For many of us, last Sunday night’s premiere of Showtime’s The L Word was a significant event: never before has there been an entire television drama about the lives of a group of lesbian and bisexual friends.

It was like the Lesbian Super Bowl as women across the country gathered together in living rooms and online to watch the show and talk about it afterwards. While the ratings for the premiere have not yet been disclosed, message boards and search engines have been flooded with requests for more information on the series and its cast since Sunday, and so many more people than expected logged onto Showtime's chat with Jennifer Beals immediately following the premiere that Showtime's servers crashed.

To celebrate this event, I invited a group of my own lesbian and bisexual friends to watch the show with me in my San Francisco apartment, and their reactions echoed many of the views posted in the last few days on L Word message boards across the internet: there was some good, some bad, and some very ugly.

The Good: Lesbian Insider Information

We all loved Marina (Karina Lombard). She was unexpectedly, unmistakably sexy, and we watched her sophisticated moves on an unsuspecting Jenny (Mia Kirshner) with fascination (and some of us were even taking notes). Not that we didn’t appreciate Shane (Katherine Moennig)—who has been positioned as the “resident heartthrob”--but there was almost universal agreement that Marina far outstripped her in sex appeal.

We also loved the bored comment Alice (Leisha Hailey) made to her friend Dana (Erin Daniels) in the lesbian bar: “it’s the same boring faces night after night.” Even in San Francisco, a town that could have “Gay Mecca” as its nick name, we do see the same girls all the time. Alice’s charting of her group of friends’ sex lives had us laughing as well; seeing such an open secret of lesbian life on television made the show feel especially authentic.

To top it all off, we loved the lesbian sex—it was convincing, and it was hot. As my friend Dawn said, “That was the first time I’ve seen a lesbian-on-lesbian thing on television where it wasn’t all filmy. There wasn’t a sheer curtain in front.” Essentially, the dialogue and imagery included enough lesbian "insider" information for us to feel like we could recognize ourselves in the show—something that is certainly a significant step forward in representations of lesbians and bisexual women in the media.

The Bad: "Bush Confidence" and Shane's Appearance

Unfortunately, there were also some bizarre missteps in the writing that made some of us question whether the writers really were lesbians. The discussions about bush confidence, butt waxing, and nipple confidence seemed strange at best, and ludicrous at worst.

Perhaps LA lesbians wax their butts (TMI, anyone?), but nobody talks about “bush confidence.” These phrases smacked of an effort to avoid saying gender-bending things like “Shane has balls.” Maybe we’re lesbians and sometimes we like to spell “women” with a Y, but we speak English too.

While we’re on the subject of Shane, what was up with her hair, and that weird leather outfit at the end? If the producers of the show are reading this, please give Shane a makeover. Maybe not this season, since apparently shooting has already wrapped, but if the show is picked up for a second season, take a hint: she looked ridiculous in that leather outfit that showed off every last bone in her back, and her hair constantly looked like it had been recently electrocuted.

The Ugly: Too Many Straight Men

Like many viewers who posted their thoughts online, my friends and I felt that the inclusion of men in numerous sex scenes—from the man jacking off behind the screen at the start of the show to the truly unfortunate threesome—pandered to a straight male audience and was outright offensive to lesbian viewers. As a viewer nicknamed "kasademon" posted on the Showtime message boards, “it is trendy to be a lesbian now, but I am offended by the blatant hetero involvement throughout the show.”

The low point of the show was arguably the threesome scene with Bette (Jennifer Beals), Tina (Laurel Holloman), and the random straight man they picked up at the art show. After Bette and Tina’s emotional discussion about the difficulties that a mixed-race child with two lesbian mothers would face, the threesome felt like a 180-degree turn into straight porn. In addition, the fact that two lesbians living in West Hollywood would willingly have unprotected sex with a strange man seemed extremely stupid. Bette and Tina would be fully aware of the dangers of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and we found it ludicrous that they would subject themselves and their baby to that risk.

As "MizTiaa" on the Television Without Pity message board stated, “I cannot believe that in this day and age anyone would be so deplorably stupid as to have unsafe sex with a stranger in order to get pregnant. I was absolutely floored by the unbelievable stupidity of it, not to mention insulted and downright disgusted.”

Focusing a major portion of The L Word on a lesbian pregnancy storyline has a high potential for disaster simply because it is such an overdone theme. The issues of race that were raised in the premiere demonstrate that The L Word can go in a different and thoughtful direction, but the threesome scene, as well as the flippant way in which many of the characters discussed finding sperm donors (hello, has anyone heard of a sperm bank?), was not a step in the right direction.

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