As we head into the second season of The L Word, which has its Canadian premiere Thursday night on Showcase, diehard fans of the juicy Showtime series are waiting with bated breath to discover the fates of the program's seriously troubled lipstick lesbians.
Will Kit (the token straight character played by the indomitable Pam Grier) fall in love with the transgender drag king who has been wooing her?
Will Tina (Laurel Holloman) ever forgive Bette (Jennifer Beals as the ballsy art-gallery director and Kit's biracial half-sister) for getting hot and heavy with a Latina carpenter while she was dragging herself out of post-miscarriage depression?
Will Jenny (the indecisive young writer played by Canadian Mia Kirshner) end up with her heartbroken husband, or the sultry café owner who seduced her into her first same-sex experience, the sensitive male marine biologist or the promising new gal on the scene, who is also being toyed with by said café owner?
And you thought Sex and the City pushed boundaries for women on television.
With its glamorous ensemble of thirtysomething professionals, tangled relationship woes and slippery sexual predicaments, The L Word is often described as the obvious successor to the phenomenally popular HBO series.
"Who would not want to be as successful as Sex and the City?" says creator, writer and executive producer Ilene Chaiken, who is currently shooting the show's third season in Vancouver. Even though Chaiken welcomes the comparison, she admits she doesn't quite understand it. " Sex and the City was a half-hour comedy and much more whimsical. The L Word, although we do have some humour, is primarily a drama. It's an hour long. And we do more in-depth storytelling that at least endeavours to be more realistic."
The L Word is set in West Hollywood's fabulously chic lesbian community, and loosely based on Chaiken's own experiences. But to describe it as a show about lesbians would be as inaccurate as saying that Six Feet Under is about a funeral parlour. This provocative prime-time soap opera is really about relationships. And its stories of lust, loss, confusion and regret are much more intense, messy and multifaceted than anything ever shown on Sex and the City.
"It's not the norm on television to show someone who's so human," says Kirshner, whose character, Jenny, seems to arouse the most dislike in viewers. "She was engaged, she thought she was committed and then she meets this woman who completely changes her life and she's trying to do the right thing, but she's a mess. The fact that there's so much grey in Jenny confuses the audience, but it's very real. Her dilemma was never about being gay -- it was about being in love with two people at the same time. Who hasn't been in that situation?"
As for the sex? Well, when Bette slapped Tina and threw her on the bed for a steamy breakup session in the first season's final episode, she made Sex and the City's man-eating Samantha look like Doris Day by comparison.
The show has been a huge success for Showtime, the U.S. premium cable channel that created a niche for itself by catering to distinct audience segments (with original programs like the Hispanic-themed Resurrection Blvd., the black family comedy Soul Food and the North American version of Queer as Folk), but is now trying to create wider crossover appeal. When The L Word first aired in the U.S., it quadrupled the network's prime-time average rating in its first two episodes.
" The L Word was always meant to reach beyond a gay audience," says Chaiken. "The show has a core audience of dedicated lesbian fans, but it's much larger than that."
In the U.S., anecdotal evidence suggests that the show is attracting a cult following among bi-curious women. Last February, The New York Observer (which published Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City column upon which the HBO series was based) ran a lengthy feature story about the show's "Sapphosexual" fans: straight women with a twinge of curiosity and a high dose of frustration with Manhattan's metrosexual males.
"The excited chatter reserved not so long ago for Carrie and Mr. Big has been replaced by heated girlie chats over which L Word lovely is the hottest," the article explained. The writer concluded that Shane, the androgynous heartthrob hair stylist played by Katherine Moennig, is the character most viewers would like to sleep with.
In Canada, The L Word consistently ranked as one of the top five programs on Showcase last season for women aged 18 to 34, but men really liked it, too. In fact, there were more men watching than women -- 62 per cent on average, according to Nielsen Media Research. Men who were watching primarily for the soft-porn sex scenes might be disappointed in the second season, which becomes a little less titillating as it delves deeper into the characters' backgrounds and psychological reasons for being so screwed up. Despite the introduction of several interesting guest stars (Camryn Manheim as a snarly movie executive and Sandra Bernhard as an abrasive writing professor), many U.S. TV critics -- mostly men -- have said season two is "glum" and "depressing."
"Check out the source," says Grier, during a break on set last week. "They were watching for their hormones."
Grier, who is perhaps best known for her glory days in the seventies as the queen of blaxploitation flicks, says her character on The L Word plays an important role in the show's attempt to address gender-identity politics, one not so different from Foxy Brown and the other kick-ass heroines she once portrayed.
"As the token straight character, Kit raises issues that bring acceptance. She's the conduit, trying to get gay women and straight women together. And when women unite in numbers, they'll have more power.
"Right now, gay men have more money than gay women. And they have better TV shows. Where are all the films about gay women? Where is the lesbian Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? Where is the lesbian Birdcage?" she asks, referring to the Mike Nichols film about a gay cabaret owner and his transvestite companion.
Although it might seem as if TV is teeming with gays and gay imagery -- the current flurry includes the NBC sitcom Will & Grace, Bravo's male makeover program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Ellen DeGeneres's daytime talk show -- this representation was a long time coming. And even today, many cast members are reluctant to label themselves as gay.
"I'm not being coy about it, I just think it's irrelevant," says Kirshner, who starred in her first major film at 19, playing the stripper in Atom Egoyan's Exotica. "There's no shame in stating your sexuality. And for some people that's empowerment. For me, I like women, I like men. But it's something that's personal."
Chaiken remembers when she first pitched the idea for a lesbian ensemble drama to her colleagues at Showtime. "They kind of rolled their eyes and said 'Yeah, lovely, great idea. The guys in the suits upstairs are never going to get it.' I let it go because I knew they were right.
"Then a couple of years later, I came back and pitched it again, knowing the climate in television, the climate for telling stories about gay people, had changed significantly. I just went in with a couple of colleagues and sat down with a senior executive, one of the guys in the suits, and started telling him stories about all the lesbians I've known. He was enthralled. He blushed. He was shocked. He was amused. In my line of work, it's really rare when someone buys something in the room, but he stood up at the end of the meeting and said, 'We've got to do this.' It was that easy."
Dealing with the show's lesbian detractors, however, hasn't necessarily been a piece of cake. The show has been criticized for not including any unshaved, buzz-cut bull dykes.
"I get it," says Chaiken, who promises more butch imagery in the second and third seasons. "And actually I welcome the debate. It's completely understandable, given how marginalized lesbians have been, how unrepresented we've been in popular entertainment. This is the first mainstream pop-culture TV series about lesbians -- everybody's going to clamour for representation. And so many people are going to say, 'Where am I? I'm still not here. That's not me.' If that wasn't happening, there would be something wrong."
Alexandra Gill