Lip Service

The BBC announced last week that Lip Service—its L Word knockoff drama about the lives and loves of a group of lesbians in Glasgow—would not be returning for a third season. The cancellation was almost certainly due to Lip Service’s flagging ratings—its audience declined by half from the first season to its second—which makes sense from a business’ perspective. The show was on, and people didn’t watch it, so now the show is off. TV 101 right?

Well… maybe. Or perhaps it wasn’t that people weren’t watching the show. Maybe it was just that straight people weren’t watching it.

This hypothesis is, I admit, held together by a mix of anecdotal evidence and educated guesswork (the blogosphere’s superglue!). But allow me to explain: 

I watched Lip Service. I watched Lip Service despite the fact that it was—let’s face it—a terrible show. I watched Lip Service despite the winding, tangential storylines, and the often bizarre, uncomfortable sex scenes. I watched Lip Service, and my girlfriends all watched Lip Service, and my best (gay) friends watched Lip Service, and my favorite (gay) cousin watched Lip Service. We all watched Lip Service because, simply, it was about gay people, and we’re gay people. Frankly, we’re usually so starved for representations of queer women that that’s enough. (Remember Tila Tequila? We watched that. South of Nowhere?  Classic. The Real L Word? Every week.) As a group, we lesbians already have desperately low standards for viewership—despite our complaints about the way we’re represented, in the end, we’re beggars, not choosers. But when it came to Lip Service, neither our desperation nor our begging could keep it around. We may wonder why this strategy doesn’t work on our favorite TV shows any more than it does on our dates (zing!), but it seems that in this day and age, gay shows just can’t survive without straight audiences.