The L Word

Over the seasons, the show has shifted from earnest lesbian soap opera, to high-camp melodrama, to whatever Season 4 was supposed to be, to completely self-aware farce. It's the kind of show where continuity is a rarity, where diorama construction can take the place of character development, and where plots and subplots were probably pieced together by dumping a magnetic poetry kit on the ground and then vacuuming up three words at random ("Incest Carnival Memory," "Silent Yoga Kidnapping," "Betty Jacuzzi Cruise," etc.).

—The Hater

A Showtime series running for six seasons, from 2004 to 2009. It followed a group of lesbian (and bisexual and transgendered) friends who hang out together at a queer-friendly coffee shop in Los Angeles.

Distaff Counterpart to Queer as Folk.

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Tropes used in The L Word include:

• Absentee Actor: For most of Season 5, Helena is missing after running away to escape her mother.
• The Alcoholic: Kit. Played for Drama.
  • Kit's kid sister Bette slips into this during Season 2, after Tina dumps her over her infidelity.
• All Gays Are Promiscuous: Most of the cast tends to avert this, but Shane is this trope distilled into human form.
  • Most of Bette's problems over the course of the series are caused by her poor judgement and self-control when it comes to sex. Sooner or later, she cheats on every partner she ever has, and Alice even calls her out on it at one point.
• All Girls Like Ponies: The characters lampshade this trope at a party, specifically the fact that almost all of them avert it.
• All Lesbians Want Kids: Bette and Tina's decision to procreate, and all the resulting drama which ensues, is one of the major plot threads throughout the entire run of the series.
  • Averted with pretty much all other characters who frankly have enough problems as it is.
• As You Know: This is usually Alice's job.
• The Atoner: Mark, in the last few episodes of Season 2. Judging from his absence from the series from Season 3 onward, it doesn't seem to have worked.
• Author Avatar: Jenny, probably.
  • Confirmed. Jenny and Dana were based loosely on the other two creators of the show, Michele Abbott and Kathy Greenberg. The subsequent treatment of both characters over the course of the show's run could be interpreted as a Take That (see Evil Former Friend below).
• Batman Gambit: It probably would have been more difficult for Adele to get her Magnificent Bastardry on if she couldn't count on Season 5 Jenny acting selfish, irresponsible, and just plain terrible at every opportunity.
• The Beard: In Season 1, Dana and her tennis partner Harrison act as beards for each other, since neither one is out of the closet.
  • In Season 5, Niki's agents insist that she use her male costar as a beard, as damage control after Alice outs her on national television. She caves under the pressure, which drives a wedge between her and Jenny.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Averted. Some of the most attractive characters (in-universe) are the most mean, spiteful and intolerable. Yeah, we mean Jenny.
• Bifauxnen: Shane McCuthcheon.
• Bi the Way: Max. Kelly.
  • Jenny starts off straight, until a kiss from Marina makes her see the lesbian side of Sears. After spending the better part of a year wrestling with her sexual identity, she admits to having had lesbian tendencies (which she tried to suppress) all her life. A girlfriend or two later, she winds up involved with female-to-male transsexual Max. After their relationship implodes, she swears off of men altogether.
  • Tina had only ever been with men before she hooked up with Bette. Several years later, she found herself craving male companionship again, but less than a year after that she drifted back to women. Her stated "regrets" about going back to men were social rather than sexual; she missed her place in the lesbian community and felt betrayed when those lesbian friends ostracized her. She has maintained and enjoyed multiple on-screen relationships with both women and men. So it's likely that Tina is a bisexual woman who rounds herself up to "Lesbian" for political reasons.
  • Alice gives lip service to being bisexual in Season 1. The one actual relationship (as opposed to casual hookup) she had on-screen with a male-bodied character was the "male-identified lesbian" Lisa, who, as Alice described, "did 'dyke' better than any dyke [she] had ever met" (it was not a compliment). After the first season, no heterosexual relations involving Alice are seen or described, and in Season 5, Alice claims under oath to be a lesbian.
  • It was never clear whether Cherie Jaffe was actually bisexual, or just gay for Shane.
• Bury Your Gays: Dana. Jenny.
• Butch Lesbian: Candace. Dusty. Jamie. Robin. Tasha.
  • Moira appeared to be one until he came out as Max.
  • Shane arguably qualifies as butch. She doesn't think of herself as one, as evidenced by her bemused but slightly puzzled reaction in an episode where she and Max help carry some luggage for the others, and Max refers to both himself and Shane as "butches".
• But I Can't Be Pregnant: Max.
• But Not Too Bi
• But Not Too Black: Both Bette and Kit have biracial parentage, but Kit is darker-skinned.
  • Bette and Kit had different mothers. Kit's mother was- presumably- black, as evidenced in the first episode: during an introduction at a party, Bette makes it a point to mention that Kit is her half-sister, to which Kit replies, "Guess which half?"
• Byronic Hero: Female version in Shane.
• California Doubling: Inverted - The series took place in Los Angeles, but was filmed in Vancouver. Lampshaded at one point in Season 5, when Jenny is scouting locations for Lez Girls, and loudly proclaims that "Vancouver can't pass for L.A.!"
• The Cameo: The series was brimming with them, from a surprisingly wide variety of actors, usually playing themselves or thinly-veiled versions thereof. Notable examples include Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Arianna Huffington, Guinevere Turner, Ossie Davis, Eric Roberts, Dana Delany, Margot Kidder, Michael Hogan, Snoop Dogg...
  • Between Tigh, Cally, Helo, Leoben, and D'Anna, half the cast of Battlestar Galactica showed up at one point or another.
  • Cobie Smulders had a 4-episode run in Season 2, before her big break.
• Cast Full of Gay: The whole point of the show.
• Character Development: Helena probably got the most of it on-screen.
• Chewing the Scenery: After 3 seasons of relatively understated performances, Jenny started leaving bite marks on the sets in Season 4. And as the series continued, it only got worse.
• Children Raise You: Shane in Season 4.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Lisa, the male-identified lesbian, vanishes without a trace after Alice dumps him. He is never mentioned again.
• Club Kid: Shane. Particularly in the first season, where another character actually mistakes her for a (male) club kid.
• The Comically Serious: Shane.
• Coming Out Story: Several of them, most notably Jenny's.
• Cool Old Lady: Peggy, except to Helena.
• Costume Porn: There's as much of this as there is any actual Fan Service.
• Country Matters: So very, very much.
• Cure Your Gays: When Jenny and Shane are interviewing potential roommates in Season 2, one of them makes this offer, and she is shown the door.
• Dark and Troubled Past: The physical and sexual abuse Jenny suffered as a child is explored, but never defined, in one of the major plot threads of Season 2.
  • Shane's dark past is not focused on as much, but is still mentioned. In Seasons 1-2, we learn that she was once forced to work as a (pretending-to-be-male) prostitute, that she was essentially abandoned by her parents, has various drug addictions, etc. These events are strongly implied to be the reason she is such a loyal friend, but terrible with relationships/commitment - she feels the need to please others, is satisfied with very little for herself, but is afraid to commit to anyone or anything. The later seasons continue to add heartbreaking details - Shane is thrilled to simply have her own, tiny little room because she's apparently never had her own before (in Season 6, Jenny, of course, promptly converts Shane's room into a study one day when Shane is out, assuming that since they're now sleeping together, she'll just move into Jenny's room with her!).
• Deadpan Snarker: Alice. Helena. Bette. Billy in Season 3.
• Demoted to Extra: In Seasons 1-5, Kit was one of the main characters. In Season 6, she existed primarily to say "Girl!" about once per scene.
  • After two seasons of being a core member of the cast, Jodi also fell into the background during Season 6.
• Did Not Do the Research: That is not a Manatee! iPhones don't work that way!
• Drag Queen: Sunset Boulevard in Season 6. Subverted because he's straight.
• Dropped A Bridge On Her: Dana. Jenny.
• Drugs Are Bad: Mostly averted; most of the cast is shown using some form of marijuana at various points, and Shane even dabbles in harder drugs, to no ill effect. However, this trope was played straight in a Season 1 subplot involving a friend of Shane's who wound up consumed by his addictions. Unlike Shane, he couldn't handle his drugs. Niki using drugs is alluded to.
• Dying Alone: Dana.
• Dysfunction Junction: Just try to find one character on this show that isn't massively screwed up, even the successful and wealthy ones.
• Ensemble Cast: Bette, Shane, Alice Jenny and Tina all get significant amounts of screentime.
• Even the Girls Want Her: Shane.
  • But kind of a moot point in a Cast Full of Gay.
    • But even the straight girls go gay for Shane.
    • Interestingly, Shane's based off a real woman named Sally Hershberger, also a hairstylisy for celebrities- though her clients include far more 'big names' than Shane's, including multiple Presidents. She's also known for making even straight celebrities feel the urge to experiment a little, so perhaps the portrayal isn't that unrealistic.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: And how!
• Everybody Smokes
• Evil Former Friend: Ilene Chaiken convinced Showtime to boot her two co-creators off the show after the second episode. Over the course of the series, the two characters based on them were the only characters to die.
• Face Heel Turn: Jenny makes one somewhere between the end of Season 3 and the beginning of Season 4, with no real explanation given.
  • Arguably, her Suddenly Sexuality in Season 1 overlaps with this - Jenny seems like the perfect girlfriend at first, so it's a surprise when she turns out to be so willing to immediately cheat on Tim when she realizes her attraction to girls.
    • Don't forget all the times she lied to and manipulated both Tim and Marina over the course of the affair and the aftermath, alternating between trying to convince them that it was their fault and playing the victim while she bounced back and forth between the two of them like a rubber ball.
• The Fashionista: The show doesn't spare any expense for any character's wardrobe, but Alice and Helena are the only ones who regularly talk about it.
  • Bette doesn't have the fashionista attitude, but she certainly dresses the part, even relative to her castmates. And the one holiday gift we see her purchase for her father is a $500 necktie.
  • Niki has a hissy fit because she doesn't think her character's clothes in Lez Girls are fashionable.
• Femme Fatale: Marina.
• Fille Fatale: Nadia was legally an adult, but her position as Bette's student and employee made their affair professionally and socially inappropriate. Despite (or because of) this, Nadia pursued Bette relentlessly (and sexual self-control wasn't exactly one of Bette's defining traits).
• Fish Out of Water: Jenny in Season 1, when she first arrives in L.A.
  • Max in Season 3, when Jenny picks him up in her hometown and brings him back to L.A. with her.
• Flanderization: Much of the cast, but especially Shane.
  • Bette went from "classy yuppie who knows how to cut loose every now and then" to "stick in the mud so uptight it's a wonder any of her friends bother with her at all."
• Foreshadowing: In the pilot, they mention that a longer ring finger than index finger makes someone a lesbian. On Jenny, they are exactly the same size. Alice mentions that this might mean she's bisexual. Just a few minutes later...
• Gayborhood: West Hollywood. For "WeHo", this is Truth in Television.
• Gaydar: In the opening scene in Season 5.
• Gayngst: Dana during most of Season 1, when she was still in the closet, mostly on account of her conservative parents and Smug Snake manager. As it turned out, said closet was even more transparent than she realized.
• Genre Shift: Apparently what this prime-time lesbian soap opera really needed to do in its final season was introduce a murder mystery.
  • ...Which never got solved.
• Girl-On-Girl Is Hot: Exploited. Due to featuring a lot of sex scenes between women, the show has a very large male fanbase whose primary motivation for watching it is... yeah. The show got often accused of Pandering to the Base because of said Misaimed Fandom. Writers eventually performed a Take That, Audience! with Mark's attitude towards Shane and Jenny to a mitigated reaction from the audience.
• Good-Looking Privates: Tasha, who is outed and has to leave the military because of her relationship with Alice.
• Hand Wave: In Season 3, Bette's inexplicable conversion to Buddhism (reportedly to get pregnant actress Jennifer Beals out of Bette's wardrobe of snappy power suits and into bump-concealing kaftans and shawls for the duration of the season).
  • The Alice/Dana/Tonya love triangle was an important (and well-executed) subplot from the latter half of Season 1 through the first half of Season 2. The conclusion was a poorly-written anticlimax that came way out of left field. A superb performance by Erin Daniels only served to highlight the awful writing.
• Has Two Mommies: Bette and Tina's daughter Angelica.
• Heel Face Turn: Helena, somewhere between Season 2 and Season 3.
• Heel Realization: By the end of Season 2, Mark finally has some understanding of the depths to which he has sunk.
• Her Codename Was Mary Sue: In the first season, pretentious, weird Jenny Schecter wrote a series of implausibly well-received stories about pretentious, weird Sara Schuster. Yes, the Author Avatar had an Author Avatar.
• Hero Antagonist: Helena Peabody in Season 2. She was a villain from Bette's point of view. But giving money to charity isn't evil just because you're not giving it specifically to the PoV character's company. And it's not "stealing your girlfriend" if your girlfriend already broke up with you, because you cheated on her. In Season 3, Helena quickly makes the transition to full-fledged protagonist, a status she maintains for the rest of the series.
• Heterosexual Brigade Bait: Most of the prominent male characters are conventionally handsome. There's also Shane, the dark-haired, androgynous Bifauxnen with the deep voice, the Dark and Troubled Past, admirers lining up around the block, and as many shirtless scenes as any other two characters on the show put together.
• High Heel Face Turn: Dawn's lover Cindi *AHEM* Cindi Tucker in Season 5.
• Hot Teacher: Jenny's creative writing instructor in Season 2 (played by real-life lesbian Sandra Bernhard) is pretty much the opposite of this.
  • Bette becomes this trope in Season 4, when she joins the university faculty. It does not end well for her (see Teacher-Student Romance below).
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every single episode title in the entire run of the series begins with the letter "L".
• I Don't Pay You to Think: In "LGB Tease", Jenny delivers this line rather awesomely after Marissa brings back her dog wearing the wrong color ribbons:

Jenny: (regarding her dog) What's this on his head? This is Mauve. This is not orange.
Marissa: Well, the groomer ran out of orange, so we thought we would...
Jenny: No. No, no. I don't pay you to think. (to the dog) Do I, Sounder? Do I pay her to think? (to Marissa) He hates you. So take him back to the groomers now and get orange ribbons so that he can like you again. That's it.

• If It's You, It's OK: Shane tends to bring this out in straight women.
• Important Haircut: Shane gives two of them in Season 2. Jenny asks for the first one, since she's tired of being read as "straight". Shane offers Mark the second one, as a symbolic gesture of friendship and inclusion (which, as she finds out later, he totally didn't deserve).
• Incompatible Orientation: Mark's fascination with Shane obviously includes lust.
  • Helena's affection for Dylan in Season 3 appeared to be unrequited because of this, but as the season progressed, the situation proved to be a lot more complicated than that.
  • Season 5 introduced Molly, the one straight girl on the planet who won't go gay for Shane... until she does.
• In the Blood: Shane's father is also a womanizer, but unlike Shane, he's consciously and actively malicious. Yet he still manages to convince her that they're the same, which winds up ruining her relationship with Carmen and Paige.
• Intrepid Reporter: Alice. Gets her in trouble when she inadvertently outs a celebrity athlete.
• It Is Pronounced "Tro-PAY": Papi tries to get everyone to say her name correctly.
• Ivy League for Everyone: But not for Shane.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Tina helping Bette get (and stay) back together with Jodi in Seasons 4-5. She wins in the end, though.
  • Shane chasing Molly away at the end of Season 5. A particularly tragic example, since she was one of only two women Shane had ever really loved. And unlike Carmen, Molly actually accepted Shane for who she was.
• Karma Houdini: Mark. When he's rooming with Jenny and Shane, they find out he's hidden cameras all over the house and has been secretly recording every aspect of their lives. Somehow, he avoids being stabbed or thrown in jail. They do tell him to leave, but within the same episode, Jenny changes her mind and dares him to stay and atone. Because, y'know, a real woman would do that..
• Lampshade Hanging: The Lez Girls subplot of Season 5 was a lampshade cannon on full-auto, aimed primarily at Season 1.
• Lesbian Vampire: Uta Refson.
• Lethal Diagnosis: Dana.
• Lez Bro: Mark to Shane in Season 2, before his betrayal was revealed.
  • Lisa the male-identified lesbian is introduced as Shane's Lez Bro before he starts dating Alice.
• Lipstick Lesbian: Most of the cast, quite deliberately. Ilene Chaiken publicly claimed that the show would never have been made if it hadn't pandered to the Male Gaze (and unfortunately, she's probably right).
• Loads and Loads of Characters: So many they kept coming and going between seasons. Or breaking up with each other. Or dying.
• Looking for Love In All the Wrong Places: While Shane and Papi both appear at first glance to be Casanovas, they've both revealed themselves over time to be incredibly caring and empathic people, who feel almost obligated to please everyone around them. And they've both genuinely fallen in love, and had their hearts broken, without turning bitter or predatory.
• Mister Seahorse: Max gets pregnant while transitioning to male (and looks quite masculine due to the hormones he's been taking).
• Money Fetish: Helena and Catherine play with their winnings from gambling, which leads to fetishistic sex with it.
• Mrs. Robinson: Peggy Peabody. Holland Taylor is practically typecast in this role.
  • Phyllis Kroll.
• Negated Moment of Awesome: When Jenny and Shane find out about Mark secretly filming them, he tries to tell them how much he's "grown" since he set up those cameras. Jenny retorts, "You think that's what I'm here for? For some fucking man to chew up and spit out so he can 'grow'?!" It was actually pretty badass (and this was Jenny, for God's sake) and could have been a Crowning Moment of Awesome if she hadn't decided at the end of the episode to fold and give him another chance.
• Nice Guy: Surprisingly, most of the male characters.
  • In Season 1, Tim seemed like the perfect boyfriend at first. After walking in on his so-called friend fucking his fiance, he acted like a huge jerk. But most people would consider that a reasonable response. And even at his worst, while standing next to Jenny, the woman who spent half a season deceiving, manipulating, humiliating and cuckolding him during her journey of sexual self-discovery, he looked like a saint.
  • In Seasons 3-4, Angus played this trope ridiculously straight. But when he finally did fall off his pedestal, he fell hard.
  • Sunset Boulevard is not only a straight guy, but he's also probably the only genuinely decent man Kit has ever dated.
  • Even Mark wasn't entirely bad. While what he did was unbelievably sleazy, he at least felt remorse about it and recognized that he probably wasn't going to be forgiven and accepted that. Its also pretty clear he hated himself as much as Jenny hated him.
• Nobody Over 50 Is Gay: Averted.
• Parental Abandonment: Shane's absentee junkie parents screwed up her ability to form and maintain functional romantic attachments in a big way. And when Dad finally did come back into her life, he only managed to mess with her head even more.
• Psycho Lesbian: Jenny Schecter.
• Put on a Bus: Marina, Robin, Carmen, Lara, Paige, Papi, Catherine... The show pruned away at least one or two characters every season.
  • Carmen was a case of Real Life Writes the Plot. Sarah Shahi was cast in a starring role on the network TV cop drama Life.
  • Male characters were particularly susceptible to this: Tim, Gene, Mark, Billy, Angus...
  • Dylan was Put on a Bus after Season 3, but then returned to become a major character of Season 6.
• Really Gets Around: Where do we even begin here? Oh, that's right: Shane.
• The Rival: The Planet vs. She-Bar. Planet wins.
• Salt and Pepper: Kit and Angus. Also, Tasha and Alice.
• Sassy Black Woman: What Kit ended up becoming.
• Schoolgirl Lesbians: Appeared in one episode, which turned out to be the set for a porn film.
• Self-Harm: In one episode Jenny is found cutting her legs by her roommate, Shane.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Variant; Tasha is very closed off and defensive about her experiences in Iraq.
• Show Within a Show: Lez Girls.
• Smug Snake: Catherine. Dawn.
  • Dana's manager in Season 1.
  • Ilene Chaiken. "Smug?" Run a Google video search for an interview with her. Any interview. She couldn't act more self-satisfied if she tried. As for the "Snake" half, see Evil Former Friend above.
• Spicy Latina: Papi is this trope to a T.
• Strip Poker: In "Lesson Number One", Helena plays strip gin against Catherine in an attempt to clear her gambling debts.
• Suddenly Sexuality: Jenny. Phyllis.
  • Tina getting together with Bette can also be seen this way, as her coming out story during an episode in Season 1 mentions explicitly that Bette was the first, and at the time of that episode, the only woman Tina had ever been with.
• Take That, Audience!: Unsuccessful. Despite trying to dodge the virulent accusations of pandering to a straight male demographic by featuring an in-show betrayal from Mark towards Shane and Jenny who only got with them because he thought Girl-On-Girl Is Hot, the true lesbian audience remained unconvinced.
• Teacher-Student Romance: Bette's brief affair with her assistant Nadia in Season 4. Phyllis fires Bette over it at the beginning of Season 6.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Jenny and Shane, from Season 2 onward.
  • Tasha and Alice, from Season 4 onward.
• Tomboyish Name: Shane.
• Transsexualism: Max is a rare (for media attention) FTM example. He becomes pregnant, too.
  • Depending on your interpretation, Ivan is either a drag king or a non-operative transman.
• Triang Relations: Alice, Tasha, and Jamie.
• Truth in Television: Leisha Hailey, Clementine Ford, Tammy Lynn Michaels, Guinevere Turner, Jane Lynch, Alexandra Holden, Kelly McGillis, Kristanna Loken, Daniela Sea, Karina Lombard and Heather Matarazzo are all lesbian or bisexual in real life, as well as playing lesbian or bisexual characters on the show (and Mia Kirshner has hinted at bisexuality in interviews).
  • Kate Moennig is fiercely private about her personal life and refuses to comment on her sexual orientation. But Jennifer Beals may have accidentally outed Moennig in an interview she did with The Advocate. And there have been rumors of Moennig being involved with Francesca Gregorini and her co-star Clementine Ford (which Ford denies).
  • She's been pretty blatant about her involvement with Holly Miranda on Twitter.
  • More recently, suspicions has also arisen about Rose Rollins, who played Tasha, and is now in another show where she will play a lesbian role.
• The Twink: Niki.
• Two-Person Pool Party: The swimming pool in Bette & Tina's backyard existed primarily to provide these scenes.
• The Un-Reveal: What really happened to Jenny, obviously.
• The War on Terror: Becomes an issue with Tasha and Alice.
• Where Everybody Knows Your Flame: The Planet. SheBar. The Hit Club.
• Who Would Want to Watch Us?: Lez Girls.
• Yuri Genre