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TCA Dispatch: Madeline Zima talks about her sexuality and we get “The Good Wife” scoop at the CBS party

Tonight, parent company CBS hosted a party for TCA members and the on and offscreen talent behind some of their biggest shows, giving critics like yours truly a chance to mingle and get as much scoop as possible on the upcoming fall season. I was able to track down several people on my list, starting with Ilene Chaiken.

I asked the L Word creator about her recent Tweet:

She told me she is referring to “more Real L Word and more projects that I hope to be able to announce very soon. I’m talking about both; more L Word and Real L Word-related news and new projects.”

Despite poor ratings for the reality series, she maintained an optimistic outlook on the show and related endeavors.

“I’m happy and I think Showtime is too,” she said. “It’s really starting to kick in.”

Madeline Zima was there to promote Californication and I stopped her to chat. She was glad to hear that lesbian fans are likely to stick with actresses who play gay from one role to the next, and she told me that Gretchen on Heroes wasn’t her first gay role.

“I did a movie with Brittany Roberts and I had a crush on her in the movie and had to make out with Selma Blair,” Zima said. “It’s called Family Tree. So this was my second girl-on-girl kiss.”

Zima said the role wasn’t specified as a lesbian one when she went to read for it.

“I had inkling because it was called a “chemistry read” with Hayden [Panettiere] and I was like ‘Hmm, chemistry! With a girl? I never had to do that. That’s weird.’ And I kind of was playing it that way just because I like to find the underlying things in a character and play those things up, which it was more flirtatious than straight up friendly.”

Madeline was psyched to play gay and said she wished the writers would have taken the Claire-Gretchen relationship further.

“We were mainly friends and had a lot of sexual tension, mostly on my part, but a little bit on hers, too. It’s like they didn’t want to go all the way gay with that storyline but I think they should have. I think they were scared. They’d put us in a trunk together and they’d find new ways to make us in a really close space but not make us kiss anymore. It’s like “what are you doing?”

I should preface this next part by saying she wasn’t joking – she was completely serious when she told me, “You never know, I might become a lesbian sometime. Very soon – I seriously considered it. I think women are beautiful and they’re definitely good kissers.”

I asked if there was an off-set connection with Hayden and she laughed at that. “If there would be any girl, it would probably be her.”

OK, so maybe it won’t be anytime soon.

We recently saw bisexual housemate Annie Whittington voted out of the Big Brother house. I nabbed the show’s producer Allison Grodner to ask about the casting process and why there doesn’t seem to be as many lesbian or bisexual women on the American version as there are on international versions.

“Last year we had a gay man and we had Lydia who was bisexual. In the past we’ve had, Yvette who made it to second place,” Grodner said. “We have huge support from the gay and lesbian community for the show so we know that and it’s important to us to be diverse in that way.”

Regarding Annie, Grodner says that they had no part in her deciding to initially hide her sexuality from her housemates.

She wasn’t sure what to do and I think that also contributed to her spinning out of control a bit. I think it caused her a lot of emotional turmoil. It’s all about Annie being who she was and who she is. She was a big fan of Big Brother, really smart. We knew we needed someone who knew the show well to pull this off, and she really did. She’s cute but she didn’t stand out as much as some of the other characters. She could lie low and fly under the radar. But as well found out, it wasn’t Annie’s true nature.
We even said to her “What are you gonna do? Are you going to tell people on the first night about your bisexuality? Or are you going to keep it a secret?” Of course we never tell people what to do. And she said right off the bat that she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. She said no; her choice. Then she started to come out in secret to a couple of people and I think, because of that, she was hiding something. They never knew she was actually hiding being the saboteur, but I think they thought she was hiding something about herself. In the end, I think she’d say it wasn’t necessarily for the best. If she’d been open about it – she is open about it, she might have lasted longer than that.

So will there be more gay women in the future? Grodner said diversity is always the plan.

Good Wife creator Robert King assured me that he takes “the GLAAD thing seriously,” and that they had the plan to introduce Alicia’s gay brother on the new season before the network got such a bad rating this time around. But I was gunning for something – or someone – very specific. Someone in a leather jacket that kisses women behind garage doors.

“First of all, I should say it’s not all about sexuality with Kalinda in that she’s a private person,” King said. “She holds on to everything in every part of her life. One thing we want to do this year is how she’s knocked back on her heels by a lot of the events around her. And part of that is sexually, part of that is bringing out her background. We want to peel away the layers of her because the mystery is there, but we also want to see who she really is so we’ll be bringing out her sexuality more.

“One of the reasons we didn’t want to show the kiss between her and Lana is because we want to go there this season, and go to what she’s about. We love Kalinda and we want to peel away the layers slowly. It’s a good basis – it’s not a basis out of fear or anything of alienating people. There’s a certain intregity with how Archie Panjabi‘s playing her. We kind of want to honor that.”

King said that they don’t want anything they do with Kalinda to be a stunt. “And Archie doesn’t either. Archie has a real investment and this year, I think she’s even better than last year, what she’s doing with the character.”

Regarding the newest cast addition of Blake, a male that appeared to be set in place for some tension with Kalinda, King said he will be a “sexual interest but not a romantic interest.”

“It’s a dangerous liaison relationship. It’s a very provocative. Part of the mystery of Kalinda is she uses sex as a tool and you wonder sometimes when does that cross over to the emotional and you’ll be wondering that a little bit about a few of the people in her life.”

I think it’s safe to say, at this point, that Kalinda is bisexual. And as King promised me she will definitely have an emotional relationship with someone this season, I am strongly hoping it’s with Lana the FBI agent [Jill Flint] who kisses girls in garages.

After hearing the news that Rules of Engagement will be bringing on a softball-playing lesbian surrogate mother this fall, I moseyed up to star Patrick Warburton to find out what he knew. Turns out it wasn’t much, other than he had just heard the same info today and said the lesbian had yet to be cast.

When I asked for who he thought might be good for the role, he said “Maybe Megan Fox?”

I don’t know if this would make me want to watch it more or less, honestly, but I somehow doubt she’s what they’re looking for. I can already see the casting sides: “Lesbian with short hair, wears baseball cap and has a masculine swagger; is totally cool with being pregnant.”

A show I’d love to see a queer female character on is The Vampire Diaries, and with openly gay creator Kevin Williamson at the helm, it can’t be far off, right?

“We continue to talk about it,” he said. “I feel like inherently vampires are gay because we’re so sexualized and sexy to both men and women. I don’t want to do a coming out story. I did it on Dawson’s Creek. I want to do it in a new way and I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what it would be. As soon as we can, we will.”

And what about Mia Kirshner’s Isobel? Will she make a reappearance in the future?

“We made sure we didn’t kill her because she’s the biological birth mother of our lead character,” Williamson said. “So I thought it’d be such a mistake to kill her because if we ever wanted to, as we get on more and more seasons, that character can come back again and again and again.”

I told him that’s actually great for Mia, considering she was killed off on The L Word.

And if you’re wondering how Rose and Natalie recouped after the stripping episode of The Real L Word that aired last week, rest assured they are “still working it out.”

Rose told me, “Our storyline – if you want to call it that – has been pretty true to life.”

Natalie agrees, saying, “Real life drama guys! … I didn’t really care so much about the strippers. That was never really my problem. I was more concerned about my girlfriend lying to me. I knew about it before TV — she got caught.”

Rose acknowledged the show has actually been a great mirror for her. “My depiction was sort of very negative and it took me watching myself to say ‘F–k, you know, I need to grow up a little bit.'”

And is Natalie going to continue working for Rose?

“I quit!” she said emphatically. Probably for the best!

Whitney’s date for the evening was Sara, so I had to find out if they’re together.

“We’re hanging out,” Whitney said. “I like to keep relationships kosher with everyone.”

“I think a lot of my hestitation came from [being on TV] because it was something I wasn’t prepared for and I didn’t know how to handle that on television,” Sara said. ” So I think I just took a couple steps back to see what happened.”

Whitney said she just wrapped Voodoo Cowboy, the film she is starring in and that it will hit horror festivals in October.

In the meantime, she’s also taking something away from how she comes across onscreen.

“I think I definitely participated in actions I would get criticized for and I was prepared for that,” she said. “I learned about myself and have grown from it.”

On the docket for tomorrow at TCA: The Real L Word, The Big C, Dexter and a new show called Episodes starring Matthew LeBlanc. Yeah, I don’t think that one is going to be of much interest to us, either.

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