TV

We Talked ‘The L Word’ Reboot With Shane, Queen Of The Lesbians

“I think now is the right time to launch a show like this, to give a voice to the people who are being discriminated against."

by Maeve Marsden  9 December 2019
Shane McCutcheon Kate Moennig The L Word Generation Q

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Is the millennial insatiable appetite for nostalgia our way of reminiscing about the past so we don’t have to contend with our climate apocalypse future?

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Invite Your Ex-Best Friend's New Girlfriend To Tea, 'The L Word' Reboot Has Been Confirmed

Look, who knows, I’m not a scientist. I do know that I am so pumped about the L Word reboot (dubbed The L Word: Generation Q), I texted about 5 ex-girlfriends to tell them I was interviewing Shane McCutcheon. Not Kate Moennig, the actress who played her. Shane McCutcheon.

I asked Kate what impact it had had on her life, having been conflated with her creation and she replied, “I guess it makes me feel like I did my job well. Good on me, job well done.”

How very Shane.

Now, I could submit 800 words on my various ex-girlfriends’ reactions to my interview news, complete with character profiles (I have loved, in my time, 2 Danas, 1 Jenny, 1 Marina, 1 Shane/Jenny hybrid and an Alice with smatterings of Jenny)… but that’s not what we’re here for.

This is not a moment for one individual lesbian, it is a moment for all of us.

The L Word reboot is more than a TV show, it’s more than the sum of its sex-fuelled melodramatic parts. The reboot is a chance for Gen X and early-millennial queer women to examine our past and content with our future. It is a reckoning.

Don’t Look Back: A Problematic Fave

In preparation for this article I did what all pyjama-clad freelance writers would do: I asked Twitter.

The response was swift and passionate. The L Word was everything, The L Word was terrible, Jenny was the WORST, Jenny was a victim of femme-phobia, Shane was hot, Bette was a gaslighter, Tina was racist, #BiErasure.

While many look back on The L Word through rose-coloured glasses — easy to do when something is firmly in the past — the reboot has stirred up all manner of problematic elements that deserve to be examined.

On rewatching, the degree to which queer politics have evolved is stark.

The characters in early episodes display transphobia ranging from subtle to blatant. Bette and Tina’s decision as to whether to use an African American sperm donor is woefully mishandled. As for the sperm donation process the two women embark on, their absolute lack of ethics regarding the men they approach is anxiety-inducing.

And that’s just the first few episodes.

There wasn’t time to raise all of these issues in my brief encounter with SHANE Moennig, but she assured me that the cast in Generation Q were more diverse, more representative of “real life,” and that all trans characters would be played by trans actors.

“The character of Max got a lot of flack back in 2005, understandably so,” she told me. “I think people forget that in 2005 we didn’t have the vocabulary and knowledge that we have now. I don’t get on the bandwagon of trashing that because we were doing the best we could during that time. I’m not saying it’s perfect because it wasn’t but you have to acknowledge where we were.”

I tend to think we can both trash carefully critique past texts’ ideological missteps while also celebrating the groundwork they laid for future creators.

The act of robust critique — whether longform articles or a bunch of people complaining on Twitter — generates change and is a fundamental to ensuring artists develop more progressive approaches to storytelling.

But if we reboot something we know was flawed, are we offering the chance for learning or rewarding bad behaviour? And do we need another L Word, in a screen culture where we have Pose, Vida, One Day at a Time, The Bold Type, Lost Girl…shall I go on?

The Only Gay In The Village

While every other show now seems to be adding a queer character or two for a little flavour, it’s still rare — with the exception of Pose — to see shows exploring queer communities.

For true representation (and because straight people are boring), it is important to show us en masse rather than in isolation so that the complexities and nuances of queer culture, relationships and politics are explored. Shows like this also offer a hothouse for queer creatives and, when LGBTQI+ actors are cast, a chance for lesser known actors to reach new audiences.

Shane has been working with Bette and Alice to try to get the show back for years (let’s be honest, it’s more fun to imagine all of them as their characters). She tells me it took the Veronica Mars reboot to give them a creative framework, and the 2016 election to really fire them up to make it happen.

“I think now is the right time to launch a show like this, to give a voice to the people who are being discriminated against. And bring a little love into people’s homes,” she adds.

I expressed hope that the show might be more directly political, more critical of the status quo, but despite the much marketed storyline focused on Bette running for mayor, the-actor-known-mostly-as-Ms-McCutcheon implied that Generation Q would continue to focus mainly on the intimacies and personal relationships of the characters’ lives, that the act of such a queer cast was enough:

“The show is a political statement unto itself.”

It’s an unsurprising and yet almost unsettling phenomenon, watching TV that is ever more diverse and progressive while being governed by leaders who are ever more fascist. The optimist would say that these stories are helping us imagine a resistance, building empathy for the very people being persecuted by the State.

I do sometimes worry that they are a distraction, though, a way of letting us think we are moving forward while those in power eviscerate our rights. Still… #SelfCare, amirite?

Seriously Though, I Want Answers

I’ll be shocked if the reboot doesn’t address the political issues with the original show.

A number of the cast and creatives are part of the queer community, and they’ve had a decade to contend with commentary on the original. If they don’t improve they’ll have the rage of Queer Twitter to content with.

In the meantime — while pretending the world isn’t on fire — I have other questions I need answered.

Did Alice invent social media? The L Word came out before Facebook. How did she build the chart? She never mentions a background in web development. How did people add their names to it? HOW DID IT WORK?

Did they all have long hair not because of societal pressures to present lesbians as feminine but because they could use it to cover their faces during oral sex?

Did we all hate Jenny because inside every queer traumatised by discrimination and self-doubt is a deeply annoying self-involved poetry-writing nightmare? Am I Jenny? Are we all Jenny?

Will Holland Taylor come back? WILL SHE BRING SARAH PAULSON WITH HER?

There’s only one way to find out.

The L Word: Generation Q is currently streaming on Stan.

Maeve Marsden is a freelance writer, director, producer and performer based in Sydney. She tweets from @maevemarsden and you can check out her work at maevemarsden.com.