'L Word' producer talks movie, more

After a six-season run featuring love, murder, sex changes, and all things lesbian, The L Word has come to (what some might call) a premature end. We caught up with the show's producer Ilene Chaiken to reminisce about its past and to get some scoop on the forthcoming movie.

Have you always known how the series would end?
"From season to season, I never knew what stories we would tell the next year and we tried to do it in a much more evolving way: who are these characters, where are they going? It seemed like six years was the right amount of time to do it for, and even though I don't believe that is the end of The L Word and I don't believe that these characters are gone, it was definitely a good time to say that this part of it is finished. You need to reboot sometimes."

Do you think you challenged people's opinions through the show?
"I set out to entertain, to make great television and to create characters that would be really engaging and whose stories people would want to get involved in. It's a given that when you tell those stories about a group of people who have never been represented before - but who are a significant part of every culture - that it helps, in a way, to create understanding and to change hearts and minds in that you're dealing with prejudice. It's a privilege to have done a TV show that was a piece of popular entertainment that had that ancillary effect."

What can we expect from the movie?
"The movie will be the essence from The L Word. In other words, there have been a lot of reactions to the last season. To me, the show was primarily a show about love and friendship. So The L Word movie is going to be a romance above and beyond anything else. I think the genre is romantic-comedy and that's what it will be."

How is the spinoff, The Farm, shaping up?
"The Farm isn't going forward on Showtime. I'm hoping I can find another outlet for it. We made a really good show. It's not technically an L Word spinoff. It was for Showtime, but that wasn't what we set out to do."

Did it impact your storylines for the final season?
"No. I know it would appear that way, knowing that the spinoff is a prison show and that we told the story of a murder in the final season. It's natural that people would assume that, but it's absolutely not the case. I had settled on that Jenny storyline before we'd even talked a spinoff. I pitched the idea of a spinoff to Showtime, and the loved the idea of a women's prison. So at some point, the two ideas collided. They said we should make it an L Word spinoff because the stories matched up."

Looking back after six years of the show, is there anything you'd change?
"I don't believe in regrets. The only thing that I've admitted is that if I'd have known how upset people would be about Dana's death, I might have not told that story. But apart from that, I have no regrets. I always did my best. I know that at some times it was better than others, and there were some storylines that the audience loved more than others, but I always did my best to be true to the stories and the characters, and to make it good and entertaining."

Are you an L Word fan? Are you looking forward to the movie? Add your comments to this entry below!