This Sunday marked the end of an era: Showtime’s The L Word aired its final episode. The L Word was trash. Let’s just get that out of the way. I am not claiming otherwise, nor would I propose an argument on the merits of the show. Some people loved it, some people hated it, but I think most people would agree that it was a highly unrealistic, overly sexualized, melodramatic soap opera. With lots of glam.
There are a lot of points to make about this series. It was the first television series made for lesbians, by lesbians, featuring lesbian characters. It was groundbreaking in the same way that Queer as Folk was groundbreaking: people were seeing gay characters they’d never before experienced. At the same time, the show didn’t really do the queer community any favors. The women on The L Word aren’t, as a rule, very nice to one another. Their favorite communication style always seemed to be talking around each other, not engaging with one another. The characters certainly were never diverse. Where are the stone butches? Where are the genderqueers? Where are the bois? But the series, of course, never claimed to cover all facets of queer identity, just this slim, privileged slice.
Which brings me to my point: the final episode. For the people who watched The L Word through all its ups and downs, I don’t think the final episode needed to do much to satisfy us. We wanted some closure, we wanted some gratuitous sex scenes, we wanted a little taste of what had come before, a little final farewell. We got none of that. (Ok,ok, we got gratuitous sex—Bette and Tina are hot!)
Here’s what happened in the final episode (warning: spoiler alert). Jenny, the character who we followed from the first episode when she moved to LA to be with her then-fiancee, only to (of course) realize that she was gay, messily ditch the boy, and then embark on many girl-centric escapades, winds up dead. We knew this in the first episode of this season, as we saw Jenny dead on a gurney, and then the season took us back in time to lead up to this moment. A set up like this is a promise to the viewer: we are going to explain to you how this happens. Keep watching. You will not be disappointed. But that implicit promise was broken when the episode ended with all The L Word women sauntering into the police station, ready to be questioned about Jenny’s murder, smiling and catching each others’ eyes. What? You’re not even going to tell us who killed Jenny? You’re not even going to leave us with a believable shot of these characters we’ve come to know so well mourning the loss of this member of their group, but instead a shot of them strolling towards a police station, sharing smirks with each other, body language impossible to decode or figure out. What the fuck, Ilene Chaiken!?!?
The rumors (or, maybe, more than rumors) are that the series ended this way as a set-up for viewers to watch Chaiken’s spin-off show called The Farm, featuring
I recently learned that I am 3 degrees of separation away from Chaiken (of course. hello, the Chart.) I want to leap over those three degrees and shake her. She had a loyal following. Everyone would have watched her new show. We love(d) her! What she did was alienate viewers and give people reason not to watch her next project. And why should we? She’s proven to us that what matters most to her is not the integrity of a project but instead her own agenda.
