Tasha
Tasha is perfect. Here we have Tasha looking at the sky, perfectly.
Here is Tasha smiling. Notice that when she smiles, the entire world turns on.
Here is Tasha holding a beer and having feelings. Notice how she does both of those things perfectly.
Tasha in a suit. (The suit is perfect, and her jaw has more integrity than the entire Constitution of the United States.)
Here is Tasha kissing someone who is not me. This scene is almost perfect, but it would be better if I were in it.
Dana
Dana! Remember when you were alive? That was so great. I’m so sorry Ilene murdered you.
Bette
Jennifer Beals is like the Queen of Deer transformed into a liquid-eyed, noble human woman. She looks great in suspenders and I didn’t even mind when she cheated on Tina, because Tina is a mealy-mouthed blob of nothing. Here is Bette holding an enormous glass of wine.
Here is Angry Bette. Nothing in the world is more satisfying than Righteously Angry Bette.
Alice
We are all Alice. No matter how much you might wish to be Marina or Shane or even Dana, if you are reading this article, you are Alice, and there is no shame in that. Alice is a damn delight.
Kit
Kit is played by Pam Grier. Are you Pam Grier? No. No, you are not.
Peggy Peabody
Let us recite together: “Were I receptive to such a proposition, it would first require a full booty check. And were you to pass muster, baby I’d give it to you family-style.”
Carmen
Can you explain to me what’s wrong with this picture?
NOTHING. THERE WAS NOTHING WRONG. THIS WAS A PERFECT RELATIONSHIP AND SHANE WAS A FOOL TO LET HER GO. 
Marina
Oh, Marina. In retrospect, perhaps you shouldn’t have instigated Jenny’s lesbian awakening. But you couldn’t possibly have known, I suppose, and she couldn’t possibly have resisted your velvet basement voice.
Joyce Wischnia
She proposed to Phyllis Kroll stark naked. She represented both Bette and Tina in every one of their court cases, often against one another, which I’m sure violates some sort of television lawyer code of ethics. She winked and made “chuh-CHUH” sounds with her teeth. She was perfect.
Ivan Aycock
Ivan! We hardly knew ye and your garage of butch mechanics. Ivan! We will never understand why you gave Kit the keys to your apartment and then got mad at her for coming into your apartment. You two could have been so great together.
Shane
It’s Shane!
Tonya
I don’t care what any of you say. She’s awful and I love her and I’m glad she ended up with Melissa Rivers.
Cherie Fucking Jaffe
Max
Max, I — I’m so sorry. So sorry for what they did to you. For the mustache. For everything. You deserved better, Max.
Billie Blaikie
He was Alan Cumming! He didn’t really belong! Nothing he did made much sense! But he’s Alan Cumming!
Helena
Made this exact face in every scene for about three seasons running. Bless you, Helena.
Paige Sobel
I don’t believe you burned down the skate shop, Paige.
Lara Perkins
A good person, but too adorable by half. Also got in between Dana and Alice, even if she didn’t exactly realize it at the time.
Leigh Ostin
Leigh is the reason I continue to believe in my heart of hearts that Cobie Smulders cannot possibly be heterosexual, which is probably offensive and also reductive.
Papi
Oh, Papi. Part Tank Girl, part Bruno Mars, part mishmash of ethnic stereotypes and inexplicable character notes. “Papi don’t do breakfast.” Okay, Papi. You don’t have to have any breakfast.
Shay
WHY WOULD YOU TAKE HIM AWAY FROM SHANE, ILENE. SHE HAD ONE NICE THING. ONE NICE THING. Every season is just an exercise in beating Shane up to you, isn’t it?
Slim Daddy
I don’t know why they didn’t just call him Snoop Dogg, but it was great to have Snoop Dogg on this show.
Molly Kroll
WHY COULDN’T YOU LET SHANE KEEP HER. She was so sullen and vicious and wonderful. “I’m going to go gay for Shane, Mother.”
Phyllis Kroll
“She’s so…vibrant. Do you think she liked me.” More fun than twenty Shanes, and cute as a button.
Jodi Lerner
Wonderful, until she wasn’t. Suffered from Angus-style derailment.
Weezie
The inexplicably straight contractor!
James
Always ready to run into Bette’s office wearing a headset. Good lad, James.
Sergeant Duffy
If there had to be an unsolved murder mystery that took over the sixth season, I’m glad that Xena was the detective who led the investigation.
Angus
Riiiiiight up until Hazel.
Dawn Denbo and her Lover Cindi
THIS IS MY LOVER CINDI.
Burr Connor
It’s closeted Fitz, and he yells at Jenny; I don’t know what more you want from a one-off character.
Tim
Tim! You put up with so much from Jenny. Somewhere in Lesbian TV Heaven, I hope there’s a Straight Guy Poolhouse set aside for you.
Arianna Huffington
Of course.
Tina
Ugh.
Lacey
Poor Lacey. Too crazy for Boystown, too much of a boy for Crazytown. Nobody wants to date sad eyes, Lacey. (Also, Tammy, I am so sorry about your horrible divorce from Melissa Etheridge, she sounds like she’s being the worst and I hope you get all her money.)
Catherine Rothberg
“Who should Helena date now that Dylan’s betrayed her irrevocably?”
“How about a crypto-dominatrix who treats her like a servant and makes her have sex on piles of money?”
“Obviously that is what we are going to do now.”
Francesca Wolff
An awful person, obviously, but no one could deliver a line this perfect without earning a few points:
“I’m sorry the evening turned out like this, but there’s something you have to understand. When I go away, Marina can do whatever she wants. As can I. But when I come back, I want my home the way I’ve left it. I hope that isn’t too much to ask.”
Stacey Merkin
Her name was Stacey Merkin, and she was terrible. But she was still better than Jenny. I have a complex sorting algorithm when it comes to comparing other characters to Jenny: Did they ever kill a dog to try to steal someone else’s girlfriend?
Gillian Davis
KELLY GILLIS. And she sort of comes around, sort of, a little, at the end!
Lisa
Hey, there’s Lisa! He…existed.
Kelly Wentworth
ABT: Anyone But Tina.
Melvin Porter
Terrible inasmuch as he was homophobic as pants, wonderful inasmuch the way he growled “Miss Kennard” at Tina was the best acting this show ever got.
Niki Stevens
Lenore Pieszecki
The first mom to make a pass at Shane onscreen, but not the last. No, not the last.
Henry Young
You have to love that when Tina “went back to men,” she didn’t just go back to men, she went back to the straightest man in LA with a bunch of friends who had apparently never heard of lesbianism before. Obviously, he is with Tim now, in a better place.
Adele Channing
I appreciate the obvious naming nod to All About Eve, and I appreciate that she made Jenny’s life harder. But the entire Lez Girls subplot needed to be four episodes, not two seasons.
Gabby Deveaux
I just remembered that she dated Lara too! Did everybody date Lara?
Mark Wayland
The only thing worse than Mark was Jenny’s bizarre decision at the end of their fight that if he was a “real man,” he’d stay in the house where he’d been secretly filming them in order to atone. Jenny. Jenny. Sweet pea. That’s not how atoning works. If someone secretly films you having sex, you don’t let them keep being your roommate.
Dylan Moreland
It’s a testament to the enduring legacy of this show that I reflexively worried when I heard Jodie Foster had married Dylan’s real-life actress, Alex Hedison. “DON’T DO IT,” I thought. “SHE BROKE HELENA’S HEART.”
Jamie Chen
You don’t get to love Tasha, Jamie. YOU DON’T GET TO LOVE TASHA. YOU GO HOME AND YOU LOVE SOMEBODY ELSE.
Tom
How could you leave Max? How could anyone leave Max? How could you leave pregnant Max?
Brooke
Remember that time Max was happy and in a relationship with someone who treated him well? Yeah, me neither.
Jenny
Obviously.
Perhaps oddly, one of the best relationships I was ever in was with a girl who considered Jenny to be her favorite character on the entire show. I do not pretend to understand it, I merely add it as a relevant fact.
Tags: not every character is on this list because there are some i just don’t care about, ranking people unnecessarily, television, the l word, this list is unquestionable
“We are all Alice” is the truest thing every written.
I loved when Alice went to the support group as a bisexual love addict and wonders if it’s OK to want Dana to stop by for her birthday, maybe give her a little prezzie, maybe kiss my eyelids…
DANAAAA i will never forgive this show for what it did to you my darling
lolll remember Lisa tho
Brian Krakowwww
Literally Lisa. LOLLLLLLLLL
Ilene Chaiken is just so dumb. Like, WTF? Did she think Alice/Lisa was somehow battling gender/sexuality stereotypes? It was just an extended joke at the expense of like…everyone, right? I mean, I don’t know what I expect from the show that produce the Max/Moira debacle, but for some reason these failures still make me mad. Obviously not jaded enough yet…
I kind of hoped you’d just omit Jenny from the list completely.
the biggest disappointment of the last season was that we knew jenny was going to die, but we didn’t get any episodes without jenny, and we didn’t get to see anyone kill her after all that taunting
Maggie Simpson did it.
Updated plans for the evening: eating Oreos in bed with my laptop balanced on my stomach so I can watch The L Word without lifting my head.
Girls in tight dresses
Who drag with moustaches
Chicks driving fast
Ingénues with long lashes.
Women who long love lust
Women who give.
This is the way
it’s the way that we live.
Talking, laughing, loving, breathing
Fighting, fucking, crying, drinking
Writing, winning, losing, cheating
Kissing, thinking, dreaming.
This is the way
it’s the way that we live
It’s the way that we live…..
And Love………….
One of my favorite things about the L Word DVD box set (heh) is when Alice, Shane and Dana (I will NOT identify them by their real world names) did the track commentary for the lesbian cruise episode. They all hated the opening song, and made fun of it.
Now that I know there is commentary I will have to buy the DVDs. Thank you for giving me this reason.
Ughhhhhh
Listening to the opening song never fails to make me feel embarrassed.
When I was newly out I had it as my ringtone for a whole month. *cringe*
if anyone knows of a worse theme song I challenge you to link to it here
I’ve only seen L Word episode (There were ghosts at a waterfall? Maybe this was actually a fever dream) so I am shocked and kind of disappointed to learn that this is actually the theme song and not your own ode to be sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things.”
DItto. I got to the verb stanza and sighed dejectedly.
HAHAHA. I’m so glad TLW is no longer running so that we can stop pretending Betty is a band anyone cares about.
Nooooo, Kit was definitely the worst.
Kit by the end of the series was pretty much just a power suit that occasionally said “Hey, girl” but I loved her interactions with Jennifer Beals and her storylines in season 1 with her son/drinking problem were pretty great, and also she’s PAM GRIER.
Fair enough. Kit was interesting before who knows what happened with the entire show.
THANK YOU FOR APPRECIATING BETTE.
Everyone is always like, “Oh, but she’s a cheater and the carpenter and she’s aggressive!”
And I want to just show them that Tina is horrible and Bette is raaaad.
Also? I still reference Dawn Denbo and call various people “My Lover Cindy.”
Bette is definitely the L word character I am most attracted to, though Mallory makes a strong case for Tasha. I loved Bette and Jodie together and their (lightly BDSM tinged) power relationship. Tina, ugh.
Oooh, but that carpenter. It’s all coming back to me now…
Tina is the worst, Bette and her terrible art world business lady fashions are the best and I absolutely still refer to people as “My Lover Cindy” THE END. (No, not the end: LESBIAN TURKISH OIL WRESTLING THE END.)
okayyyy but some of us are Dana because some of us are awkward and sporty and also GHOSTS
Oh god, I kind of like Jenny too. For the longest time I felt so alone in that.
lol it’s just the two of you
Felt the compulsion to share the only thing I have ever read that made me “get” why people like Jenny. This from an avowed Jenny-hater who fast forwards all her scenes on re-watching. And whatever anyone says about her importance as a character or to them – I was not feeling her writing ever at all. http://www.autostraddle.com/schecter-316-or-how-j…
But wasn’t Helena awful and deserving of having her heart broken?
ETA: Also, whenever Jenny’s actress shows up anywhere, I am immediately distrustful of the character she plays and assume she will ruin anything she touches.
There are many reasons why I didn’t watch more than one episode of Defiance on Syfy–but the appearance of Jenny is reason number one.
I think that, much like Kristen Stewart in Twilight, Mia Kirshner did a phenomenal job with the material she had. (I confess to a secret, terrible affection for Jenny and also hate her for obvious reasons.)
I wonder if anyone has thought to do an L Word tarot deck yet.
Would buy.
kickstart that shit! i would be all over it.
STRAY (UNCHARITABLE) THOUGHT: JAMIE CHEN LOOKED LIKE JUSTIN LONG
I am not Pam Grier. 🙁
But I did see Pam Grier’s book at the Dollar Store the other day, so I am learning more about her.
I’ve taken exactly 0 buzzfeed quizzes about which L Word character I would be, but I strongly suspect that I, like so many others, am always an Alice, never a Bette (in the same way that I am always an Arwen, never an Eowyn no NOT EVEN WHEN I PICK “A CAGE” AS MY WORST FEAR)
Any romantic prospect who speaks a word against Molly is no longer a prospect 2 me, I am 80% kidding
I believe that anyone who believes themself to be an Eowyn over an Arwen is exactly that. Having that desire makes you an Eowyn.
I want you to know I lol’d at “NOT EVEN WHEN I PICK ‘A CAGE’ AS MY WORST FEAR.”
My ideal L Word: It is one season long. Bette and Tina are together. Dana and Alice are together. Shane and Carmen are together. Cobie Smulders is also there. Everybody teams up to murder Jenny, Orient Express-style. Lucy Lawless investigates and also has nude scenes.
And by the end of the season, even Lucy Lawless doesn’t care that Jenny was murdered.
okay let’s fire up a kickstarter, we can do this toasties
Add Tasha to the mix and I’m on board!
This list is almost completely perfect. The only things I would change is for Lisa to be lower on the list (because uggghhh) and for Papi to be higher (and I don’t even know why I love her).
I married a real life Bette (except minus the cheating) and she is perfect, but I would probably leave her for Tasha if the opportunity arose. (If you read this babe: JUST KIDDING I LOVE YOU THE MOST.)
This comment, plus your handle, makes me feel like you are probably more of a Jodie, or even a Kelly, than a Tina.
“I have a complex sorting algorithm when it comes to comparing other characters to Jenny: Did they ever kill a dog to try to steal someone else’s girlfriend?”
INDEED
Let us remember MARK WAYLAND, ABOMINATION. Mark Wayland:
— jacked off to secretly-recorded videos of his lesbian roommates having sex
— one time of which was with a sex worker he specifically hired to make good video for this project
— in hopes of uploading his videos probably to scores of Reddit voyeurs and Girls Gone Wild types
— and then confronted his lesbian roommates with his unwanted love
— (unwanted love which had MOVED HIM and MADE HIM A BETTER PERSON!!!!!)
— was the subject of several episodes’ worth of digging into his pathetic feelings about doing all these things, which the creators of the show must have thought we cared about somehow
— represents all that is wrong with this show; episodes with him in them are unwatchable despite featuring an Alive Dana
I submit: maybe put him just above Jenny.
I always assumed Mark was just a stand-in for straight guys who watched the show
Alice is indeed delightful and I am going to see an Uh Huh Her concert in June, I have to share that because I am very excited!
I’m still in love with Carmen.
Jenny WAS the best. But then again, I’m French.
This just made me remember the time I fell asleep at the opera (Jetlag I swear) and the entire cast of the L Word took over the parts in Madame Butterfly and I was STILL MAD that Jenny wasn’t dead yet.
I so loved Tasha for her frowny intensity, which seemed completely out of place in that show’s insane universe, then when she laughed for the first time, wow. Sunlight! I’ll defend Tina as not only important to the story but also a super hot pregnant swimming pool cheater. If I have to be unanimous in this by myself like Mrs. Slocombe so be it.
Oh *god*. Tasha’s warm, velvety chuckle. The things I wouldn’t do/Jennys I wouldn’t kill for that chuckle. If there is a Heaven, for me it is full of Tasha smiling at me and chuckling in just that way.
Also, I will defend Tina right along with you. Perhaps it is because I identify with her, but I think she was very important to the show, and I think her and Bette had great chemistry.
Solidarity! Even the actress who played Tina thought she was a useless schlub at first, just kind of flailing and spinning in Bette’s orbit, but her journey away from that (and through that appalling man in grody underpants) brought her to a place of, if not capslocked BITCH, I GOT MINE, at least a lowercase, “I know who I am and what I want now.” I can definitely relate, though hopefully my journey won’t require dealing with an equivalent underpants man.
guys not to brag or anything but I ~inspired~ this piece by asking Mallory what her favorite L Word character was (and also being the first one to ever think of that question). YOU’RE WELCOME
Although (previously unbeknownst to me) Tasha is hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhot, I submit that everything I heard about the show A.D. (After Dana) still has me convinced I was right to bail when I did.
How are Pam Grier and Lucy Lawless not higher on this list?
Because Kit was a stupid, poorly-written character and PG deserved better.
Marina. SIIIIGH. Smoldering is not enough of a word.
I’m a little pissed that I am not Pam Grier. Why am I not Pan Grier, goddammit.
I did not EVEN REALISE that there was a generalised Jenny hatred going on. Surely she’s a hilarious genius and everyone knows it? If only some of the brown characters and Max were afforded such freedom of expression. If someone killed a dog to be my girlfriend I’d be totally flattered.
The only flaw with this list is that Uta Refson is not included (and I mean, Papi should be higher, did you even see the basketball episode?)
And also! Where is Candace, the suuuuuuuuper hot butch carpenter that Bette cheated with? Hnnnng she was gorgeous.
my thoughts on reading this:
omg that character was closeted Fitz! this is the best thing i’ve learned all day.
also, i wanted the lez girls thing to go on for-ever. the show as a parody of itself? absolutely the best thing ever. if only lucy lawless had played all the roles.
Solidarity! Even the actress who played Tina thought she was a useless schlub at first, just kind of flailing and spinning in Bette's orbit, but her journey away from that (and through that appalling man in grody underpants) brought her to a place of, if not capslocked BITCH, I GOT MINE, at least a lowercase, "I know who I am and what I want now." I can definitely relate, though hopefully my journey won't require dealing with an equivalent underpants man.
I am watching The L Word right now, and had missed the part about Fitz.
So hit that episode and went ‘holy shit! It’s Fitz!’
DItto. I got to the verb stanza and sighed dejectedly.
this post reminded me that about two years ago I met lucy lawless at a party at greenpeace’s rainbow warrior (which should probably grant me some sort of queer girl award) and she was great and how could I have FORGOTTEN that?
(also – and this is going between parentheses after I told a cool story in hope that you now like me – jenny is probably one of my favorite characters in the show even though she is definitely The Worst; I can’t even explain why I love her, but I do)
I’ve never seen this show but my god that is a stellar cast!
Hello, Nadia Karella? And Jessica Capshaw even plays a lesbian on Grey's Anatomy these days.
Also, Max did date that Grace girl – she was nice to him. But then fell into the black hole that most of the other characters fell into on this show. No explanation, just one day here and gone the next, never to be seen again. Except that awkward time Tim Haspel came back and had ice cream with his wife and Jenny, who is most certainly THE worst.
I ALSO DATED SOMEONE WHO LOVED JENNY. like, what does that say about me??