#i started this show because the women on unsolicited project aka the gay women channel referred to it all the time and said it was hilarious

[a9saga]

I wanna make one thing clear. Nobody killed Jenny Schecter. Nobody. Not even herself.

The L Word was the most sloppily written, most lazily dramatic show, and it never cleaned up any of its undeveloped sub plots that they began once and then suddenly dropped entirely and pretended never happened. I swear to God the writers must have never revised a damn script. And this wasn't the type of thing that you only noticed if you're really hypercritical of shows you watch. Very little in the show happens subtextually. It's not a subtle show. Its on fricking Showtime.

Jenny herself over the course of seasons is an example of how the show would just create drama without reason. In season one she and her boyfriend just moved into west Hollywood next door to a couple of lesbians and through one experience with Marina at a party hosted by some of the neighborhood lesbians, she begins to understand she is really intensely drawn to this woman and her boyfriend is at this point still seemingly necessary to her new life, but he doesn't hold up to her interest in this woman no matter how guilty she feels. This makes sense as a plot point. This is how you begin a show about a bunch of lesbians in proximity to one another. The new girl in the neighborhood wants to ditch her fiance for a woman she just met. And after all this Marina stuff subsides eventually, Jenny is a decently developed character. She has flaws and good traits alike. She's messy but she's passionate. She's a drama queen but she cares about people. For instance, Max? Jenny is the main support system for Max in his transition at first, she's really like the only one enthusiastic for him about the whole thing besides that Scottish guy who does drugs in Kit's restaurant and has a couple of otherwise completely unacknowledged sex scenes with Max that dont develop into anything else and don't matter in the future to the show at all. Again. It's a Showtime show. You get the quality you should expect.

And Max is another great example of a sub plot the writers lose interest in! He's a priority to the show for basically just that one season. Honestly they treat Max like shit and lose all interest in him until they get him pregnant in the last season and even then he's only in like every other episode for a few minutes. That was mean. And so was Jenny. Jenny has like, anti-character development throughout the show which is not normal for writers to do to a protagonist. She goes from Jenny Schecter, aspiring writer and newly out lesbian in a new neighborhood to Jenny Schecter, two faced bitch with princess syndrome. They just start writing her in being obviously mean and wrong. And when Max gets pregnant suddenly she's misgendering him on purpose left and right and to my memory maybe the shittiest person to him about his pregnancy? Except of course for Tom, Jodi's interpreter and the guy who got him pregnant who was all on board for parenting the baby until for no reason he gets up in the middle of the night and leaves Max's room and never comes back. Oh and immediately changes his phone numbers apparently, and I guess cuts off contact with everyone on the show or something. That was also just a sudden, uselessly dramatic thing the show threw in that you didn't want it to, that was not justified other than to fuck over a character in a vulnerable situation, and which isn't even in character of the guy who did the thing.

But anyway. This is all to say that no member of the main cast killed Jenny Schecter. You know why? Because the writers are too fucking lazy and careless to make you want to point the finger at anyone, again, including Jenny herself. They don't give you one particularly good reason why anybody might've done it or how they were possibly tied to it. They don't give you reason to think anybody is more likely to have killed her than someone else. They give you nothing to work with in your mind's eye besides your ability to understand who in the main cast hated Jenny the most already. Jenny up and died for no reason because you aren't properly made to raise an eyebrow at her death. Jenny's death is another undeveloped subplot that the show isn't interested in seriously developing, except it is meant as the dramatic series finale to leave you at the edge of your seat so they want you to think it's *mysterious* except that's actually just a recurring fault of the show. Half assed undeveloped melodramatic subplots that get dropped and written out well before your mind forgets them. Don't let them trick you into thinking this was clever of the writers. It's not. It's so consistent with the headache inducing and lazy writing of the show it's absurd. Nobody killed Jenny Schecter. Mark never recorded Shane and Jenny in their own home. Papi was never falling in love with Kit. Etc etc. Ultimately none of this shit happened because they were unfinished and dropped entirely, and the whole murder mystery of Jenny's death ended up being less important than everyone being interrogated by police and explaining their personal history in the show like it's fascinating when weighed against this sudden death. Alice sighing and explaining "the only person I ever loved as much as Tasha... was Dana 😔" is just the investigation being a substitute for therapy. The murder mystery is an afterthought to the cast's final reflection on their relationships to each other just to stick in your mind after the show ends the way the writers want them to. And then they're like. Oh no but who killed Jenny? Nobody. God killed Jenny. Big Bird killed Jenny. The old rescue dog Jenny adopted to put down and then seduce the vet she took him to came back to life and killed Jenny. I killed Jenny. Your mom killed Jenny. The Joker killed Jenny. No one in the main cast killed Jenny. The writers just want you to think they did enough to make you think one of them did. They didn't.

Now that we've established the absurdity of the l word, why did I watch the entire show? Because I was a senior in high and a newly realized lesbian of course. That was more than 4 years ago now. I finished just before Showtime announced they would be bringing it back. I haven't watched generation q so I can't tell you anything about that. But my confliction for the original show as well as my really weird and intense love for Shane are both documented on this blog. I can't believe watching the l word in senior year and falling way too deeply and all-encompassingly in love with Shane is not a universal or even common experience. What were you guys doing senior year? Haven't you watched the l word?