After 10 years, Showtime's The L
Word franchise, which morphed from a scripted drama into a
reality series, The Real L Word, for 3 seasons, will become a
documentary that looks at lesbian culture outside Los Angeles and New
York City.
Creator Ilene Chaiken told The
Hollywood Reporter that the documentary will be “grittier.”
“It's going to be quite different in
tone and ambition,” Chaiken
said. “I have been feeling this for a while and [producers]
Magical Elves and Showtime felt compelled to look in this direction.
It's going to be different in that it's going to be grittier, less
glamorous and a story about different facets of gayness. We all
know, especially those of us who are gay, that there are challenges
and hardships and that there are a lot of places in the world in this
country where it isn't easy to be a lesbian or to be gay. That part
of the story gets touched upon in The L Word and in three
seasons of The Real L Word in Los Angeles and New York but
we're really going to look at what that is and explore it now in a
more unvarnished way.”
Chaiken said there may be a “single
documentary” or a two-part feature.
“In this documentary process, you
don't know what the story is going to do until you start telling it,”
she said.