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Tales of the City: What you need to know before watching the Netflix revival

Photo credit: Alison Cohn Rosa/Netflix
Photo credit: Alison Cohn Rosa/Netflix

From Digital Spy

It's been 18 years since we last visited 28 Barbary Lane and much has happened since, both in the real world and also within the cozy haven that Armistead Maupin first crafted in his Tales of the City series.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this groundbreaking and LGBTQ-inclusive franchise, Tales started out as a serialised narrative in the San Francisco Chronicle before Maupin expanded the story into books that were later adapted into a limited series.

First airing on Channel 4 in 1993, Tales of the City returned for two more instalments in 1998 and 2001, all three of which starred Laura Linney as a naive newcomer called Mary-Ann Singleton who tried to navigate life in '70s San Francisco.

Photo credit: Showtime Networks Inc./Courtesy Everett Collection
Photo credit: Showtime Networks Inc./Courtesy Everett Collection

Related: Netflix's Tales of the City star discusses playing a trans man on screen and representation for queer people of colour

Despite there being more books to adapt, the series seemed to end on screen almost twenty years ago with Further Tales of the City, and it wasn't until Netflix revived the show this year that fans were finally given the chance to revisit 28 Barbary Lane again on TV.

Set 23 years after Mary-Ann left San Francisco behind to further her career, the new Tales of the City should feel instantly familiar to fans of the earlier adaptations. Along with Linney, Olympia Dukakis and Barbara Garrick have both reprised their roles on the show along with a host of new actors including Oscar nominee Ellen Page, who plays Mary-Ann's now grown up daughter, Shawna.

Although these familiar faces will help ease in longtime fans, there's also plenty to get your head around when it comes to the shared history of these characters. That’s not to say that Tales of the City is hard to get into – if anything, it’s quite accessible to newcomers – but some prior knowledge of earlier instalments certainly adds new layers to the revival.

That's where we come in.

Photo credit: Alison Cohn Rosa/Netflix
Photo credit: Alison Cohn Rosa/Netflix

Before Queer as Folk or The L Word helped normalise queerness on TV, Tales of the City was the first network show to depict LGBTQ+ love as something to be celebrated (while breaking new barriers for sex and nudity on the small screen too).

The first series was set in 1976 at the height of San Francisco's blossoming queer culture before AIDS started to devastate the LGBTQ+ community just a few years later. In a bid to find herself, Mary-Ann Singleton moves into an inclusive boarding house run by Anna Madrigal, an old lady who loves weed and welcomes people from all walks of life into her community.

Initially quite repressed, Linney's character starts to let go of her inhibitions and even embarks on an admittedly unhealthy love affair with a slimeball called Thomas Gibson.

More Tales of the City aired three years later on a new network and picked up six weeks after the first series ended. Aside from the likes of Linney and Dukakis, a number of characters were recast, including Brian Hawkins, Mary-Ann's ongoing love interest, and Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, her best friend, but the show itself continued to navigate love and queerness more openly than most of its peers.

Photo credit: Channel 4
Photo credit: Channel 4

Set four years later in 1981, Further Tales of the City went off the rails a bit with a bizarre plot involving real-world cult leader Jim Jones, but fortunately this doesn't impact upon anything in the new revival.

What does become relevant though is Mary-Ann's new job as a TV personality and her now monogamous relationship with Brian. As viewers of the 2019 series will soon learn, Singleton's career eventually takes precedence over her family and she ends up leaving both Brian and her adopted daughter Shawna behind to break into network news.

In the twenty-three years that have passed since Mary-Ann left Barbary Lane, Mouse also contracts HIV, something which the source material explores in further detail starting with the fourth book, Babycakes.

Photo credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/Netflix
Photo credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/Netflix

Looking star Murray Bartlett is the third actor to take on the role of Mouse for the revival and 2019 Brian is now played by the original actor, Paul Gross, who initially left Tales following the first season. Newcomers shouldn't be too confused by these developments, but it's still reassuring to see Linney and Dukakis ground the show with consistent appearances across every season.

In many ways, Dukakis is the heart of Tales, but one thing that doesn't become immediately apparent in the revival is that Olympia's landlady is in fact a transgender woman who transitioned through surgery before any of the other characters met her.

However, as the show's mysteries start to unfold, it soon becomes clear that Anna's past is more important to the revival than viewers might first assume and this all comes to a head in a special flashback episode set in 1966.

Photo credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/Netflix
Photo credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/Netflix

Now played by Jen Richards, an Emmy-nominated trans actress, the younger Anna arrives in San Francisco with the same kind of naivety that Mary-Ann once did before finding friendship with other transgender women. Without spoiling too much, just know that Anna's personal history around this time plays a key role in the revival while also shedding a much-needed light on the real-life Compton's Cafeteria Riot, which preceded the Stonewall Riots by three years.

New showrunner Lauren Morelli has said that the biggest challenge in helming the revival was to make sure that the new Tales could "play both to audiences familiar with the material and to newcomers." Fortunately, she and the team have managed to do exactly that, capturing the revolutionary spirit and tone of earlier instalments with a bold new take on queerness that's very much grounded in 2019.

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City is streaming now on Netflix.


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