All this strikes me as an example of lazy scriptwriting. The lesbians, being the focus of the series, provoke and are subject to all the drama because they're the people we're meant to be focusing on. Straight people, from the way you describe it, drift through occasionally when the plot requires it and then leave again; the scriptwriters haven't paid much attention to them, and don't really want to, so they make them stable and boring because a) stable and boring is easy and quick to write and b) if the straight people had anything interesting (which in teledramaland means "traumatising") happening in their lives there's a risk that the audience will be interested in them, and then the scriptwriters would have to write about the straight people even more.

I know this is a fairly useless comment but I was wondering what 'lesbian bed death' meant. I am also confused about how a show could have only lesbians as main characters. Is it because the setting is in a gay community or is it because the point of the show is to show (unrealisticly) how lesbians live? Plus (just because I was wondering) do all the characters who aren't lovers/girlfriends/couples know each other?

Hmmm...interesting, so the reason the straight people are sane is because the writers aren't paying enough attention to them to make them batshit? I think the L Word has received criticism for 1) not having enough balanced straight characters and 2) having too many straight characters hogging the lesbian limelight. So they're actually in an impossible position.

No, no that's not a useless comment at all. Um, lesbian bed death is a fairly well-documented phenomenon for the fact that long-term lesbian couples seem to have an over-riding tendency to stop sleeping with each other, moreso than straight couples do. Basically the L Word revolves around a group of friends within the reasonably tightly-knit LA gay community, which I know absolutely nothing about so I can't tell you whether it's realistic or not. New characters enter their orbit every now and again, either join the group or don't. I think generally such communities do tend to form tight bonds, especially if you're bonded together by being interested in your sexuality as a major part of who you are, rather than who you do. So I don't think it strains credibility that all the major characters are gay or bisexual.

Thanks for replying. I just have no idea about gay communities.
And (because I always want to know this) what time is it where you are?

No problem; comments make us feel loved (most of the time anyway). And I can't really answer for my insights into gay communities, not having been a part of one for years and years, and never having been particularly passionate about sexual politics.

Um, at this precise moment it's 12:27 (middle of the day, not middle of the night).

I think the L Word has received criticism for 1) not having enough balanced straight characters and 2) having too many straight characters hogging the lesbian limelight. So they're actually in an impossible position.

I think it's the problem any Queer As Folk-inspired drama has.

If you focus entirely on the gay community - entirely possible, since as you point out such things have a tendency to be fairly tightly-knit - your series ends up looking like it's set in some kind of magical homosexual happyland where straights are as rare as unicorns, which is all very well but can't help but become unrealistic. (The interaction between gay people who want to be themselves and straight people who don't want gay people to be themselves being more than a little responsible for a good proportion of the problems particular to gay communities.)

On the other hand, if you don't focus closely enough on the gay community, you're going to end up including a lot of straight people, because most folk outside the gay community are, er, straight (with a certain proportion of non-politicised gay people who don't want to be part of the community sprinkled here and there). Which somewhat undermines the point of having a "gay" drama series.

The writers for these sorts of things have to walk a godawful tightrope between "unrealistic fantasy" and "so realistic there's nothing differentiating it from any other drama series", and the fact that the writers on The L Word have got people complaining that they've got it wrong from both sides of the divide means that they've either got it right or they've got it very, very wrong.

Yes, good points all. I suppose the other thing is that, as gay people are always pointing out, homosexuality tends to be under-represented in mainstream culture... I mean less so these days, perhaps, but there is usually one gay person, relegated to the status of friend or comic relief. But there's very little way to combat this without be totally unrealistic and putting gay people in there for the heck of it because if you take a cross-section of society the chances are that there are going to be significantly fewer gay people than straight people - essentially, in fact, a group of people and a gay person, unless you're specifically moving in homosexual communities.

And again the problem with gay dramas versus straight dramas is that all you do is feed into the sense of segregation. Or perhaps the point is that straight people are going to be happy enough to watch lots of pretty straight people pretend to be gay but gay people are going to get discontented and feel marginalised when the majority of television is concerned with straight lives.

But, again, this brings us round to the point that, one would hope, that the majority of television was, you know, reasonably universal. And that, I don't know, [insert anything at random] Show X about Issue Y or Lifestyle Z has something to say to me even though the majority of the cast happens to be straight. I mean people don't complain that there are no (obvious) gays in Hamlet yet it is still meant to be relevant to human condition.

I'm going round in ever-increasing circles now. Just thinking aloud. Or in typescript.

And I will just add, actually, that part of the pleasure of watching the L Word is linked to my own sexuality so regardless of all the above it is genuinely nice to feel something is specifically about you or your lifestyle.

More television drama for scrabble-lovers! Now!

For what it's worth, I don't remember having any trouble with the proportion or characterization of straight characters in 'Queer As Folk'. Can't comment on the realism (Canal Street in Oxford isn't quite the same as the one in Manchester), but the plausibility was fine. There were some of them knocking around, as there tend to be in the world, but equally they were mostly irrelevant to the plot because they were mostly irrelevant to the lives of the characters we were interested in.

Rather, the straight characters were mostly irrelevant to the aspects of the main characters' lives on which the programme concentrated. No doubt a drama could have been made about Stuart's job in advertising, and one would have expected that to involve a higher proportion of heterosexual characters. But the series was about the main characters' love-lives, so it was no great surprise that most people were gay. Perhaps one of the reasons this doesn't work so well in 'The L Word' (which I confess I haven't watched, even with the sound off) is that, from the sounds of it, it tries to deal with aspects of the characters' daily lives where one would expect to meet straight people and have them portrayed as reasonably three-dimensional personalities.

Then again the two main straight characters in 'Queer As Folk', Donna and Hazel, were well characterized and well integrated into the plot. In fact when I went to wikipedia to remind myself of the characters' names I was surprised to see Hazel described as a "minor supporting character" and Donna not mentioned at all, because by my hazy recollection they were quite important. But maybe this just proves Arthur's original point. 'Queer As Folk' was just plain well-written.

The question I'm really struggling with is this: is 'the straight razor of characterization' a finely-turned phrase describing an important phenomenon in long-running television series, or is it just an iffy pun?

I actually wanted to say this is very much my impression of the show too. It honestly sometimes seems like the writers want to deal with some issue that's "for lesbians" and then invariably say the strangest things about whatever they're saying. Though the worst scenes are the awkward product placements the characters are sometimes stuck doing. Nothing wrong with shows that are just crazy, but I hope nobody tries to use it to learn what lesbian's lives (or human's lives) are really like because I'd be very surprised if that were true.

Also, iirc, "super couples" started in daytime TV back in the 80s. I think General Hospital's Luke and Laura started off the phenomenon. After that every show tried to have their big couple who usually spent their summer on the run for some reason, undercover in whatever setting was trendy at the time: farm house, lower east side of NYC, an Amish community, traveling circus, tropical island...

I think I would mind about the crazies so much if I thought the show wasn't also trying to convince that it was genuinely offering some insight into the lives and issues of lesbians in the 21st century; unfortunately the demands of episodic tv (for drama, arc, character development etc.) are such that the insights tend to be (unconsciously) that "these women are all freaking nuts! Run the other other way!"

The supercouple concept was new to me - perhaps I'm just grossly ignorant of the tropes of popular culture (likely) but I'm not sure it's mad it, in that form anyway, to England. I find the list of supercouples on wikipedia terrifying since most of those couples are, again, completely terrifying...

It's been a long time since I've seen Queer as Folk, and I believe there are both British and American versions each naturally performing a slightly different televisual agenda. I've only seen the British version and, although I remember it having a certain tendency towards interrupting the plot to bring the viewer a titillating shot of two hot men snogging or whatever, the overall themes seemed to me reasonably universal. The central relationship between the commitment-phobic gay playboy (Stuart wasn't it?) and his gentle, self-erasing best friend with a major crush seemed to me to be accessible to all - the fact the characters involved in it were gay seemed incidental rather than definitive. If that makes sense.