"Stumptown sees Smulders morph into action star"/ "Why the world still needs shows like 'The L word'"

I'm posting these 2 articles in honor of June being Gay Pride month.

Sept. 25, 2019  "Stumptown sees Smulders morph into action star": Today I found this article by Raju Mudhar in the Star Metro:

At the CTV upfront event in June, Cobie Smulders looked exactly like the movie star you would expect. Gorgeous in a bright yellow dress, the actress was the epitome of glam, glad-handing with media and industry folks.

It’s a far cry from her character in “Stumptown,” in which she plays Dex Parios, a bisexual, gambling-addicted private investigator — who usually looks relatively schlubby, as much as someone as striking as Smulders can — and tends to run afoul of both sides of the law as she navigates the seedier side of Portland, Ore.

Based on the graphic novel by Greg Rucka, it’s another comics adaptation for Smulders, who has been busy in the Marvel Universe playing S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill and says she has no desire to escape the clutches of comics-inspired work.

“I like them very much,” says Smulders. “Reading the graphic novel helped me say yes (to this part), because I was thinking, ‘This chick is so friggin’ cool.’ That was a big part of the sell, being able to see visually this world to get to know the characters. But it’s so cool. I never grew up reading comic books and now I’m surrounded by them. I’m in this world through Marvel and through this.”

CTV has high hopes for “Stumptown,” making it the centrepiece of this fall’s new acquisitions, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a Canadian front and centre.

“We went to L.A. on the hunt for big character swings and this was a great year for dramas. We circled four we wanted and all featuring great female leads,” said Mike Cosentino, president of content and programming for Bell Media. 

“The poster child is ‘Stumptown.’ That is exactly what the network schedule needs: it is an action drama with a big star, at a time when the world is ready for the strong female character to be the lead, not supporting.”

Smulders moves into a different kind of a hero role and, like many good gumshoes, her character has a complicated life. The first season is about setting that up and her path toward becoming a private investigator, she says.

“She’s a woman who’s dealing with a lot of things. She was in the military for many years. She did many tours and, because of that, she suffers from PTSD and is struggling with that, or maybe it’s just best to say just ignoring it,” says Smulders.

“She’s a woman who’s not willing to deal with what’s happening internally, emotionally. But in turn, she decides to project all of her energy into helping others, like taking care of her brother, who she’s the sole guardian of, and we’re also kind of introducing the idea of her becoming a private investigator.”

There are two trends that “Stumptown” fits squarely into, besides being another comics-derived series. Parios joins a number of females leading new shows, including Allison Tolman as a police chief in “Emergence” and Simone Missick as a new judge in “All Rise.”

Smulders is also the latest to hang up her PI shingle on television, which always has a revolving door. “Stumptown” is on the case along with the rebooted “Magnum” and the Jason Priestley-starring “Private Eyes.”

“Greg Rucka gave me a great quote. Raymond Chandler said, ‘The detective in the story must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.’ 

A private investigator has to be so honourable. One of the things about Dex is she has to read the good in people and see through all the bulls--t. And that’s fascinating to me. Every job you’re hired for, somebody is terrible and it’s part of a terrible, terrible situation. Nobody’s hiring you to find out good news.”

Smulders leads a strong cast of well known actors, including Micheal Ealy as a police detective who gets personally involved with Parios. The show features Jake Johnson (“New Girl”), Camryn Manheim (“The Practice) and Tantoo Cardinal (“Dances With Wolves”) in supporting roles.

In the pilot, Ealy’s and Smulders’ characters get romantically entangled, but due to Dex’s methods — the usual car chases and explosions that TV PIs use as their modus operandi — they will be at odds.

“I think it’s going to be an interesting working relationship. But right now, it’s just kind of starting,” says Ealy. “Hopefully we’ll find out … these two have some things in common that we haven’t quite discovered yet.”

“There’s certainly a lot of chemistry, whether that’s sexual, whether that’s just human to human getting to know each other, we’ll see, but there is a partnership there,” adds Smulders.

Smulders is also enjoying becoming a full-on action star, having fun doing stunt work on the series — or at least the ones they will let her do.

“I’ll do all of the stunts that I’m allowed to do legally. Like from the pilot, I did all of the fight sequences, but we had a double while I was thrown from a car, just because of liability. But I like to do all my own stunts and have started training already to do more,” she says.

“It’s very cool. We have a great stunt team. They did all of the ‘John Wick’ movies and all of the ‘Atomic Blonde,’ so it’s very realistic fighting and we are just trying to keep it as inventive as possible.”

https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/television/2019/09/24/cobie-smulders-is-happy-being-an-action-star-in-stumptown.html

Dec. 5, 2019 "Why the world still needs shows like 'The L word'": Today I found this article by Debra Yeo in the Star Metro:

Jennifer Beals sounds exasperated.

She’s just been asked whether anyone has suggested to her that “The L Word: Generation Q” — an update of the groundbreaking lesbian drama she starred in — is superfluous now that more and more queer characters are showing up on our television screens.

“No, not a single person,” she says.

“That’s kind of like saying, ‘Well, we’ve done enough love stories. I don’t think we need to tell more love stories, do you?’ ”

She has a point.

In the 15 years since the first iteration of “The L Word,” LGBTQ protagonists have certainly become more common, but they make up just 10.2 per cent of regular characters in prime-time scripted programs broadcast in the U.S., according to the latest report from advocacy group GLAAD. 

And none of the newer shows boast ensemble casts of mainly lesbian characters (Netflix prison drama “Orange Is the New Black,” which released its final season in July, comes closest). So yes, Beals is confident the world needs more “L Word” — as are her co-stars Leisha Hailey and Katherine Moennig. All three are reprising their roles from the original series as well as executive producing the new one.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the fact there aren’t 20 to 30 of the same type of show” as “The L Word,” says Hailey in a separate interview. “I can’t believe it’s still a niche thing to be.”

“The L Word” debuted in 2004. Same-sex marriage was still more than a year away from being legalized in Canada and 11 years away in the U.S.

There had been lesbian characters sprinkled throughout TV dramas up to that point — “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “ER,” “Queer as Folk,” “The Wire,” to name a handful — but never a show that focused almost exclusively on the lives and loves of a group of queer women.

“The story was able to dive into aspects of the experiences of lesbian women in a way that no other show really had,” says Megan Townsend, GLAAD’s director of entertainment research and analysis.

For Hailey, 48, who’s lesbian in real life, it was “mind bending” that “one show revolved around all the characters being gay or bisexual.”

She and Moennig, who’s 41, recalled gravitating as kids toward shows with strong female relationships like “Cagney & Lacey,” “always looking for representation,” as Hailey puts it.

Even so, they had no inkling of the impact “The L Word” was about to have as they shot the first season in what Moennig called their “Canadian bubble” in Vancouver.

“It wasn’t a mainstream thing to be gay at that time,” explains Hailey. “I thought, ‘This will be a little indie project that some people will see.’ ”

For her part, Beals, 55, shies away from calling “The L Word” groundbreaking.

“It’s really about love at the end of the day,” she says. “It wasn’t really until I started getting letters and people started coming up to me sharing their coming out stories, that was really when I understood the magnitude of the show.”

That’s not to say that everybody loved “The L Word.”

The show was criticized for, among other things, being too soapy, too white, too glamorous.

One bisexual character, Jenny Schecter (played by Mia Kirshner), was mentally unstable and downright unlikeable (and yes, we’ll find out in “Generation Q” how she ended up facedown in a pool). 

A particular sore point with some viewers was the portrayal of transgender character Max, who was played by a cisgender woman.

Beals acknowledges that “The L Word” had flaws. But one of the main motivations behind this reboot, she says, is to tell the stories of a younger, more diverse generation of queer people.

The new leads of “Generation Q” include a transgender

Asian man, Micah, played by trans actor Leo Sheng; lesbian couple Dani and Sophie (Arienne Mandi and Rosanny Zayas), whose ethnicities are Chilean Iranian and Dominican, respectively; and butch lesbian Finley, played by Jacqueline Toboni — a type of character the original was accused of avoiding.

Beals’ character Bette, an art gallery director in the original, is now running for mayor of Los Angeles and single parenting her daughter; Alice (Hailey) has progressed from journalist to talk-show host and become a step-parent; former hairstylist Shane (Moennig) is rich from selling her chain of salons but unhappy in love.

The trio, who are friends in real life, first started talking about the reboot in 2012 or ’13, partly because no TV show had come along to replace “The L Word” and partly because it was still being discussed in the queer community. 

But creator Ilene Chaiken was busy executive-producing “Empire” (she also worked on a season of “The Handmaid’s Tale”).

 Then Donald Trump got elected U.S. president.

“We all knew there would be an assault on the LGBTQ community and there was immediately,” Beals says. “We really felt we needed to do something.”

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