Dana, Alice, Shane, and the Very Long Wait

No series has made me think about women quite like The L Word—and I mean that in the most direct sense. Dana, Alice, Shane: all of them unreasonably attractive, all of them compelling in entirely different ways, and the show’s willingness to put them in bed together, in conflict, in love and grief and spectacular catastrophe was something American television almost never managed to pull off with any honesty. I watched all six seasons on a laptop at night, volume low, with a very specific kind of appreciation for everyone involved that I didn’t always discuss at length.

For anyone who missed it: The L Word ran from 2004 to 2009 and followed a group of lesbian women in Los Angeles. The entry point is Jenny, a would-be writer from the midwest who moves west for her boyfriend and finds herself slowly absorbed into a world that makes her previous life look very small—a museum director, a café owner, a hairdresser, a professional tennis player. Jenny is fascinated. So was I. The show treated its characters as fully realized human beings first and symbols of representation second, which sounds like a low bar until you clock how rarely it’s actually cleared.

Eight new episodes are in production—BuzzFeed News broke the news—with Ilene Chaiken and Marja-Lewis Ryan producing. Chaiken spent years wanting to continue the story, originally as a film and now as a proper series return. I want to be optimistic. But the Gilmore Girls revival sits in my memory like a cautionary marker: all the right people, technically correct in every way, emotionally inert in all the ones that mattered. A reunion that understood everything about the show except what made it matter in the first place. I’m hoping The L Word is smarter than that. Shane alone is worth at least four episodes of genuine attempts.