Television

The scene opens on a palatial lobby of the Biltmore hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Two women, Dani Núñez and Sophie Suarez, gape at the elaborately carved ceiling, 24-karat fixtures and lavish chandeliers. Recently engaged, they are touring potential wedding venues with their families. Dani’s father, a wealthy businessman, had suggested this one. At one point, Sophie’s mom wonders aloud, nervously, if she should have dressed up for the appointment. But no matter: The mood is festive, giddy. As they are led into a sprawling ballroom, Sophie’s abuela looks around skeptically and asks: “Where does the food go? Because we need a few tables to put everything we’re bringing.” The hotel event planner, blond hair pulled back into a pristine twist, informs her that the hotel doesn’t allow outside food, her voice barely concealing her disdain.Later, at home, Sophie explodes. “I don’t want to feel uncomfortable at my own wedding,” she says tearfully. “I want to laugh, I want to yell, I want to eat the food that my family cooked.” Dani seems to understand, until she opens her mouth. “I’m sure that they’ll make exceptions,” she tells her wife to be. Sophie is livid. “Did you see how they looked at me and my family?” Dani is a light-skinned, moneyed Chilean-Iranian woman; Sophie is Dominican-American and Afro-Latina. Their argument demonstrates that even though both women are Latinx, they have completely different experiences of power, privilege and class.VideoShowtimeCreditThe scene appeared about halfway through the first season of Showtime’s “The L Word: Generation Q,” the highly anticipated sequel to the original series, which ran on the same network from 2004 to 2009. Exhuming old cultural totems is risky: Overdo the nostalgia, and it becomes cloying; ignore the show’s legacy, and core fans might rebuke it. Fortunately, this reboot found a happy medium — and many juicy moments, like a fling with a minister, a hot threesome and a charming cameo by the soccer star Megan Rapinoe. But that sober, fully clothed and vulnerable exchange between Sophie and Dani is the one that stayed with me.When the original “L Word” aired back in 2004, it was a seismic event for many lesbians. At the time, TV shows featuring gay characters — “Queer as Folk,” and the lesser known “Noah’s Arc,” about black gay men in Los Angeles — tended to center on cisgender men and the issues relevant to their communities, whether it was casual sex and H.I.V. status or substance abuse. Sexual interactions between women usually showed up only as side plots, scandals or spectacles, usually for the benefit of men. Remember Kevin Bacon looking on from the bushes as Neve Campbell and Denise Richards made out in the pool in the 1998 erotic thriller “Wild Things”? Or when Britney and Madonna kissed at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards? You barely got to see it — the camera was too busy cutting away to Britney’s ex, Justin Timberlake, for his reaction.“The L Word” got closer to depicting the real social milieu of women who love women. It helped that lesbians were at the helm — Ilene Chaiken, the show’s creator, along with writers like Guinevere Turner and Rose Troche, who made “Go Fish,” a low-budget, grungy movie about queer women in Chicago in the 1990s — and they satisfyingly captured cultural touchstones of lesbian life at the time. (The cast attends Dinah Shore, a golf tournament that doubles as a cruising ground for women, and there were cameos by the singers Toshi Reagon and Tegan and Sara.) They also got the knottiness of queerness right: the way that exes can become best friends, that former lovers can show up as co-parents. The lines are messy, chaotic and overlapping, and that’s the point.The show birthed lasting archetypes in the characters of Shane McCutcheon, a shaggy Lothario, and Bette Porter, a high-powered, fiery woman with irresistible sex appeal. For some queer women in the 1990s and aughts, the show was their first glimpse of lesbianism onscreen and the incandescence of living in a world beyond the purview and validation of men. I can still remember the electricity I felt watching the show’s central character, Jenny, fall for a seductive Italian woman named Marina. I looked over at my boyfriend at the time and thought, Welp, there goes that.The original show received valid criticisms for largely casting straight actors over the show’s six seasons. This not only denied gay actors roles but also denied viewers the opportunity to fully project themselves into the story. Aside from Jennifer Beals, who plays a lesbian with unfettered gusto, there’s a palpable difference between watching women fully lean into their desire and watching them mime it. The show was a close relative of “Melrose Place,” full of wealthy, mostly white women treating money and race like nonissues. Those decisions undermined the show’s triumphant agenda, and it required a mild level of dissociation to imagine yourself alongside them, sipping cappuccinos in the Planet, their local hangout. The show’s most painful error was in its treatment of noncis characters, particularly Max, a trans man who was frequently misgendered and treated with a cold curiosity.Last year, when Showtime first announced it would be rebooting “The L Word” series, it initially seemed like yet another example of a beloved old piece of intellectual property being upcycled into a shinier version of itself. Most cultural reboots are engineered to deliver an instant dopamine hit — the comfort of familiarity. Rarely is the intention to make reparations or even amends. But “The L Word” had a cultural debt to repay through its resurrection, and it knows it.The new “L Word” takes place 10 years after the old one left off, i.e. basically now. The characters are entering into new phases of their lives, grappling with aging bodies, divorce and child-rearing. The once-irritating character Alice Pieszecki, played by the sparkly Leisha Hailey, has matured into a level-headed talk-show host and co-parent, managing a household and her girlfriend’s ex-wife. Bette Porter is still a hotheaded mess, having affairs with married women and verbally decimating her enemies. Much as it did 20 years ago, the show models for me hopeful possibilities, like women well in their 40s having adventurous sex. The new cast includes several trans actors who simply appear on the show. Their transness isn’t excessively politicized — it just exists.Not everything about the 2020 version works. More of the actors identify as queer, but the show still has some representational blind spots (no major nonbinary characters; no darker-skinned black women). Somehow it also has become glossier than its predecessor: Each of the original characters seems to have added a couple of zeros to her net worth. But for the most part, the show is cannily self-aware. It knows representation is hard-earned. The moment with Dani and Sophie suggests that television has gone beyond just putting gay women onscreen to make out and arrived someplace more raw and textured.By the end of the season, it’s not looking good for Dani and Sophie. Their relationship is starting to buckle under their miscommunications. They disconnect. Loneliness seeps in; each woman seeks comfort from others. That’s real life, and it makes for excellent TV.Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for the magazine and a host of the podcast “Still Processing.” She last wrote about the director Dee Rees. More

What’s StreamingTHE FAREWELL (2019) Stream on Amazon; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. While it may not have garnered any Academy Award nominations, this comedic drama from Lulu Wang netted a Golden Globe for its star, Awkwafina, and was among the highest-grossing indie movies of 2019. Based on an experience from Wang’s own life (or, as the film puts it, “based on an actual lie”), “The Farewell” casts Awkwafina as Billi, a young, creative New Yorker who learns that her overseas grandmother (played by Zhao Shuzhen) has a terminal illness. Billi travels with her parents to the northern Chinese city of Changchun, where her grandmother lives, but not before reluctantly agreeing to terms set by the rest of the family: Nobody is permitted to tell the matriarch about her illness. What follows is a bittersweet story that plumbs family relationships and cultural differences. The film “has a loose, anecdotal structure and a tone that balances candor and tact,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Much of the charm and power of this story — about events leading up to a wedding that’s also a fake funeral of sorts — come from the palpable sense that it genuinely happened to someone.”TOY STORY 4 (2019) Stream on Disney Plus; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. On Sunday, “Toy Story 4” became the second movie in the series to win an Academy Award for best animated feature. (“Toy Story 3” won in 2010; the first two were released before the category existed.) Like its predecessors, “Toy Story 4” assembles Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and their plastic cronies for an adventure — this time one that involves a road trip and a spork with a death wish (Forky, voiced by Tony Hale). “The animation is striking, the jokes amusing and the story sweet,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times, “though this being Pixar, the tale is also melancholic enough that the whole thing feels deeper than it is.” She deemed the movie “great-ish.”What’s on TVBIG CAT COUNTRY 8 p.m. on Smithsonian Channel. This new nature series centers on two prides of lions along the Luangwa River in Zambia, dramatically narrating their hunts and power struggles. (An example: “A herd of buffalo is coming to drink. The herbivores don’t see the lions … Until it’s too late.”) In other words: “Cats” this is not.WATCHMEN (2009) 6:30 p.m. on IFC. Those who watched HBO’s recent, radically reimagined TV riff on Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” graphic novel can see a very different take on the material in this film adaptation, which was directed by Zack Snyder. With a cast that includes Billy Crudup and Carla Gugino, this version adheres more closely to the graphic novel than HBO’s version — but wasn’t nearly as well received by critics. More

A grand jury in Chicago revived the criminal case against the actor Jussie Smollett, indicting him Tuesday on charges that he lied to the police in connection with the alleged hate crime attack against him a year ago. The indictment came 11 months after prosecutors dropped similar charges against him.The new charges were announced by a special prosecutor, Dan K. Webb, who was assigned to the case after a judge ruled that the Cook County state’s attorney, Kim Foxx, had not properly handled it the first time.In a rebuke to Ms. Foxx’s office, Mr. Webb criticized the decision by her prosecutors to abruptly drop the case, saying in a news release that his review of the record showed that her office had believed it had strong evidence against Mr. Smollett. Mr. Webb said the state’s attorney’s office had not offered any evidence showing that it had gained new information indicating Mr. Smollett’s innocence, nor any documentation that similar cases had been handled the same way.Mr. Webb said that he had not reached any conclusions about whether prosecutors engaged in wrongdoing and that he was continuing to investigate.[A timeline of the case|What we know about the evidence]Mr. Smollett, 37, was charged last February with filing a false police report after the Chicago police concluded that he had paid two brothers to stage an attack on him in which they shouted homophobic and racial slurs and yelled, “This is MAGA country,” a reference to President Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan. The police said Mr. Smollett was looking for publicity because he was unhappy with his salary on the television show “Empire,” which dropped him from the cast after his arrest.The new indictment charges Mr. Smollett with six counts of disorderly conduct related to false statements to Chicago police officers. Five of the counts were related to accounts Mr. Smollett gave police the morning of Jan. 29, 2019, when he said the attack occurred; and one was related to a statement he made on Feb. 14, around when the police started to view Mr. Smollett as a suspect.In a statement, Tina Glandian, a lawyer for Mr. Smollett, noted that he is in litigation with the Chicago Police Department, and raised questions about whether it was fair for Mr. Webb to partly base his investigation on evidence from that department. She highlighted the fact that Mr. Webb’s office said it had not yet found evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the prosecutors. “The attempt to re-prosecute Mr. Smollett one year later on the eve of the Cook County State’s Attorney election is clearly all about politics not justice,” she said in the statement.Ms. Foxx is running for re-election and faces a Democratic primary next month in which her opponents have criticized her management of the Smollett case. Her campaign issued a statement on Tuesday denouncing the “James Comey-like timing” of the new charges, referring to the former F.B.I. director’s public pronouncements about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server just before she lost to Mr. Trump.Mr. Webb’s decision to seek charges “can only be interpreted as the further politicization of the justice system, something voters in the era of Donald Trump should consider offensive,” the statement read.Mr. Smollett’s case transfixed the country for weeks last year, first after reports that he had been the victim of a bigoted attack, eliciting messages of support from politicians, celebrities and civil rights groups. When the police revealed that Mr. Smollett was being investigated for possibly orchestrating the attack, the tone shifted.The president’s supporters seized on the case as a hollow attempt to demonize them as racists. In October, Mr. Trump told a gathering of police chiefs in Chicago that Mr. Smollett’s report of being attack was “a scam, just like the impeachment of your president.”The police had built a case based on surveillance camera footage, interviews with the brothers, text exchanges between the men and Mr. Smollett, and a check he had given them. None of the text exchanges explicitly mentioned a staged attack, and Mr. Smollett maintained that the money was to hire the brothers to physically train him for an upcoming video.Last March, just a month after his arrest, the state’s attorney’s office dropped the charges against him, explaining that Mr. Smollett was not a threat to public safety and that he had a record of service to the community. He agreed to forfeit the $10,000 bond that had released him from jail.The office’s decision angered some officials in Chicago, including the police superintendent and the mayor at the time, Rahm Emanuel, and the city later sued Mr. Smollett for more than $130,000 it said it had spent investigating his claim of being attacked. Mr. Webb said that part of the rationale for reopening the prosecution was the resources expended by the police department while investigating his reports.Ms. Foxx had removed herself from the Smollett case early in the investigation, saying publicly that it was because she had earlier contact with representatives of Mr. Smollett when the police still considered him a victim. Ms. Foxx handed the case to her deputy, leading to some criticism that she had not formally recused herself under state law.A retired judge who objected to Ms. Foxx’s handling of the case asked that a special prosecutor be appointed, and a judge agreed, saying that Ms. Foxx should have handed the case to someone outside her office. Mr. Webb, a former United States attorney for Chicago and a special counsel during the Iran-contra affair, was tasked with looking into Ms. Foxx’s decisions and determining whether further charges against Mr. Smollett were warranted.The actor was not arrested on Tuesday, but is due in court on the charges on Feb. 24. More

Good shows often have mediocre pilots — the nature of pilots usually makes them awkward (too much exposition and the characters aren’t developed, for example). So when you watch a pilot that isn’t any good, how do you decide how much of a chance to give it? — JoannaThe difference between a bad pilot with potential and a bad pilot without is often execution versus taste. Some jokes don’t land, some moments are overly broad, some characters a bit too reminiscent of an actor’s previous role — those all feel conquerable to me. Trafficking in bland stereotypes, demonstrating a lack of imagination or relying on anonymous, naked dead women as vague motivation all feel more urgently terrible. “They didn’t achieve what they were going for” is easier to look past than “the thing they are going for is bad.”There are always going to be genre hiccups: Shows that have high-concept premises or unusual settings often suffer from pilot-itis, but as a viewer I know they won’t explain the world in every episode. Sitcoms often have “the day everything changed” pilots, but presumably the “new” character will be warmly subsumed into the rest of the ensemble in the second episode. Great pilots still exist in both of these formats — for example, “Battlestar Galactica” and “Cheers” —  but I am more likely to forgive a familiar failure.I also try to look at the world the show is set in, if I can imagine myself spending more time there. On the pilot of “Madam Secretary,” we’re meant to find drama in the protagonist agonizing over whether to become secretary of state. We know that she will do it, because that is what the show is going to be! Ugh. But I liked a lot of the characters, and I liked the vibe, and I like hopeful political stories and that turned out to be a show I enjoyed tremendously.Is the cast good? I was not wild about the pilot of “Schitt’s Creek,” and actually didn’t love the first season — too screamy, and not fun enough. But Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara were there, and I’m not made of stone, and I loved how much Dan Levy’s and Annie Murphy’s performances played off each other. I stuck it out and am thrilled I did; “Schitt’s” is one of my current faves.As a critic, I probably give bad pilots a longer leash because part of my job is to be curious about things I don’t necessarily like. Off the clock, I follow an extremely unscientific metric that works great here: Do I want to like this? If so, watch more. This doesn’t always work out, but don’t let lousy shows harden your heart. Seek joy and you just may find it.I was hoping for some advice on a new (or not so new) procedural that would work for fans of “Castle,” “Psych” and “iZombie,” i.e., something with enough light to balance out the dark and isn’t too bleak and depressing. — DavidYou seek “Murder, She Wrote,” the ur-text for the modern light procedural in which Angela Lansbury plays a mystery novelist who also solves crimes. (It’s not currently streaming on one of the big three, but it has come and gone from those platforms and will again.) There are a billion episodes, the theme song is catchy as hell, and in my experience it is an extremely easy show to get people to agree on.Until that’s available again, watch “Monk” (currently streaming on Amazon). Tony Shalhoub stars as Adrian Monk, a former cop turned private detective who has O.C.D. and pretty severe anxiety but also a Sherlock Holmes-y attention to detail and deductive reasoning. It’s mostly light and quirky, but it acknowledges the existence of genuine anguish.For a different spin on the ex-cop-gets-pulled-back-in setup, try “My Life Is Murder,” an Australian series starring Lucy Lawless. There’s also the fantastic “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries,” which is set in the 1920s and is a ton of fun. (Those are both on Acorn.)For something with a poppy sense of humor, try “Death in Paradise” (which constantly comes and goes from streaming; you can currently find four seasons on Hoopla and one on BritBox), in which a British detective is dispatched to investigate crimes in a fictional Caribbean nation. Cue fish-out-of-water shenanigans.When does my favorite show come back? Or how can I tell if my favorite show was canceled? — Many, many WatchersThanks to relentless S.E.O. spam it is often difficult to just search for accurate information online about TV calendars. So I will let you in on my most powerful industry secret, which is the website The Futon Critic. It will tell you when a show is returning, how many seasons a show has been renewed for, or the circumstances of its cancellation. I cannot remember the last day I didn’t use it — perhaps some time in 2005? — and I will sing its praises always.Send in your questions to watching@nytimes.com. Questions are edited for length and clarity. More