I was watching the L Word the other night and I learned two important things:
1) If you're transgendered, and in the closet, do not go to your boss's pool party.
2) The L Word is awful.
I've watched bits of the L Word over the past two years, and, I've got to admit, I was kind of sucked in at first. I mean, sure, the women are all lipstick femmes, and they're all model-thin, and white, and they speak entirely in cliche, and, when they're walking up to a door, there's a twenty second shot of them walking up to a door, but, for some reason, there was still something oddly compelling about watching two fake lesbians having sex in a pool.
Apparently not anymore.
Somewhere between season two and season four the writers decided to spruce up things by over-misusing hip lingo ("my band released our album on myspace this week, so we're dealing with a lot of record companies") and random namedropping (Jenny gets interviewed by Curve Magazine! Jenny writes short fiction for the New Yorker! Jenny loves the B52s!).
And now that the show has decided to take on the "big issues," like transgender politics, the stakes are uncomfortably high. If the L Word is to be believed, the time period between a transitioning FTM's first testosterone injection and his ability to grow facial hair, pass as a man in a job interview and start dating the boss's daughter is about, er, five minutes.
It's too bad that the two flagship American big-G gay dramas (Queer as Folk and the L Word) have suffered from both bad writing and an unhealthy love of camp. The most interesting queer television characters from the past few years have appeared on straight shows (like Six Feet Under), so maybe there's something to be said against creating tv shows for the sole sake of self-representation. Maybe the pressure of living up to a community's vision of itself is too difficult a thing to do, and this burden inhibits good writing. Or maybe all the good gay writers just aren't writing for gay television shows. Or maybe the L Word should just spent more time on character-development, and less time shilling its internet side-projects ("Hey Alice, come look, it's ourchart.com, my new lesbian social networking site!").
All things said, it's hard to take something as trashy as the L Word all that seriously, and nowadays there are alternatives. When I want to watch a well-written, fully fleshed and engaging lesbian character deal with real-world issues, I'll just tune in to the Wire. And when I want to see Cybill Shepherd ride a mechanical bull in a bikini and yell "Snapple!" I'll know where to look.
