The Chronicle: 1/16/2004: 'The L Word': Novelty in Normalcy
By EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK - this article used as introduction to book Reading the L Word. pretty good. text saved in prvs post as draft

Jenny Schecter (Mia Kirshner), a young fiction writer newly arrived to join her swim-coach boyfriend, Tim (Eric Mabius), in his West Hollywood bungalow, seems poised in these earliest episodes to offer an invitingly unformed conduit for the lesbian fixations of a variety of viewers -- but maybe in the first place, nonlesbian-identified women. Jenny looks as fetally unformed, and eerily precocious, as that famous 1972 New York Times Magazine photo of Joyce Maynard yes yes just what I first thought! joyce maynard - the long straight brown hair with bangs - small & childlike pose, the one that accompanied the premature memoir "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life," and snagged the attention of J.D. Salinger. Jenny's imminent passion for a local cafe owner, Marina Ferrer (Karina Lombard), statuesque, enigmatic, and all shoulders and cheekbones, forms the centerpiece of the early episodes and of Showtime's publicity prose: "Amid denial and confusion, Jenny starts to question her sexual orientation and her love for Tim. Her attraction to Marina is powerful and ultimately irresistible."
If Jenny appears to be the nonlesbian viewer's early path of initiation into the L world, lesbian viewers seem intended to be drawn in by the female couple living next door, who are (did you guess?) trying to make a baby. In their first scene the blonde thrusts a plastic stick into the hands of the brunette, who observes with wonder, "You're ovulating." "I'm ovulating," echoes the blonde, Tina Kennard (Laurel Holloman), as reverently as if announcing the conception of baby Jesus. Our intimacy with Tina's body -- inseminated, peeing, ultrasounded, vomiting -- continues to be near-total. The only one without glamour among these women, she turns red and sweats during sex, worries about looking fat, and speaks (though she is tall) in a small, timbreless voice. Her very discomfort in her skin seems to offer space for identification to any viewer who would appreciate a sightline among the lesbians.
space for identification and therefore a sightline ~ int, this sentence was reworked in the book: Our intimacy with Tina's body -- inseminated, peeing, ultrasounded, vomiting -- continues to be near-total. She turns red and sweats during sex, seldom toned this down and took out worrying about looking fat seems comfortable in her skin, speaks (though she is tall) in a small, timbreless voice: Among these women the only one without glamour, her obscurely ill-fitting point of view huh her point of view obscurely ill fitting to what? 'obscure' seems accurate ~ but, point of view ill-fitting? seems capacious enough to incorporate any viewer who would appreciate a line of sight among the lesbians. int, fr an editor? changed to 'point of view" capacious enough to incorporate a viewer who appreciates a 'line of sight". anyway the edit does seem better ~ but I read it in the book first, I think I tend to prefer the version I first read ~

In short, if The L Word is as bold and daring as claimed, its novelty does not lie in either a demographic coup or a startling use of the medium. I anticipate that its long-term audience will be not male porn hounds but the range of viewers, predominantly though not only female, who enjoy smart and well-made domestic drama, psychological and relationship-based, low on violence, criminality, and sensation.

A visible world in which lesbians exist, go on existing, exist in forms beyond the solitary and the couple, sustain and develop relations among themselves of difference and commonality -- that seems, in a way, such an obvious and modest representational need that it should not be a novelty when it is met. Nor does The L Word meet it fully. But it's absurdly luxurious being able to explore, for instance, the portrayal of generational dynamics in this group of women, even if only between thirtysomethings and twentysomethings. The inscrutable Marina, mother-to-be Tina and her accomplished girlfriend, Bette Porter, are the grown-ups. Tina and Bette show classic symptoms of depressed libido even as the spectacle of their long-term pair-bonding magnetizes the younger women.
Yet the twentysomethings, single, callow, and seemingly uneducated, do a lot of the work of articulating norms and mores for each other, the older women, and the audience. Alice Pieszecki (Leisha Hailey), for instance, a journalist who reviews discos and flags cut-rate Botox treatments for an L.A. weekly, maintains -- as a kind of community service -- a vast, ever-changing, n-dimensional diagram that shows who exactly has slept with whom, and how many nodes of connection mediate any two points in Sapphic space. Here, she keeps insisting, is the narrative matrix that will sustain any woman in an evolving but unbroken web of erotic relation.
Alice uses fatuously knowing Valley-girl syntax; her body has the easy expressiveness of a 5-year-old's; her dark eyes are deep holes in the surface of her blond, oddly ravaged face. Her friend Shane (Katherine Moennig), a fetching baby butch, is an equally unexpected mix of innocence and experience, with her bachelor insouciance, squalid history of sex work, and resonant low voice of reason and amusement. They remind me of students I've known, barely literate but tender, with a willingness to care for their teachers even as they engage our pedagogic energies.