Pam Grier is prepared to defend herself against another Papi-centric story line.
The L Word was put of out of its misery last night after six seasons of unwavering mediocrity, and while I didn’t see the finale (a few episodes into the shortened final season, when it became clear that the writers had again failed to come up with any kind of game plan, I bailed), some guy who did says it sucked. He misspelled Pam Grier’s name in his review, by the way, so I’m not quite sure that he can be trusted, but…Oh, who am I kidding? There’s no way in hell the finale wasn’t every bit as terrible as all the episodes that preceded it. And if you’re looking for a second opinion, Entertainment Weekly‘s Nicholas Fonseca agrees the big denouement left something to be desired, but ends things on a more philosophical note, writing:
But years from now, will it even matter how the show went out in its final hour? It was really the other 69 episodes that made The L Word a TV milestone.
If by that he means a milestone in unbridled—and unrivaled—awfulness, then I agree. But Fonseca continues:
As the retrospective that aired beforehand reminded us, its impact expands far beyond its barrier-busting stories: TV’s first deaf lesbian, its first regularly occurring transsexual character, bisexuals of both genders, drag kings, the US military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, biracial identity, gay parenting, sex/drug/alcohol/gambling addiction, sexual abuse, midlife sexual awakenings, breast cancer…this show took on a lot. Judging by the frequent erraticism of its storytelling, it probably took on too much. In the end, I say, thank goodness it had the guts to take them on at all.
My thoughts are slightly different. Maybe, on occasion, when you know you’re failing miserably at something, you have to stop trying to do it. I know that’s the kind of crazy notion that runs contrary to everything the entertainment industry normally believes in (after all, these are the same brain trusts who thought Freddie Prinze Jr. was a good idea in the ’90s), but can you honestly say that The L Word was successful in its handling of any of those issues?
It didn’t entirely botch the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell story line (which was less effective than it would have been had viewers been given more reasons to care about Tasha, the new character who was the focus of the subplot), and no missteps were made with issues of biracial identity, but the failures of all those other story lines were pretty massive. What The L Word did best was frivolity and froth, and even those episodes (which were mostly the work of writer-director Angela Robinson and not Ilene Chaiken, the show’s demented creator and resident peddler of overpriced L-Word-themed jewelry) were few and far between.
Altogether, this is a series that will be remembered for two things: having a bunch of lesbian characters (which is good) and inspiring eight trillion shitty YouTube fan-edited clips of C-list actresses making out with each other while Sarah McLachlan wails in the background (which is bad). Call it a draw.
Mia Kirshner (seen here in The Black Dahlia) tearfully asks God, “Why can’t I catch a break?”
Does anyone else find it a bit odd that the L.A. Times is questioning whether killing Jenny Schecter on The L Word will drive viewers away from the show? As much as I hate to defend any of the decisions made by the hackety-hacks (don’t talk back!) who write for The L Word (assuming it isn’t written the way I’ve long suspected: by putting typewriters in front of oversexed zoo animals and handing the resulting drafts to the criminally insane for polishing), aren’t they finally, after five long years of mind-boggling mediocrity, giving the viewers what they want by killing Jenny, one of the most widely loathed central characters in the history of television?
Mind you, I watched Big Love last week instead of the season premiere of The L Word, so I can’t comment on the particulars of this “Oh my God, they killed Jenny! You bastards!” plot development yet. It just seems obvious that the viewers who have faithfully watched (and almost as faithfully complained about—not that it ever stopped them from watching) this train wreck for the last five seasons aren’t tuning in for the storytelling.
Grouse as they might at the prospect of Jenny’s death spurring a season-long game of Clue, these viewers come from hardy stock, having suffered through missteps including but not limited to voyeuristic roommate guy; drag king Ivan; the Max debacle; the Betty invasions; Jenny turning into a self-harming stripper/Talmudic scholar when repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse came to the surface (she wasn’t really a Talmudic scholar, but I still laugh when I think of her breaking out the Hebrew); Dana’s death; Alice fucking a vampire; Tina’s ill-fated return to man-cock; Kit getting pregnant at the age of 87; Shane having sex with every woman she meets (and not seeming to care when it’s hinted that one of them is an arsonist); and freaking Papi.
In other words, the people who watch this show—and I know because, sadly, I’m one of them—have no respect for their own intelligence. They don’t care about decent writing or acting (if they wanted quality actors, they wouldn’t have spent so much time complaining about Mia Kirshner and Marlee Matlin on message boards over the years and they wouldn’t have been so invested in the Tina/Bette pairing), and they only watch The L Word because lesbian characters are almost impossible to find anywhere else.
Hell, the writers could probably kill off several more characters and while viewers would complain, they’d keep tuning in as long as the occasional hot actress appeared and, to borrow a phrase from an SNL sketch, hugged another woman with her legs in friendship. No, the real crime in all of this (if the character is actually dead) might actually be that Jenny wasn’t killed off years ago, which would have served the dual purpose of pleasing viewers and freeing Mia Kirshner to pursue more work with directors like Brian De Palma and Atom Egoyan instead of visionless goofballs like Ilene Chaiken.
Willow and Kennedy weren’t the first lesbians to have sex on primetime television.
The fifth season of The L Word premiered tonight, and my expectations were not met. It wasn’t bad in a “so bad it’s funny” kind of way, it was bad in a “maybe I should be watching American Gladiators instead” kind of way. The only laugh of the night came during the show’s opening moments, when the special guest star credit went to Cybill Shepherd instead of the man who co-wrote My Dinner with Andre. Of course, the laughter died down pretty quickly when I realized that meant I’d have to deal with Cybill Shepherd.
I admit it: I’m a blog virgin. There are a handful of blogs I might visit in moments of boredom, usually to skim the latest political headlines, but I don’t participate in comments sections or subscribe to any feeds. I’ve never tried my hand at writing an entry, and there’s an 80-20 chance I’ll lose interest in this and shut it down before the month is through. But something is happening tomorrow night that I might need to blog about. If you’re an ill-tempered, masochistic Showtime-subscribing lesbian like me, you already know what it is. It’s the return of The L Word, a show so horribly written that it’s almost enough to make you approach the huddled nebbishes on a WGA picket line and say, “That’s right, you strike! You strike and you stay struck until you apologize for that fucking tractor!”
Oh, but that wouldn’t be enough. You would have so much more to say, maybe starting with “What, do you think Mia Kirshner doesn’t have anything better to do with her time? Fine, she was in Not Another Teen Movie, but she got her break in an Atom Egoyan film, for crying out loud. What horrible crime against humanity did she commit in a past life that she wins a leading role on what should have been a groundbreaking TV show, only to have its writers systematically destroy her character, turning her into one of the most loathed fictional creations in the history of premium cable, a medium that gave us Dream On and The Mind of the Married Man? Why is she reciting Hebrew prayers in unspeakably asinine faux-arty carnival scenes while sporting Azrael Abyss-inspired eye makeup and adopting dying dogs in order to prey on innocent veterinarians while Sarah Polley writes and directs Away from Her?”
The list of grievances one could lodge against the writers of The L Word is quite possibly endless. There’s the humor that’s not funny; a deep resistance to acknowledging valid criticism of the show that routinely manifests itself in unresolved plot lines and Betty appearances that suggest the show runner is hostile to her own audience; and a glaring inability to write characters out of the show in a way that’s respectful to viewers, the characters, or the actors who play them. There are wasted casting opportunities, like hiring Elodie Bouchez, who won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for the brilliant The Dreamlife of Angels, so she can – do what, exactly? Show up in the background of a few scenes with Jenny and then kiss Karina Lombard, a former series regular who was unceremoniously dumped at the end of the first season and brought back for two or three minutes several years later, presumably for little more than the private amusement of the people who canned her?
And then there is Papi. I still can’t figure out why she was created. The only way Papi could possibly work as a character is if Janina Gavankar were replaced by Rachel Dratch, who would serve the same function she did on 30 Rock, but while dressed in a variety of ugly sleeveless shirts and increasingly bizarre-looking hats. For example, if Alice and Shane ducked into The Planet’s bathroom to have an intensely personal conversation (which happens on The L Word with some frequency), Papi would emerge from a stall, wearing a tam-o’-shanter and holding a plunger. Dana Fairbanks would make it to the finals of a tennis tournament and there would be Papi, the overeager ball girl with an obvious crush, bedecked in a brightly colored knit rasta hat. (Oh, wait. Dana’s dead. Again I refer to a glaring inability to write characters out of the show.)
Looking back on it, as one often does when she realizes she has spent four years watching a show she sort of hates, we knew what we were getting from the very first episode. That’s when the supposedly intelligent Bette and Tina, the token long-term couple in a group of otherwise single friends, conspired to conceive a child by luring a horny straight guy into a threesome.
First of all, Ilene Chaiken stole that plot from an episode of I Love Lucy. But even more disconcerting than her flagrant pillaging of one of television’s most beloved comedies was that these two characters, who were longstanding, politically active, ostensibly socially aware members of the gay community, were going to have unprotected sex with a complete stranger because they had been suddenly seized by baby fever. Why would they do that? Was it because it’s not TV, it’s HBO?
Maybe that’s the problem. It’s not HBO, it’s Showtime, and Showtime is bad. It’s so bad it ought to be called NBC. When a network isn’t even partly redeemed by violence, nudity, graphic lesbian sex or the prettiness of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, it has more problems than Tom Cruise’s publicist. And don’t give me Weeds as an example of a Showtime show that works, because Mary-Louise Parker is practically superhuman; she could make anything work. Which begs the question, why isn’t Mary-Louise Parker writing The L Word? Fine, she’s straight, but she was in Fried Green Tomatoes. She knows from lesbianism.
“Yeah,” you’re saying to yourselves right now. “And the idiot who wrote this knows from stupidity.” You’re right. I won’t argue. I know that I’m stupid. I’m so stupid that I embrace my stupidity. I am volunteering, even, to broadcast it to all three of you who will read this. I know that if I hate The L Word so much, the obvious solution is to stop watching it. But where do I get my lesbian fix on TV now that Kynt & Vyxsin have been eliminated from The Amazing Race?
Nip/Tuck is out of the question, and even I can’t make it through an episode of South of Nowhere. (My standards may be thinner than Donald Trump’s hair, but they still exist.) The L Word is my only option, and surveying a big four network landscape that is virtually lesbian-free, I should probably be thankful for it. So what if it is, at its worst, one of the most embarrassingly badly written hour-long dramas in the history of television? At its best, it gives us—or gave us, prior to another of those signature sloppy character exits—innumerable scenes of Sarah Shahi awkwardly pretending to deejay and do other things I won’t mention because my family will probably find this and pass judgment. It’s hard to argue with that, though I expect to have a complaint or two come Sunday night.
