How to Support Your Friends Who Won't Shut Up About 'The L Word'

If you’re a straight person who’s friends with any queer women, or people who ever identified as queer women at any point over the past decade and a half, you’re probably at least tangentially aware that The L Word is back.

The reboot, titled The L Word: Generation Q, premiered on Showtime Sunday night, and it was met with mixed reviews from critics. While AV Club contributor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya called the first episode “impressive,” IndieWire writer Jude Dry joked that the muddled sequel series “struggles to make a similar impression” as its predecessor, jokingly retitling it “Generation Who-Is-This-for-Exactly?”

Whether or not the new L Word is actually good (it’s not) is kinda beside the point, though. A lot of queer fans would be watching it even if it were worse than Netflix’s Tales of the City reboot from earlier this year—though, thankfully, the situation is not that dire. Generation Q might be as hamfisted and out of touch as the original, but it’s no longer the mid-aughts, and there’s no reason your queer friends have to suffer this show alone. For the next few months, the L Word fans in your life could use your support.

If you love your friend, you’ll support them through nearly anything, and that means standing by their side and not calling them out for talking ad nauseum about how angry this show that they are voluntarily watching makes them every week. I’m sorry to invoke the E word that goes with the other L word (i.e., emotional labor), but the emotional labor involved in supporting your friend while they spiral over this stupid, sexy show is a pretty low lift.

There are a number of practical ways you can be a good friend to the L Word fanatics you’ve let into your life. You can give them your Showtime logins, for starters. You can also learn who all the characters are, because you might as well know who the hell your queer friends are tweeting about 24/7 when they could be working, sleeping, or doing literally anything else. Remember: Ally is a verb, not a noun. If you don’t at the very least watch the first three seasons of the original series, familiarize yourself with the utter shitshow that happened in the later seasons post-Dana/Carmen, and memorize the theme song (melody and harmonies), you might as well tattoo “I hate my gay friends” behind your ear.

You should also clear your calendar so you can Hold Space for their rants, of which there will surely be many. Examples of premiere episode spirals include: “Finley Will NEVER Be Shane;” “No One Asked You to Tackle the Opioid Crisis, L Word, Why Are You Tackling the Opioid Crisis;” and “Bette's Affair With an Employee Was Bad Because She Was an Employee, Not Because She Was Married!!"

The next two months or so are really going to be a critical time for you—a person who might not have time for this lesbian nonsense—to step up for your loved ones who do. As hard as it will be to listen to your friends talk about how they hate everything about this show that they actually do love and watch every week, it’s what friends do. If it ever begins to feel unendurable, just remember how many times your queer friends have listened to you talk about how some man you were dating was great because he “remembered to ask me how my day was without calling me a stupid bitch.” You owe them.

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Follow Harron Walker on Twitter .