The L Word’s Coming Back

I watched The L Word in a very particular state of mind for a long time. These women on screen—Shane with her perfect hair, Dana caught between everything, Alice sharp and impossible—didn’t need to do anything special for it to register. The show let you look at them without shame, without irony, without the usual defenses. It was disarming.

The L Word was about lesbian women in Los Angeles, but that’s just the premise. What made it work was simpler: these characters were allowed to be complicated and sexual and fucked up without the show lecturing you about it. They had jobs and relationships and ambitions, and none of it was treated like a tragedy or a statement. Jenny showed up from the Midwest into this world of a museum director, a café owner, a hairdresser, a tennis player—and the show was genuinely interested in what that world did to her, what she wanted from it, what it cost her.

I just found out it’s coming back. Eight new episodes, Ilene Chaiken running it again. Which is weird to sit with, because most revivals are disasters—they’re just people performing the idea of who they used to be. Gilmore Girls came back and it was embarrassing. But I’m also curious. I want to know if the show still has it, that particular thing that made watching it feel like you were seeing something true instead of something designed to be safe.

The strange part about loving something like that is you never quite shake it. You move on, watch other things, forget about it for long stretches, but knowing it exists stays with you. When it comes back, you’re interested despite yourself. You want to see what happens next.

I’ll watch when it comes out. I’m not expecting to feel what I felt before—you can’t go back to that. But I’m curious whether the show can still do what it did, still give you that permission to feel things without apology. Whether it’s still unflinching. That’s what it always had that most television doesn’t: it looked directly at desire and complication and made room for both without flinching.