first volume, as well as essays by some newcomers, "Loving The L Word" explores the series' quantum contribution to the ongoing evolution of queer television. Whether you loved "The L Word", hated it, or loved to hate it, this book recognizes that the show transformed the post-Ellen LGBT television landscape, fulfilling a long-neglected, visceral desire for lesbian stories and images. In the process, it reshaped the communities that follow and talk about queer television and care about the narratives and characters that drive it. Including complete Character/Actor, Film/TV and Episode guides, the book also proceeds from the understanding that while "The L Word' ended in 2009 it manages to live on - in the lives of its fans, as well as in a new reality spin-off, "The Real L Word".

PART 1

Lamentations

1

“Slip under my cloak of boringness.
No one will even know we’re gone.”

Kim Ficera

Like a longtime lover who one day went out for milk and never came back, the final episode of The L Word left me hanging.

In a word, I felt cheated. In a lot of words, watching the finale was like having been read a story by someone with Alzheimer’s, who purposely set the book on fire before reaching the last page. Just seconds after the credits rolled, I wanted the hours and hours and hours and hours I’d devoted to the show, the characters, and the storylines back. I wanted to hang Ilene Chaiken in effigy with the rope left over from all the loose ends she failed to tie.

But did I expect more than I got? Did I expect, for example, an answer to the question, “Who killed Jenny?” No, not really. But I have to admit I held out a sliver of hope that the finale wouldn’t be as abrupt and careless as it was. So when it failed to live up to even my low expectations, I was angry.

On March 9, 2009, the morning after the finale aired, I wrote the following on my blog, “Pimp My Wry”:

To sum up the way many, if not most, viewers of The L Word finale feel this morning, I need only steal a line of dialog from Alice Pieszecki: “Thank you and fuck you.”

Alice said those words to Jamie last night, but today unhappy lesbian viewers are saying them right back to the woman who wrote them, the woman responsible for last night’s debacle, Ilene Chaiken. …

The past six years haven’t been a total waste of time … we owe a lot to Ilene and Showtime. Increased lesbian visibility on TV is good, even when it’s mediocre, and, yes, even when it’s downright cringe-worthy … [But], unfortunately, Chaiken remained true to form and gave us in the finale exactly what she’s given us the majority of the past six years, a jumbled and irrational hour that left us shaking our heads …

For the record, I didn’t enjoy writing those words then, and I don’t enjoy revisiting them now, because it’s never any fun to be reminded of a love affair gone terribly wrong. And a love affair is exactly what I’d call my relationship with the show.

(Cue Leave it to Beaver theme-song-like music.)

I can vividly remember the moment I was seduced by the mere idea of The L Word. It was an average day in Suckerville and I was walking home alone when Ilene pulled up beside me in a Subaru. “Excuse me, Average Lesbian, my friends and I have a great idea for a show,” she said as she handed me a picture of Jennifer Beals holding the cutest puppy I’d every seen in my life! “Will you ride with me to find more puppies and hot brunettes if I promise to tell your stories?”

“Yes! Yes!” I said. “I love brunettes! I love puppies! I love my stories and they do need to be told!” And I got in her car, and she drove me to hell.

Okay, so it didn’t happen exactly like that. The truth is, I fell in love with the show of my own free will after reading all the hype and seeing the pilot episode. I was hooked from the start, infatuated and charmed by the entire package, but especially by Alice’s “Chart.”

As I wrote in Reading The L Word, this book’s companion text, the Chart was something any lesbian with a sexual past could identify with:

[It] served to provide viewers with a not so subtle representation of the characters’ sexual ties to one another. … Lesbian viewers understood. We laughed out loud. We’ve all taken similar paths, after all; only the names of our pit stops were different. Regardless of our ages or accents we saw ourselves in the Chart and we each reacted similarly, as if a long-lost friend had finally gotten the huge break she was waiting for in Hollywood. (112)

I so wanted that friend to make it, and by midway through the first season I was head over heels in L Word love-lust. So smitten was I that I didn’t only look forward to my Sunday night dates with show, but also planned my life around them.

“I’m sorry,” I said to any and all who invited me here or there, “but I can’t do whatever fabulous thing you want me to do tonight because The L Word is on and, well, you’re not Marina.”

I also didn’t notice other dramas as much as I used to. Law and Order? Not tonight. Sure Mariska Hargitay was and is a hottie, but no matter how hard I prayed or how long, she never kissed a woman. And that so-called lesbian on ER? The one with one cane in her hand and another up her attitude? The one who obviously never had any sex? Please! I laughed in NBC’s homophobic face! I was finally able to turn on my television and watch a program I could actually relate to, a show that was as out as I am, a show that celebrated lesbians, the incestuousness of our lives, and the sex games we played out of necessity or even boredom. Why waste time on teases when I could enjoy the real thing?

For two years I was happier than Max at a computer convention sponsored by The Hair Club for Men. But as the third season came and went, something changed. Ilene had told stories, true, but she hadn’t told my stories. Could it be I’d been duped? Had I fallen not for The L Word, but for its potential? I wondered.

The show was groundbreaking, sure; that would never change. And, yes, there were entire seasons of greatness (one and two) that proved attempts at excellence were made. But the series had developed a superiority complex, an unrealistic and exaggerated opinion of itself. Also, not-so-little things, like Dana’s death and Tina’s obsession with men and real penises (season three), had come between us, and I was frustrated by the fact that Shane, a grown woman, rolled around LA on a skateboard. What lesbians had The L Word writers channeled for material? None I knew.

So I questioned Ilene, and did so publicly. In January of 2007, I wrote her an open letter and included these words: “I’m not angry; I’m concerned, and like many who watch your show, I’m disappointed in the last two seasons. Did you fall and hurt your head?”

She never answered.

I grew more and more disenchanted. I felt increasingly appeased instead of loved, tolerated instead of valued, and, perhaps predictably, I felt that I was trying much harder to make our affair work than I should have to. I felt as if I was being taken advantage of and that my relationship with The L Word was becoming (insert scary music here) unhealthy.

If only I could find a lesbian therapist!

One major concern was that after having been introduced to characters that I quickly grew to love (or hate), and after having become invested in their lives, their behaviors went from fascinating and somewhat believable to infuriating and downright preposterous. At least two characters never stood a chance of escaping the one-dimensional prison that the writers locked them in. Loyal viewers need only to recall the story arcs of Moira/Max and Kit for proof that rational character development wasn’t exactly a priority for the writers. In fact, it was so unimportant that by the end of the series both Max and Kit became caricatures—not of themselves, but of the transgender and African-American groups they were supposed to represent.

More troubling, I felt that Ilene wasn’t delivering on her promise of substance, of art imitating lesbian life. She tried, I suppose, by feeding me storylines that were pulled from the day’s headlines—Max’s pregnancy in season six, and Tasha’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military court battle in season five. But for the most part, instead of quality storytelling I got daytime soap-like nonsense—Jenny’s adopting a dog just to euthanize it in season four, and Jodi’s humiliation of Bette in her payback-is-a-bitch art sculpture-cum-magic show in season five—stories so far-fetched that even the craziest, most dysfunctional lesbians in West Hollywood probably deemed them implausible. (Did Ilene really think I’d believe that Jodi just wished all that footage of Bette into existence?) Chaiken, I thought, was only one bad idea away from having Jenny enlist help from the Cassadines to build a weather machine that would freeze LA.

What was a priority? What had replaced the substance of the first two seasons? What did I get in return for my devotion? A lesson in—get this—brand promotion.

The Chart, the very thing I loved most about the show, went from prop to character to product when Ilene turned chunks of the very first episode of season four into an advertisement promoting the launch of her now-failed “OurChart.com.” The Chart, the one “character” that had stayed true to that point, was now turning me off, and Ilene was making it perfectly clear that I was nothing more than a consumer in her eyes. Consumer—the least sexy word in the entire dictionary, next to congeal.

That move was, apparently, just part of her long-range plan.

In August of 2008, the summer before the sixth and final season, Advertising Age published an article titled “On Ad-Less ‘L Word,’ Brands Become Part of the Plot” (http://www.commercialalert.org/issues/culture/product-placement/on-ad-less-l-word-brands-become-part-of-the-plot) in which writer Claude Brodesser-Akner penned the following:

Ilene Chaiken, the creator of The L Word, has obtained something unprecedented among Hollywood’s writers—the power to control all brand integration for the show’s final season, as well as for a spin-off series launching on the network next year. … Those with knowledge of the matter say that for $300,000, consumer brands can buy an “integration package” that will either incorporate a brand into existing “L Word” storylines or allow the brand to work with the show’s writers to create customized storylines, participating in one episode or across several. Ms. Chaiken is also offering brands opportunities for integration around Ourchart.com, the largest social network for lesbians on the web. …

The “L Word,” [Chaiken] notes, isn’t just about and for gays and lesbians; it’s about “affluent, avid consumers plugged into pop culture,” which Ms. Chaiken said makes the series “a rare, perfect opportunity for showcasing brands” to women, lesbian or not.

An “opportunity for showcasing”? Uh, no. It was more like an opportunity for Ilene to punch me in the face while insisting she’s kissing me with her fist.

Right then and there I should have changed the channel. While product placement happens all the time on TV, being subjected to blatant infomercial-like scripted dialog in the middle of show was a first for me, and I hated it. In my mind it was an unprecedented infringement on our sacred relationship—the marriage, if you will, of story and audience. In fact, it was more than just a betrayal of trust and a barging in on of personal space; it was an undeserved and very overt flipping of the bird. Through that ad stunt Ilene said, point blank and without apology, I interrupt this program in this very shameful way because I can, and if you don’t like it, lump it. I’m the only game in town, sister, and therefore I’ve got you by the short hairs.

The clincher? She was right. I didn’t move.

I continued to watch despite having been use...

Table of contents

• Reading contemporary television
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Lamentations
• 1. “Slip under my cloak of boringness. No one will even know we’re gone.”
• 2. The T Word: Exploring Transgender Representation in The L Word
• 3. The End of The L Word: Fan Pleasure or Fan Pain?
• Part 2: Laudations
• 4. Queering The L Word
• 5. The Trouble with Shane: Lesbians and Polygamy
• 6. “L” is for Looking Again: Art and Representation on The L Word
• Part 3: Lineage
• 7. Trashy, Trivial, and Testimonial: From Pulp Novels to The L Word
• 8. From the Bottom to West Hollywood: Finding Community in Sula and The L Word
• 9. “No Limits” Entertainment: All-consuming Transgressions in Showtime’s The L Word
• Part 4: Legacy
• 10. Imagining Queer Community in The L Word Cristyn Davies and Kellie Burns
• 11. “The D Word”
• 12. Why The Real L Word Matters: Community and Lesbian Sex, in the Flesh
• Character/Actor Guide
• Complete Episode Guide
• Film and TV Guide
• Bibliography
• Notes