Ryan doesn’t deserve all the blame for this disconnect. The result is a more serious drama shoehorned into an aspirational soap. While Shane buys a bar on a whim and Alice flirts with talk-show guest Megan Rapinoe, Dani and Sophie wrestle with the class differences that divide them and freeloading goofball Finley (an early contender for the Jenny Schecter Award for Most Irritating Character) is forced to confront her Catholic upbringing. That leaves the more diverse “Generation Q” characters to represent the politically engaged, sexually fluid and trans-inclusive present. With their glamorous jobs and rich-people problems, Bette, Alice and Shane are living the same sparkly postfeminist fantasies that hooked viewers in the aughts. What’s more worrisome in the long run is that, despite their proximity, these two cohorts can feel like they’re in parallel shows.

New showrunner Marja-Lewis Ryan ( The Four-Faced Liar) struggles to balance such a big cast Micah and Sophie don’t quite come into focus in the three episodes sent for review. The emotionally unavailable James Dean of the circle, Shane (Katherine Moennig) has just returned to LA and moved into a palatial home financed by her salon empire but can’t stop thinking about her estranged wife. Alice (Leisha Hailey), who was introduced as a bubbly bisexual journalist, is juggling her own talk show and a fiancée (Stephanie Allynne’s Nat) who has two young kids plus a creepily clingy ex-wife (Sepideh Moafi). Once an art-world enfant terrible, Bette-who’s now divorced from Tina and raising their loving but rebellious teenage daughter, Angie (Jordan Hull)-is channeling her ambitions into a run for mayor, despite the many skeletons the original show stacked up in her closet. We meet Dani and Sophie’s roommate Micah (Leo Sheng), a sweet academic who happens to be a trans man.īy some unbelievable but easy-to-overlook coincidence, most of these new faces quickly find themselves in the orbit of The L Word’s three returning Gen X characters. Their mononymous butch pal Finley (Jacqueline Toboni) bikes across town in a sports bra, baring hairy armpits and screaming “Time’s Up, jackass!” at a catcaller. And it turns out Sophie is on her period.

While the show does begin with one of those gratuitously long sex scenes for which The L Word was famous, this time the couple between the sheets is Latinx millennials Dani (Arienne Mandi) and Sophie (Rosanny Zayas). It all seems very Lesbian 101-not to mention very tailored to the heterosexual male gaze-in contrast to what goes down within the first few minutes of Generation Q, which premieres Dec.

The real l word season 1 cast