The L Word for the next generation
Reboot continues to speak to inclusive TV audiences
Will & Grace, Tales of the City and Queer Eye have common ground: They were here, they were not here, they came back here and they are still queer. Now The L Word will join their ranks as the latest LGBTQ series to be rebooted for television audiences.
Ten years later, Showtime has rebranded the groundbreaking hit show to The L Word: Generation Q — a purposeful post-colon addition to bring more queerness into the fold.
“Generation Q is a nod to the generation who defines themselves as queer, which doesn’t really subscribe to labels beyond that,” says showrunner Marja-Lewis Ryan. “It was just meant to be a more inclusive sort of tag out to the original generation ‘L,’ which were mostly lesbians.”
“We’re bringing an authenticity to Generation Q that maybe wasn’t present in (the original series),”says Regina Hicks, co-executive producer of the show. “Our fresh take is, you know, be real.”
To keep it real, Ryan and Hicks acknowledged that the show needed to evolve with the community it portrayed as it grows both in numbers and
language.
In a 2017 Gallup poll, approximately 4.5 per cent of the U.S. population identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual and/ or transgender, though Americans tend to overestimate that number. (Five years prior, the percentage was recorded at 3.5 per cent.)
The shift in the queer population has also been represented on the small screen. According to GLAAD’s annual “Where We Are On TV” report, there has been an increase from 126 queer regular and recurring characters in 2009 — a television season which featured shows such as Glee, Skins and Modern Family — to 433 a decade later with series such as Pose, Steven Universe and Special.
In GLAAD’s analysis, during the 2018-19 television schedule on broadcast television — which includes ABC, CBS, CW, Fox and NBC — 8.8 per cent of the regular and recurring characters were queer, which is nearly double the U.S. population of LGBTQ humans. In 2019-20, that number jumps to a projection of 10.2 per cent.
It’s a change that has been reflected across the spectrum of the acronym.
“In last year’s report, we had counted 26 transgender characters across all of broadcast, cable and streaming. This year, we counted 38,” says Megan Townsend, principal author of the report and director of entertainment research and analysis at GLAAD. “And one thing that was really exciting was that we more than doubled the number of transgender men that we found on television.”
But not all representation is good representation, a fact of which Ryan and Hicks are more than aware. They both acknowledge that the original L Word series was the first of its kind, though it had missteps in its casting and portrayals of people of colour.
Ryan is adamant about avoiding tokenism and using “rainbow casting” — which she describes as having “one of each” person — both onand off-screen. “It is very, very, very rare that you get a bunch of queer people in a room that are not like the queer in the room,” she says. “We kind of get to strip that label away and then show up as like ourselves, which is what it feels like in real life.”