The Reinvention of Jenny Schecter

To give Jenny credit, she actually takes Charlotte Birch’s advice—and Americans love someone who can take a blow and come back stronger than before.

The producers have also changed the way they portray Jenny’s writing in the show. In the first season, Jenny’s writing was often shown literally, as lines of text scrolling across the screen or fading in and out over images meant to represent Jenny’s “fiction.” In Season 2, the producers seem to have realized that showing text on the screen should only be done minimally, if at all; after all, The L Word is a television show, not a novel.

Rather than showing Jenny’s words, which could be easily mocked for their overdramatic quality, this season producers have chosen to show surreal scenes from Jenny’s stories filmed like art-school projects, often in black-and-white or with lurching, oversaturated colors. These visual explorations of Jenny’s writing are still a little precious, but are much more sophisticated than text scrolling over images of beluga whales. They do represent a step forward in Jenny’s evolution to being a professional writer, not merely an aspiring one.

Not content to merely workshop Jenny into popularity, the producers have also recruited Shane to help them integrate Jenny more fully into the group of friends on The L Word. Unlike Jenny, Shane has a significant fan base and has been situated from the beginning as the cast’s resident heartthrob; this status carries a particular weight when it comes to making Jenny one of the gang. Essentially, Shane is the epitome of cool, and if Shane thinks that Jenny’s cool too, that goes a long way toward making Jenny more acceptable.

A recent conversation between Shane and her sometime-lover Carmen (Sarah Shahi) overtly outlines the producers’ hopes for Jenny: