The L Word ends with a deadly sixth season

BY LYDIA MARTIN LMARTIN@MIAMIHERALD.COM

Poor Jenny. Everybody wanted her dead, and now she is. In Sunday night's opener of the sixth and final season of The L Word, the groundbreaking girl-on-girl melodrama fans have swooned over and bashed in equal measure, we see the lifeless, kooky novelist rolled from Bette and Tina's house on a gurney.

''I mean, it would be horribly unprofessional of me to say anything about how the story ends. But how can I phrase this? I'm curious to see how it all comes together,'' Mia Kirshner, who plays Jenny, says during a Miami visit to read from her book, I Live Here (Pantheon, $29.95), an edgy, graphic anthology written with three co-authors about the lives of refugees and displaced people. Kirshner spent seven years, and a good portion of the money she earned on The L Word, traveling to war zones and refugee camps around the world to collect its gut-wrenching stories.

Her work on behalf of displaced people is her greatest passion. But she can quickly shift back to shooting the breeze about the TV show -- airing at 9 p.m. on Showtime -- that inspired dozens of websites and chat rooms dedicated to dishing about alpha dyke Bette Porter (played a little more convincingly each year by Jennifer Beals, who can certainly work a power suit and cuff links) and her crew of fab friends and lovers.

The series, long on sizzling sex scenes but also dedicated to exploring serious issues -- gay marriage, the custody dramas of gay couples who co-parent and then split, the marginalization of transsexuals by gay and lesbian communities -- quickly established a cult following not only in the United States but also in China, Israel, Russia, Mexico, France. Just about any place with Internet access and a lesbian community thirsting to see itself represented in pop culture was seduced.

So, doesn't Jenny go off the rails toward the end? And doesn't she sort of deserve her fate?

''When you're an actor, your hands are tied. Ultimately it's one person's vision,'' says Kirshner, obviously as invested in the show as the multitude of fans who obsess on it as if it were real life. ``I actually feel sorry for Jenny. I think she's immature and harmless. And she did go through a lot. She was gang raped as a kid, which is pretty awful. She became a cutter and had an eating disorder. ''

As the season opens, we meet a presumably lesbian detective played by Lucy Lawless of Xena: Warrior Princess fame (The L Word has always been good at delivering guest appearances by actresses its lesbian viewers crush on), and it looks as if she'll be asking the gang a lot of questions.

The first television drama to focus on the lives of out-and-proud lesbians originally sold itself as Same Sex, Different City when it debuted in 2004 with a cast of lipsticked glamour girls. (Leisha Hailey, who plays Alice, is the only out lesbian in the cast.) This year, the series is more Desperate Housewives.

Just about everyone will be suspected of doing in Jenny, whose demise has been plenty publicized by Showtime. The short, eight-episode season is told in flashbacks to establish possible motives.

Hardcore fans, even those who have long wanted annoying, self-absorbed Jenny dead, have for weeks been griping in cyberspace about The L Word's ''shark-jumping'' final season. Someone got hold of the first episode and posted it on YouTube, and a bunch of spoiler commentaries and stills have viewers in a tizzy.

Fans are worked up, and they don't really know how Bette and Tina, their favorite couple, who broke up, made up, broke up and made up again, will ultimately fare.

Read between the lines of what Jennifer Beals has to say about TiBette in Season Six and. . . . Well, better we not get ahead of ourselves.

''From what I've seen, the edited version is quite different from the way we shot it,'' Beals says from her house in Los Angeles. ``I certainly would have liked it to have ended differently. Those crazy writer people.''

Beals confirms what everyone in cyberspace has prattled about: the tears she shed at the end of last season's money shot, when Bette grabs Tina in a nightclub after they had both allegedly moved on, kisses her and then starts sobbing, were not scripted.

''Bette just missed her,'' Beals says. ``Sometimes in the middle of a scene, the character you think you really know in your head will tell you what's actually going on. You can intellectualize all you want about the character and the story, but sometimes it hits you in the middle of a scene. Bette loves Tina so much and realizes she is her soul mate. Or, certainly at the time she thought of her as her soul mate.''

Beals isn't about to give up what happens in the end. But she says she'll miss the show and the cast.

''I'm tremendously proud of all of us and the fact that we made this work that has been so helpful to so many people,'' she says. ``One of the most memorable moments is when a couple who won an auction to do a walk-on on the show came in. They were two older ladies who had been together 30 years and had just decided to come out, and it was because the show had given them the courage. That was really moving.''

There's one more thing Beals won't get over right away: ``I'll definitely miss those clothes. I'm already grieving about the loss of future shoes. Even though I tried to take as much as I could. You can go on Wire Image and see that I keep wearing the same clothes from the show to everything. They're beautiful.''

Ilene Chaiken, creator and executive producer of The L Word, says she is hoping to sell a spinoff, and that she'd like to do an L Word movie. Chaiken won't offer details about the spinoff, but Showtime confirmed this week that a pilot is in the works. The spinoff would star Hailey, whose character winds up in the slammer. From high-fashion lesbians in WeHo to jumpsuit-wearing lesbians in prison?

''I can't talk about it yet,'' Chaiken says. ``But I am stubbornly saying it's not over. We tried to do something in the final season that had a shape to it, some sense that life goes on. And I do believe that because of what this show is and what it has meant, and because there is nothing else taking its place, that it will live on.''

Chaiken has hinted that the behind-the-scenes drama on TheL Word set has been pretty juicy over the years. Would she ever write a tell-all?

''No. Never. But it's better than The L Word,'' Chaiken says.

Beals also won't blab: 'I just go home to my family. When somebody comes up to tell me the gossip, I'm always the one going, `Really?' People will say, 'So-and-So flipped and now has a girlfriend.' I don't know if anything is really true.''

Beals, who vows to continue raising awareness on behalf of the LGBT community, plans to put together a book of the photographs she took over the years on the set.

'First I thought of doing it just for the cast, just as a way for us to remember. But then I said, `What if we made it available to fans and gave all the money to charity?' ''

Beals says she is hoping to use the designers who did Kirshner's book, which comes alive with drawings and illustrations and gripping narratives geared toward the short-attention-span generation.

''I wanted it to be a book my friends would read. Because of the Internet and the way our brains are shaped, we want small things,'' says Kirshner, whose father was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany after World War II, and whose mother was displaced from Bulgaria to Israel when she was 6. Kirshner grew up in Canada.

She says she enjoyed playing Jenny, but she also felt burdened by being the lesbian character everybody loves to hate.

``I stopped reading the blogs, because, obviously, I can't comment. But I agree with what people say about Jenny. She's crazy.''

Kirshner is still disturbed about a plot line in the fourth season in which Jenny adopts an aging dog and takes it to a vet's office to have it put to sleep as a way of getting close to the cute vet, the girlfriend of a critic who bashed her book.

''Obviously, my personal morality doesn't have to play into the story,'' she says. ``But the dog incident was just outrageous. To this day, I don't understand why we needed to do that. It got to the point where it was like, can I lose my job if I refuse to do this scene?''

Chaiken shrugs off the pouting her actresses have done over the years. Beals and Laurel Holloman (Tina) several times appealed to Chaiken to get their characters back together.

''These actors become very connected with their characters,'' Chaiken says. ``They meld with them. They were all playing flawed people living in Los Angeles and working in and around the movie business. In some ways it was close to home. They were upset by Jenny's death the way they were upset by Dana's death. But I understood pretty quickly that the show wouldn't be successful if it wasn't eliciting passionate and outraged responses. It's an ensemble drama, and I do embrace the genre. It's about making people angry sometimes.''

Comments

[frenchlady]

Hi. Happy to see that you are doing the blog for the final season. Always fun to read it.

Why do I have a feeling that we will need many boxes of Prozen pills this year...I hope I'm wrong!

[dutch/juno]

Lydia!! so glad to see this Blog back! one question concerning the JB quote--"...Or certainly at the time she thought of her as her soul mate..." is that a slip of her tongue, or a hint of trouble ahead for TiBette? I just don't trust IC to leave 'em alone!!

[Lydia Martin]

Hey Frenchlady, nice to see you again.

Dutch, come on, you don't expect me to give it all away, do you? ; ) Actually, I can't really offer up spoilers. Not my style. But stay tuned. And welcome back!

[Sue]

Great to see you back blogging for L-word's final season Lydia. I always get a kick out of reading your insight and humor and the discussions that follow are fun.

Not sure how I feel about a lesbian "Whodunit" and the subsequent prison drama, but it'll be fun to talk about it all nonetheless.

[lisalisa]

greetings lydia. glad you are back, no matter how dumb this season sounds. looking forward to your blogging.

[ella]

Well, Hello!
I am so happy you are back. I thought for a while that we had lost you. Looking forward to reading your clever analysis of S6. Bringing it on IC.

[colorado fan]

Lydia, so glad to see you back for the final season. So it begins - the beginning of the end.

Looking forward to your wit and snark on the S6. I can't wrap my mind around any of these characters killing Jenny. As we all know, logic has never been a guiding principle on TLW. Bring on the over-the-top, fantastical non-reality world of these LA lesbians.

[qiqi]

Lydia, I seem to look forward to your writing more than the show now.

[RDDJ]

Lydia! I'm with qiqi. I haven't even really watched the L-Word for the last two seasons, but I wouldn't miss my L-Words! So what's the big plot twist for the final season of our blog???