An admirable Tales Of The City update wants to be considered radical without being radical
TV Reviews Tales of the City
It’s not particularly surprising that Tales Of The City is finding new life in 2019. For one, we’re in an era of media where basically anything that’s ever existed can return at some point but also because Tales Of The City has already proved its staying power. The book series, which was originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978, has spawned a 1993 U.K. series (shown in the United States on PBS) followed by two Showtime installments in 1998 and 2001. In 1999, it inspired a thematic concert series; in 2011, a musical at the American Conservatory Theater; and from 2013-2017, BBC Radio 4 aired eight radio adaptations covering the nine novels. In a general sense, the novels are simultaneously of their era and ultimately timeless: The early trio of books capture specifics of living in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early ’80s, weaving in real life people and events such as Jim Jones and, later, the AIDS epidemic. But they also capture the overall, still-relevant feel of being queer in this world—from a character dealing with his parents’ homophobia to the happiness of finding a queer community who accepts you as you are.
It’s why, in many ways, the basic ideals of Tales Of The City are easily translatable to 2019 (albeit with a few updates of some of the cringier aspects). The new Netflix limited series, which credits Orange Is The New Black’s Lauren Morelli as its showrunner and Maupin himself as an executive producer, is technically a sequel to the original miniseries with a combination of the same characters (some played by the same actors) and a new group of younger residents at 28 Barbary Lane, the apartment building where most everyone’s lives intersect. It’s a welcome update that aims to appeal to both original fans and a younger generation of queer folks.
Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City follows Mary Ann Singleton (Linney reprising her role), a once-naïve and sheltered woman who originally moved from Ohio to San Francisco in 1978, as she returns to Barbary after 20 years of being away. Mary Ann chose to pursue a television career over her family—ex-husband Brian (Paul Gross) and adopted daughter Shawna (Ellen Page, who fits in perfectly)—and ended up married in Connecticut. A mid-life crisis sends her back to San Francisco, back at the same building, and back drawn into the world and antics of Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis), Barbary’s eccentric landlady. Anna is a trans woman and Dukakis revives her original role; Morelli has stated that if she were to cast new, Anna would be played by a trans actress. Indeed, young Anna in a flashback episode is played by Jen Richards (also wonderful: A Fantastic Woman’s Daniela Vega plays her friend), and it’s worth noting that Morelli has trans writers and directors behind the scenes, too.
Mary Ann—needy, occasionally obnoxious, but quite easy to root for—quickly falls back into Barbary, especially upon seeing her friend Michael “Mouse” Tolliver (Murray Bartlett) while attending Anna’s 90th birthday celebration and watching the joyous, decidedly queer party. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she asks her new husband. “It’s… something,” he replies.
The same could be said for Tales Of The City as a whole: It’s at times wonderful and at times… something. It’s somewhat fascinating watching the “new generation” (who are, according to Michael, “beautiful and terribly depressing”) which includes Mary Ann’s queer daughter Shawna, young couple Margot (May Hong) and her trans boyfriend Jake (Josiah Victoria Garcia), and social media-obsessed twins Ani and Raven (Ashley Park, Christopher Larkin). Also at the party is young filmmaker Claire (Zosia Mamet) who is making a documentary “about queer community and its dissolution as a result of the strangling grip that capitalism has on San Francisco,” a mouthful that reflects how the show’s characters frequently converse.
Beloved Anna, who always seems to know everything about everyone before anyone else, sometimes speaks like a fortune cookie, which you’re likely used to if you’ve read the books, and it’s a delivery that few people can pull off but that seems almost natural in the hands of Dukakis. “It seems to me that being interested in more people is generally better than being interested in fewer people,” she tells a young man who confesses that he’s attracted to more than one gender.
Tales Of The City is most interesting when it touches on the delicate nuances of queerness, the competing opinions between generations or just between a couple with differing ideas. When a stranger asks Margot and Jake about their plans to have children, Margot balks at the idea that they’re being mistaken for a straight couple while Jake just seems happy that he’s passing for a cis man. Tales Of The City features a queer woman engaging in a polyamorous relationship, a gay couple navigating their first threesome, and a woman mulling over her partner’s hope for an open relationship by spitting out, “contrary to everyone else in the 21st century, I love monogamy.” Tales wants to show the spectrum of queerness and relationships, and even when it falls flat or doesn’t commit enough, it’s still pretty admirable.
A highlight in a later episode comes when Michael brings his younger boyfriend Ben (Russian Doll’s Charlie Barnett) to a dinner party amongst Michael’s peers. When Ben calls them out for using racist and transphobic language, one man can’t hide his disdain for Ben’s generation. “Any so-called privilege that we happen to enjoy at this moment was won,” he says, “from a society that didn’t give two shits if we lived or died.” He asserts that Ben can’t even begin to understand what this was like but Ben is a black man; he does understand living in a society that doesn’t care about his life. It’s an intense scene with a lot to say—and talk of intersectionality on television is something to be grateful for—but the thing is, there is so much more to that conversation that needs to happen. Instead of digging in harder, Tales decides to take a step back—a problem that occasionally plagues the 10-episode season. It’s as if the series wants to be considered radical without being radical.
Still, it’s hard to fault this adaptation for issues such as surface-level skimming, or its cloying and hokey sentimentality, or even its third act insistence on going broader and more ridiculous as it falls into a mystery with a clear-cut villain. These elements are built into its very DNA: Revisiting Maupin’s novels, there are a number of scenes that don’t sting as hard as they could, and a lot of cringe-inducing earnestness. And while the books do provide lovely little stories about queer life, they also occasionally fly into subplots about fleeing the Jonestown massacre or infiltrating a cult of cannibals. Netflix’s Tales takes a similar approach.
Ultimately, the show can be summed in up in an early line from Anna Madrigal, describing people as “flawed, narcissistic, and doin’ our best.” The series has many faults, often gets lost in its own self-indulgence, but it’s easy to admire how much effort they’re putting into making something for a queer audience—both new and old.
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I’ve been looking forward to this since I first heard about it, and this review only confirms that. It sounds like an absolutely accurate spiritual successor to the BBC series (I never got to see the 2 Showtime follow ups) and Maupin’s original sextet of novels. (The last 3 are weaker, partially because they weren’t serialized [which I think is true of the last 5 technically] and they’re more locked into a single POV as opposed to the more chapter by chapter switching approach).Of course, like Maupin, I’m spoiled in being a white male, so I do have a position of privilege to start with, so I probably don’t notice the more cringeworthy aspects/lack of intersectionality when i read.
Don’t worry, if you need help finding something “problematic” that almost no one else in the world does, this is exactly the place to be.
I saw the first one that aired on PBS, didn’t see the 2nd two series. I liked Paul Gross in the one I saw, and I know a different actor played the part thereafter. I look forward to seeing his return to Tales of the City when it airs.
The timeline seems really off, right? The books and the miniseries started in 1978. Now this show is set in 2019? It’s not been 20 years, it’s been 40 years. This miniseries should be set in 1998, right? Am I missing something?
Yeahs, that’s been bothering me as well yet weirdly I’ve haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else. The period aspects and passage of real-time were a big part of the original TV and book series so hopefully they haven’t forgon that just to make social media references etc. I’m addition, Anna was 60-ish in the first season and she turns 90 in this one!
The two? three? new books came out relatively recently—maybe in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s? So a slightly exaggerated time jump. The last book references Burning Man.It’s at times wonderful and at times… something.This is an excellent summation of the books. There’s a lot of problematic stuff in them, but they are a remarkable time capsule of very specific types of people and neighborhoods in SF. They were still running in the Chron when I was young, along with Herb Caen and I have a ton of nostalgia for them.
The final three books came out in 2007 (although initially Maupin claimed Michael Tolliver Lives wasn’t an actual Tales book—it’s the only one written in the first person and solely from his perspective with just cameos for other well known characters—but he’s since realized that was a dumb thing to say), 2010 and 2014 and I believe are meant to be basically set in those years (Burning Man, as mentioned, plays a big role in the 2014 Days of Anna Madrigal). I think even with the books you can’t take the timeline *too* seriously—yes the books echo and refer to events from the years they come out but not everything (ages, etc) fully adds up.
As I’ve said before, it seems like this is based on elements from the last two books, though it also seems like parts are new to the show (I may be just forgetting, but I don’t remember the “social media obsessed” twins).
While this review reads more like a solid B to me (but I never seem to understand the letter grades here), in hindsight I think it does sum up my feelings for the books, especially the later ones (which, in trying to be more clearly inclusive and less irreverent, sometimes had an awkward mix of the overly earnest with the more camp elements). So I remain optimistic.
All the new additions sound like they’ll never be as good or as socially relevant as “Good Trouble” is. also the line. “often gets lost in its own self-indulgence”, is something that I feel plagues a lot of queer cinema and storytelling a little too often.
the only bad thing I can say about Good Trouble is that it ruined me for The Bold Type by doing a lot of things TBT tries to do way, way better.
That’s how I felt when I discovered “Please Like Me” around the time “Looking” was being bandied about as the next big queer-defining thing.
I suppose Please Like Me and Looking focus on protagonists of a similar age, but they strike me as such completely different shows… A pet peeve of mine is how gay programming is so often pitted up against each other by gay viewers when one of the few things they share in common is they’re… well about gay characters. I remember a year and a half back whenever someone would discuss Call Me By Your Name on my FB page suddenly people would argue about whether God’s Own Country was the better movie when really the only similarity I saw was that both got N America releases around the same time.
There’s definitely truth to that. I think also at that time people were looking for a Gay Millennial answer to Girls and HBO was trumpeting Looking as it. It’s one of the things when something is so marginalized that there’s this weird expectation that only one thing can exist and it has to represent everything. It’s the same mentality that keeps pitting Wonder Woman against Captain Marvel.
I think you nailed it exactly. I ended up getting kinda defensive about Looking although I probably do think Please, Like Me was ultimately the better show. But I just got tired at how actively angry towards the show some people I know who disliked it were. And I think again that’s something about the fact that it has to represent “everything”–a lot of people simply would never care for a show like Looking–it was slow, self indulgent, etc. But I think a lot of gay viewers felt that, with no other real alternative, it *should* be for them, if that makes sense.
I remember when Brokeback came out how there was a sort of gay backlash and it wasn’t due to it being yet another tragic gay love story (though there was that, too). A lot of people just found it boring–it’s a VERY deliberately paced film. They would have just ignored it as not their thing if it were a straight movie, but being the only major gay release at the time, I think the fact that they didn’t like it ended up pissing them off.
It seems to me that the showrunners want to shoehorn in story lines that would make sense today, but not in 1998. I lived in SF at that time, and while the trans community was emerging, it was anything but ubiquitous. I worked with the LGBTQ population and the trans people I knew, sadly, still faced hostility from their fellow community. There was still quite a bit of danger and fear of persecution from the straight community and the queer community. I wonder how this show deals with the still very real AIDS and Hep C crisis. The meds that were used at that time were quite debilitating. I knew a few people who chose not to take them. They were also very hard to secure. The realities of drug abuse were a big focus at that time – with the straight community and the queer community. Meth and heroin use was very high – and the organizations I dealt with put focus on Harm Reduction. That was an issue that had a lot of focus from the city and non-profit assistance. Prop 215 was just passed that year, and the beginnings of medial marijuana was an aggressive movement that changed our country. And, while gentrification had started to take hold of the entire city it was not as predatory as it is today. One could still be poor (like myself) and live in the Mission, the Tenderloin or Hunter’s Point. Barbary Lane would be filled with millionaires now. In 1998, a young woman talking about the dangers of capitalism for the queer community would have been unusual. Activism was focused on the struggle to secure rights as a queer person – even in SF. And while it was more acceptable there – it was far from acceptable outside of any metro area. The intersectionality of poor POC in the queer community was not widely discussed. And social media? Uh, many people didn’t even have computers at that time. I admit I may be jumping to conclusions here, but the details described in this review perplex me.
I’m aware that my experiences may not match other SF residents at that time, but my exposure and involvement with the queer community, the medical marijuana movement, and the sex workers industry were quite common. Damn, I miss those days.
I may have missed it, but I don’t see this article saying it was set in 1998. It says Mary Ann moved to SF in 1978, and this has her coming back after 20 years of being away. The unknown (to me) variable on that equation is how long she lived in SF before moving away.And of course it’s possible they’ve played kind of loose with the timeline, using the same cast as from the 1993 series set in the late 70s/early 80s, but possibly updating it to more like current day without aging the characters exactly the appropriate amount.
It’s confusing for sure. But MaryAnn Singleton would be at least 65 if they intend for this to take place today. And I doubt Mrs. Madrigal would even be alive. I should probably wait until the premiere before I continue to criticize it, though.
Ok, just did a little research and discovered that Mary Ann left Brian and the kid in 1988. Which would put this series in 2008. That makes a lot more sense thematically.
The first mini was 1976, the second was 1977, and the third was a few years later (at least three). Ellen Page’s character is 25, so at least that long has to have passed.
Maupin in a talk I attended last year addressed when this would be set
and he said it’s definitely meant to be set “now” (this was 2018
but…) The fashions, etc, would seem to attest to this. He also
admitted it meant that you can’t really worry about the timelines of
each miniseries and add them up properly (whereas the books basically do
take place in the year they were published). This series, though much
of it is original content (much more than the earlier ones which were essentially faithful to the books), still draws
a lot from the last two books that came out in 2010 and 2014, for what
it’s worth. So yeah, they basically did do exactly what you suggest. It doesn’t bother me, but then again I grew up watching soap operas where small kids are sent to European boarding school for six months and come back as horny 17 or 18 yer olds (so that they can actually have stories written about them) which almost always added up to bizarre chronology like a character born five years after another character ends up being 15 years older due to them “SORASing” (soap opera rapid aging syndrome) one of the characters, and not doing the same to the other.
But yeah I guess the problem as well comes from the TV adaptations starting 25 or so years back, but at the time of the first adaptation the original novel was only about 15 years old. OK, now I’m getting confused again. Despite often reflecting and mentioning real events (most notably, of course, AIDS starting in the fourth book—which Maupin was claims having a character die of the disease in 1983-84 was a fiction first) the series always seems to be set in a just ever so slightly fantastical world, (one of the TV writers said they set it “2 feet off the ground”) so things like this don’t bug me. (Even if I just wrote an utterly long, confusing post here about them).
I enjoyed this a lot, having just caught up on the earlier series this week. Very messy at times, though the plot doesn’t go nearly as crazy as the previous minis (the first one ended with the only black character revealing she was a white woman in blackface, the second one revolved around amnesia, and the third one was all about Henry Czerny stealing children).The character ages thing is very weird, especially as they’re constantly talking about the past series. At one point, a character specifically says that Mouse is 54, which, if this is 2019, would have made him 12 when the first miniseries was set.
I’m two episodes to the end and am enjoying it a lot as well—but I admit, I kinda wish it still had some of those crazy soap elements and coincidences (OK there still are plenty of coincidences). Like the cannibal cult in the second series. Sometimes it felt a tad too earnest compared to the earlier series to me—but that is true of the final three books in the series as well (which this takes some plot elements from but is no way as close an adaptation as the earlier series)—although there’s at least one major over the top plot point I hoped would show up, but it was a throwback to a complicated plot point (the creepy pedophile character) from the first novel/series and they probably just didn’t wanna go there or have to explain it. Still, I think those big crazy plot elements would give this series a bit more forward momentum as, there really is so very little plot (even if I was never bored). (It also may not have made some of the parts that DID feel over the top, like the gay wedding in the episode I just saw which would never seem like something a character like Ben would be comfortable with, even if he is game to have Grindr threesomes, seem kinda out of place with the tone of the rest of the show…)
Oh one complaint–the three earlier miniseries all had very distinctive, quirky, musical scores (including the pretty memorable theme). I thought the scoring here was mostly incredibly modern tv generic (with the 10 second theme particularly uninspired) but I guess that’s not a big deal.
And yeah, I think, as I know I say elsewhere in this thread, you just have to completely not worry about the ages lining up in the various series (even if they do in the books).
I was thinking the same thing about the musical score — the new series has that generic “empowering” style of music you hear when a film wants to show the audience how real and in touch it is, imo. The original PBS series score was so iconic to the show, it’s a shame that its Netflix series does not include it. Probably a license/money issue.
I think the whole previous series must be tied up in weird licensing limbo, given that S3 is only available on Youtube.
Each of the previous series seem to be owned by different people. The original was created by Channel 4 in the UK (where Maupin has always been very popular, apparently) and then bought by PBS, and for a long time it was the hardest to find on DVD in N America. I remember there was a release that went quickly out of print that accidentally used the slightly censored print offered to some PBS stations and had to replace some of the music. Finally Acorn released a 20th Anniversary set which is uncut and can still easily be found (I notice a free streaming service here in Canada also has the first series uncut—very randomly, though they also have Channel 4’s original Queer as Folk uncut with the proper music whereas the Acorn release of THAT still had to replace almost all of the music….) Amazon Prime also offers it.
More Tales from Showtime has had two different DVD releases and both went out of print quickly—I managed to get the second one which has a ton of extras (commentaries on nearly every episode, a doc about the PBS controversy, etc). I don’t know what its status is streaming wise, but its the DVD set that seems to go for the most money used on Amazon (a quick glance shows used copies going for 100 bucks and up).
On the other hand Further Tales of the City, while I can’t find it streaming anywhere, is still in print on DVD and can be found for under ten bucks (of course it’s half the length of the other 6 episode series, and the DVD in fact I think has it as a three hour movie instead of three one hour episodes). What confuses me is Further is also from Showtime and had the same producers as More Tales (as well as also being filmed cheaper in Montreal) so I would have assumed the rights for Further and More were owned by the same people, but…
So yeah, it’s a mess. I’m sure Netflix at least considered trying to stream the earlier shows to build anticipation for the new one, but maybe it was just too difficult.
That’s exactly how I feel about the music in the new series. Of course the new series does focus on that element in its story telling more—the early series all had rather nasty or twisted elements as well as greater focus on mystery, so maybe the quirkier style of scores used there were felt to be the wrong fit here (to be fair, the later Maupin books also have that switch in tone but to a lesser degree—they still keep more of the early style IMHO).
But they probably could still have gotten the original theme music if they wanted to—the first series and the later two were from different production groups and networks and indeed the first series seems to have been scored by a regular UK TV composer (who also wrote the theme) whereas the second and third used a regular Canadian film composer (from Montreal, where they were filmed). However they still managed to license the original theme music for them…
I watched the first episode of the new Tales of the City and maybe my expectations were tempered by the early reactions of others but I…liked it a lot? I have many THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS and most of them are good. None of them are bad. I have quibbles and questions, but I felt such love and affection for all of these characters, and I think it’s the right way to introduce these characters to an audience that probably hasn’t seen the original or read the books. NO SPOILERS the first episode, and this is all quibble stuff and in no way hindered my enjoyment of the episode, but some of the actors are so far off from the ages of their characters, and I’m unsure how old some are supposed to be?Mouse! That actor isn’t 50! Maupin is 75! Wouldn’t Mouse be 70-ish? Laura Linney is 10 years younger in real life than Mary Ann would be?The funniest thing it was that I was like “oh, come on” when Olympia Dukakis came out. I’m like “That’s a great looking 90. What is Olympia Dukakis? 78?” She’s actually 87, so damn, good for you, OD.
Yeah for the most part the actors are close enough to their ages as mentioned on the show (Murray Bartlett’s Mouse is mentioned to be 54, and he’s 48 I believe, but the guy who plays his boyfriend is meant to be 28, and is in his early 30s, Paul Gross is a pretty amazing looking 60, which probably is about how old his character Brian, is meant to be, etc). But, as others have mentioned, the ages they are meant to be in this series, which is meant to be set in 2019, do not make any sense given their ages in the previous series (I think there’s a reason that they mention earlier storylines and earlier “eras” but never even say things like “I came here in the 70s!” The only date that gets mentioned is a 1960s one for Anna Madrigal and that works fine for her supposed age).
Anyway I won’t say more to avoid spoilers, but given the tone of the reviews in general (AVClub had one of the better reviews) I went into this with some trepidation but was, mostly, pleasantly very pleased with the show, even if I found it a bit overly meandering and directionless compared to the books and the earlier series (though they have always had elements of that) and wanted a bit more of the crazy soap opera twists the series has always been known for and a bit less of the very earnest on the nose, talk about gender and sexuality (though some of that was definitely appreciated).
Well, having watched the entire thing, I have to say I was disappointed. Not enough to stop watching, but I was disappointed that it turned out to be exactly what I feared it would be when I started hearing about the showrunner and writers and saw the first promos for it—a great big, reverential, up-it’s-own-ass, earnest “IMPORTANT” statement series with none of the charm, sophistication and fun of the earlier series. I feared it would be a melancholic trip down memory lane with little excuse for existing other than showing how the original actors have aged, and it was a lot of that (for example, what was DeeDee’s character there for? She had basically nothing to do with the main story or characters).And whoever they hired to do the soundtrack needs to be arrested and never allowed to work in movies or television ever again. The music chosen for this series was a hate crime. Did this person just go to GenericUpliftingTVSoundtracks-dot-com and pick the first sound clips available? It was beyond terrible—it was distracting and cheesy.San Francisco, which used to be central to the series as well, wasn’t really shown much at all. They spent the majority of time on soundstages, so you didn’t get any sense of the actual city (you know, the thing in the title of the series?). No iconic locations or events—just some generic B-roll.Overall, I get the feeling that Maupin was given a courtesy credit, but wasn’t allowed to be involved much in the development of this series. I can’t imagine he would have contributed to something as bland and humorless as this turned out to be…I hate it when great TV gets placed in the hands of PR hacks who don’t understand the appeal of the original, so they lean into manipulating nostalgic emotions instead.Oh, and one last thing…maybe it’s my age or whatever, but i could not stand any of the new characters. Shawna, in particular, was completely unlikeable and did nothing but mope, whine and complain throughout. Also, those embarrassingly stereotypical Asian twins should never have been recorded on film…they were borderline racist cliches—but I do have a question, which wasn’t ade clear from the series…were they supposed to have been DeeDee’s children?
I couldn’t agree more. Shawna and Ben were the best written of the millenial characters, not saying much, and that only as reflections of Shawna’s parents and Ben’s boyfriend respectively. Even Ben’s big speech at dinner reflects Mouse’s big speech at the dinner party in season 1. The rest of the characters were awful, though I thought the story of the couple where one partner transitioned would have been worth telling on its own as a non tales story. I didn’t even get that those might be Dee Dee’s kids, and their a/v show was ridiculous.
It was awful. A mellinial navel gazing politically correct snoozefest. The acting was terrible. No laughs. I almost expected the cast of fullhouse to show up. I’ve seen Lifetime and Hallmark movies that were more interesting and less preaching. Plenty of Boomer bashing by the mellinial writing staff. What they did to Maryann’s character was criminal. Absolutely not one bit of magical fantasy like in the previous ones. Blech.
Zosia Mamet is an absolutely TERRIBLE actor. She ruined the show anytime her sourpuss was on screen. I don’t know how Ellen Page could stand it! Damn, but the contrast between these two is black and white.
Ben’s big speech at the dinner party is a callback to the speech at the dinner party in season 1, where poor queers are ridiculed by Ian Mckellan. It was the only good moment for the millenial characters, who were terrible. I have family in the Bay Area, already in 1998 the homeless crisis and cost of housing was a pervasive problem. By 2003 I don’t think you would have been able to afford the kind of feminist cabaret that we were shown (when did the last lesbian bar close?) It was also disappointing not to see or hear about Mona on the occasion of her parent’s birthday.