Tina Kennard
Tina Kennard is a fictional character on the Showtime television network series The L Word and The L Word: Generation Q, shown nationally in the United States. She is played by American actress Laurel Holloman. Tina lives in Los Angeles, California, and mostly hangs out in West Hollywood. She is the mother of Angelica Porter-Kennard and initially the life partner of Bette Porter, though the two become on-again-off-again lovers in later seasons, and eventually marry and divorce between the events of The L Word and Generation Q.
| Tina Kennard | |
|---|---|
| First appearance | Pilot (episode 1.01) |
| Last appearance | Last Word (episode 6.08) |
| Created by | Ilene Chaiken |
| Portrayed by | Laurel Holloman |
| In-universe information | |
| Gender | Female |
| Occupation | Chief Development Executive for Peabody-Shaolin Film Studios |
| Family | Lovers = Unnamed older sister, Eric, Bette Porter, Helena Peabody, Henry Young, Brenda, Carrie Children = Angelica Porter-Kennard (biological daughter) unborn baby boy (miscarried) |
Storyline
Back Story
In the context of the six seasons of The L Word very little is said about Tina's background and nothing at all is revealed about her family. Only in the interrogation tapes, released online after the airing of the final episode of season 6, does Tina reveal some 'truths' about her upbringing. As a child, Tina and her two siblings were abruptly moved to Atlanta, Georgia by her mother when Tina's politician father refused to end his extramarital affair.
Tina's first sexual relationship was an abusive relationship with her older sister. The relationship lasted three years, and later her sister became a Fundamentalist Christian to mask her homosexuality and hypocritically shunned Tina for being a lesbian. Tina kept this secret from everyone, including Bette, and only confessed it to interrogating police officers after Jenny Schecter's death.[1]
Prior to meeting Bette, Tina lived largely as a straight woman and had a few relationships, along with multiple abortions in her early twenties.
Bette and Tina met when Tina's then-boyfriend Eric took her to the Bette Porter Gallery, where the two instantly became attracted to one another. Bette noticed Tina's right earring had fallen off. Despite the fact that Bette returned it to her, Tina left her earring at Bette's gallery so she could come back and get it later. Bette had kept it for her. While Tina was picking it from her hand, Bette kissed her. Shortly after, Tina left Eric to begin a relationship with Bette.
Season 1
At the beginning of the first season, having been a couple for seven years, Tina and Bette are in the process searching for a sperm donor so that Tina can be artificially inseminated. After a successful insemination, Tina conceives, but suffers a miscarriage before she is even showing. This event is very traumatic for Tina, who finds comfort in working for a charity organization. Though she finds fulfillment there, her new career drives her further away from Bette. When Bette eventually has an affair with carpenter Candace Jewell, Tina confronts Bette about it and the two fight, leading to Bette raping Tina.[2] Tina subsequently moves out of their shared house to live with Alice.
Season 2
During the second season, Tina lives with Alice, and under her advice, decides to seek legal advice over her situation with Bette. It is then revealed that Tina secretly inseminated herself before she learned of Bette's affair, and is now several months pregnant. Not wanting anyone to know about this because of her broken relationship with Bette and previous miscarriage, Tina hides her expanding body with loose clothes. Eventually, Alice notices that Tina appears to have gained weight, and blames this on the breakup with Bette. She has a dinner with Bette at their former house and plans to tell Bette then, but is derailed when Bette begins dominating the conversation with discussions of her work problems. After her charity organisation is granted money from the Peabody Foundation, Tina begins a relationship with Helena Peabody. It is Helena who reveals Tina's condition to Bette, and the two are shown as having a rivalry for Tina's affections. Helena's promiscuity and possessiveness combine to push Tina back towards Bette, who in turn is reaching out to her over the loss of her father Melvin. Though Tina experiences a difficult and traumatic labour, her baby girl Angelica is delivered safely, and at the end of the season it is revealed that she plans to move back in with Bette and raise their baby together.
Season 3
The third season is set six months after Angelica's birth, in which Tina and Bette are shown suffering more marital strife (including Bette losing her job at the CAC, and showing little interest in finding a new one). The couple appears to be more distant than ever; Bette seeks partner support from an overwhelmed Tina, who starts looking for the protection Bette cannot give her outside the home. Helena Peabody has just bought a movie studio, and offers Tina the chief development executive position.
During this strife, Bette and Tina's communication breaks down. Tina begins to have feelings for men again, and Bette decides to go on a spiritual retreat. Because of this revelation, Bette decides to remove Tina's 'life-partner privileges'. During Bette's retreat, Tina (who has already had an online fling and also a frustrated attempt at fulfilling her interest with a male movie producer) meets Henry Young (Steven Eckholdt), a divorced man with one son, Mikey. After it becomes clear that their relationship is all but over, Tina begins a relationship with Henry. Bette and Tina have difficulties with a social worker who is tasked with evaluating their second-parent adoption process, who is both unimpressed with Bette's attitude towards finding another job and sows doubts in Tina about Bette adopting Angelica. As Tina and Henry (who claims to be unconcerned about Tina's past lesbian life and also shows doubts about Bette's parental rights) continue settling in, Bette decides to visit Joyce Wischnia (Jane Lynch), a gay civil rights lawyer known for sleeping with her clients and who Tina had previously contacted for her separation from Bette, in order to obtain full custody of Angelica. Later on, Bette decides to withdraw her sole custody petition, but the notification unfortunately reaches Joyce too late. Devastated after receiving Bette's sole custody petition, Tina decides to withdraw her consent for allowing Bette to become Angelica's other legal parent. At Shane and Carmen's wedding, tensions between Bette and Tina reach their peak and Tina tells her that she no longer wants Bette to adopt Angelica (referring to her as "my child"), and that she is going to start a family with Henry, who will adopt Angelica instead. The season closes with Tina and Henry returning to their hotel room and discovering Angelica is missing, having been kidnapped by Bette.
Season 4
Bette, after realizing that she can't and shouldn't run with Angie forever, returns to LA. Though Tina appears ready to proceed with pressing charges against Bette, Joyce Wischnia chastises them both and persuades them to reach an agreement rather than let their daughter suffer the fallout. Though relations are generally strained between them at the start of the season, things gradually improve between the pair and they agree on shared custody. Relations with her close friends also show strain, as Alice and Jenny react negatively to Tina sleeping with men, something which Papi later chides them on. This distance leads to a heartfelt confession where Tina confesses to missing "the company of women." She spends a lot of the season very socially isolated.
Professionally, Tina is still working in the movie studio, "Peabody-Shaolin Film Studios", and acquires the rights to adapt for the screen a novel of Jenny Schecter's, "Lez Girls". Work on "Lez Girls" strains the relationship between her and Jenny due to their conflicting opinions on how the piece should be adapted, and also leads Tina to meeting Kate Arden (Annabella Sciorra), the selected director for "Lez Girls". It becomes apparent that there is a mutual attraction between the two, though due to her feelings for Bette yet again making themselves known, it doesn't go anywhere. Despite these feelings, Tina is very supportive of Bette's relationship with Jodi Lerner, going so far as to help Bette win her back at the end of the season. She ends the season single (though whether it was her attraction to Kate or Bette that caused her to break things off with Henry is unknown), but tentatively reconnected with her friends, Bette included.
Season 5
Tina repeatedly clashes with Jenny while producing Lez Girls. Shane and Alice try to get Tina to date again as Bette and Jodi's relationship begins to get more serious, but it's clear that Tina is still hung up on Bette. She manages to have one successful date with a successful heart surgeon, Brenda, and sleeps with her on the first date, much to Bette's chagrin. However, at the SheBar opening, Tina confesses to Bette that she and Brenda are just having a little bit of fun and that Bette is lucky to have Jodi. Overcome with the emotion that has built between them and realizing how much she missed TIna, Bette kisses her and they start an affair. For a while, both Tina and Bette wonder if what is happening to them is nothing more than a sexual reconnection. During a blackout, Bette and Tina get stuck in an elevator on their way to their couples therapist. They reminisce on past events, both of them owning up to their flaws and what they put the other through. Bette tells Tina that she still loves her and they end up having sex. Though that marks their decision to get back together, they both agree to keep the affair a secret until after the Subaru Pink Ride. The truth of the affair comes out during the camp fire "I Never" game. Bette admits to her sister Kit that she loves Tina while Tina also admits to Shane and Alice that she too still loves Bette. Jodi brushes her off when Tina tries to apologize as Jodi picks up Bette at The Planet. After Bette breaks off the relationship and endures a shocking public humiliation at the first exhibition of a new Jodi Lerner piece, Bette finds comfort with Tina at the Lez Girls' wrap party.
Season 6
Tina moves back in with Bette, and they decide to adopt a second child. In preparation, they begin to add an expensive extension to their house.
The pair finally meet young pregnant Marci in Nevada, an underprivileged caucasian woman expecting a half African-American son. Despite the fact that Marci's family rejects the notion of giving the child to a lesbian couple, Marci agrees to give Tina and Bette her child. However, this transaction is threatened when Joyce Wishnea informs the pair that Nevada law does not permit adoption to same sex couples. A solution is reached when Bette and Tina agree to board Marci during her pregnancy, but when they arrive to the Los Angeles bus station to meet her, Marci is not on the bus. They later appear to abandon the hope of adopting Marci's child.
Tina unknownly accepts a lunch meeting with filmmaker Dylan Moreland, only to learn that Dylan used the meeting as an excuse to recruit Tina to help her win back her ex-lover Helena. Aware that Dylan is straight and that she and her husband previously attempted to swindle Helena out of her fortune, Tina refuses the request.
Meanwhile, Tina's job at the studio is threatened when the Lez Girls negative is stolen. Tina's boss Aaron believes Jenny is responsible for the theft and orders Tina to retrieve the negative from her. But when Tina confronts her, Jenny claims innocence and soon suggests that the film's hedge fund millionaire producer William was probably the true thief. Later, the negative is ransomed via correspondence faxed to the studio, signed by Tina and thereby implicating her as the thief. Tina is incredulous and afraid for her job, but finally snaps when she sees Aaron and William at a dinner meeting with new clients that she wasn't informed of. Believing herself to be already fired, she causes a scene, angrily accuses Aaron of mistreatment and William of theft, and quits.
Also in this season, Bette reconnects with her bisexual college crush Kelly Wentworth, and the pair open an art gallery together. Though Kelly rejected Bette during their college days to the point that Bette considered suicide, Kelly makes constant flirtations towards Bette in front of Tina, referring to her as a "player". Bette reassures Tina that those days are over for her, that she is committed to her and only her, and despite her former insecurities, Tina trusts her, knowing that if Bette were to cheat again, that would be the end of them forever. Later on, Jenny manages to film an encounter between Bette and Kelly on her cellphone; as Bette is picking up broken glass from the floor, the angle from Jenny's window makes it look as though she is performing cunnilingus on Kelly. Jenny threatens Bette that she will show the footage to Tina, who she knows will believe it, unless Bette confesses the alleged indiscretion first.
Tina soon finds herself in a new business meeting in New York, where she is offered her dream job. She and Bette decide to move to New York so Tina can take the job; to Tina's surprise, Bette asks her to marry her once they move, and she accepts. At their going away party in Los Angeles, Jenny prepares a video montage of several friends wishing them farewell. During the party, Shane leads Tina to Shane and Jenny's attic, where she has uncovered the missing Lez Girls negative. Tina is enraged, believing Jenny has stolen them and lied to her (the true thief is later revealed, via online interrogation tapes to be Jenny's ex-lover, Lez Girls actress Niki Stevens, who planted the negatives in Jenny's attic to save her career and destroy Jenny's). Shortly afterwards, Jenny is found dead in Bette and Tina's pool.
The Interrogation Tapes
One day after the television series ends, footage of Tina's police interrogation appears on Showtime's L Word website ("The Interrogation Tapes"), during which she reveals certain elements of her early life such as her adulterous father and the three years of sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her older sister.[1]
The L Word: Generation Q
By the time of Generation Q, set over ten years after Jenny's death, Bette and Tina did get married, but have since divorced. Bette is shown to have custody of Angelica, who now lives with her and refers to Tina as "Mama T", though they still communicate over matters regarding Angelica. Tina seems to stay in touch with her old friends, as she sends Shane flowers for her 40th birthday.
After Bette comes into conflict with Tyler and Felicity Adams, both of whom seek to sabotage her campaign for Mayor of Los Angeles, Tina returns to offer Bette emotional support, having been called by Angie. Despite their troubled past, after Bette gives a speech revealing her reason for running for mayor and determination not to drop out, Bette and Tina admit that they still love each other to a certain degree, and share a hug, during which Bette asks Tina not to leave. Later, Tina meets up with Bette and Shane at Shane's new gay bar, "Dana's", where Tina asks Bette to dinner. The two meet up at Bette's house, where Tina reveals that she is moving to Los Angeles in order to be closer to Angie. Though Bette hopes to renew their relationship, Tina reveals that she is actually looking for a place for herself and Carrie, who she is going to marry, and that she wants to reveal it to Angie along with Bette and Carrie. Though obviously devastated by the news, Bette gives Tina her blessing.
The Chart
References
- "The L Word Interrogation Tapes: Tina". Showtime. Archived from the original on 2009-06-29. Retrieved 2009-03-11.