Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City’ On Netflix, New Stories About The People At 28 Barbary Lane

The original miniseries based on Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City novels was a massive hit for PBS in 1994, but also a massive source of controversy. Two more miniseries followed, causing less of a controversy but still keeping people interested in the story. Now, eighteen years after the last sequel airs, Netflix has brought back some new Tales Of The City, with Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis reprising their iconic roles. Does it hold up?

ARMISTEAD MAUPIN’S TALES OF THE CITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An older woman is being interviewed on camera. “You better hurry up if you don’t want me to croak on screen,” she jokes.

The Gist: The woman is Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis), the owner of the building at 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco, and she’s about to turn 90. She considers everyone who lives in her unique building to be her family, and they’re all furiously planning a raucous birthday party for her. The occasion is so monumental, that Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney) is coming back to San Fran for the first time since she left Barbary Lane 20 years ago to pursue a TV career.

Mary Ann’s Connecticut life has been somewhat less than the idyllic life she intended it to be; she went from a morning show anchor to shilling on informercials, and her marriage to her husband Robert (Michael Park) is strained. She only intends to be there a day in order to pay her respects to the woman she still calls “Mrs. Madrigal,” but once she enters the party, all the old emotions of her time there comes back.

She sees her old buddy Michael “Mouse” Tolliver (Murray Bartlett) and his new young boyfriend Ben (Charlie Barnett), who are both overjoyed to see her. But a couple of people there aren’t happy she’s there: Her ex-husband Brian Hawkins (Paul Gross) and his daughter Shawna (Ellen Page), who just happens to live at Barbary Lane. Shawna, all black outfits and heavy on snark, tries to shrug off Mary Ann’s appearance, but she can’t just shake off her disgust at the mother who left her and Ben when she was two.

When Mary Ann tries to get some air on the roof and finds Shawna, they share some weed but Shawna lets her know that she doesn’t want a relationship with her. “You gave birth to me, then you left.” One problem: Ben and Mary Ann adopted Shawna, so she confronts Ben the next day, wondering why he never told her the truth. Given how icy things are between her and her husband (they sleep in separate beds in the hotel, he calls the people at Barbary Lane “freaks”), it doesn’t seem like a stretch that Mary Ann is going to stick around SF for awhile.

Our Take: When the original Tales Of The City miniseries aired on PBS in 1994, it caused an amazing amount of controversy. Taking place in late ’70s San Francisco, it depicted LGBTQ relationships in a very real way, a way that hadn’t been seen much on television — especially broadcast television — to that point. It was so controversial, PBS was pressured into not picking up the miniseries’ two sequels, which aired on Showtime.

But times have changed, and it seems like this story, still based on Maupin’s novels and adapted for TV by Orange Is The New Black writer Lauren Morelli (Linney and Maupin are also executive producers), doesn’t quite have the same impact as the original miniseries did 25 years ago. When you see Shawna kissing Claire Duncan (Zosia Mamet), the filmmaker shooting Anna’s birthday party, in the alley of the drag bar where she works, it’s a scene we’ve seen on Netflix dozens of times. When Mouse and Ben make out on a sofa, you shrug your shoulders. The fact that Anna is transgender is NBD.

And that’s a good thing! But that means that the story has to rely on its stories and characters, and there is where this new TOTC miniseries gets shaky. For now, the most intriguing characters are the new ones, like Shawna. There’s also an intriguing couple living in the building: Jake Rodriguez (Garcia), who has recently transitioned to living as a man, and his girlfriend Margot Park (May Hong), who still thinks they’re a queer couple, but now her girlfriend is her boyfriend, and her boyfriend is starting to be attracted to guys.

The older characters, even the esteemed Linney as Mary Ann, feel like they’re playing in a soap opera that’s wholly inappropriate for people their age. Yes, we know that TOTC was soapy, but it doesn’t feel like the older characters are as down to earth as they should be. Mary Ann is portrayed someone who more or less abandoned the community that defined her young adulthood, but Linney plays it like she’s a wide-eyed innocent again, chained to a marriage to a tight-ass husband who seems to have social values just slightly to the left of Pat Robertson. And while we know people who act as immature in middle age as Mouse and Ben, it wears more like privilege now than it did a quarter-century ago.

Finally, we get that the timeline needed to shift because Linney isn’t 65 years old, but we were trying to make sense of that timeline during the entire first episode. That sort of distraction isn’t helpful.

Sex and Skin: We mentioned the making out scenes above, and we also see Mouse’s tush. And in the drag bar, Margot does a burlesque routine where she’s topless.

Parting Shot: Anna looks through her birthday cards, and in one, an old picture of her falls out; she’s with a group of women. The note in the card says, “I know you’re a fraud.”

Sleeper Star: Hard to call Ellen Page a “sleeper,” but Shawna is the most intriguing character in this new miniseries, and it seems like her exploration of her relationship with Mary Ann will be the best part of the show.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I know you’re unhappy, but don’t act like those people we were with tonight are your people,” Robert chirps at Mary Ann. “Maybe they are!” she snaps back. “Fine. Believe what you want. Frolic among the freaks,” he says back dismissively.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s enough in this new iteration of Tales Of The City to satisfy fans of the novels or the other three miniseries. But it just feels like a show whose time has long passed.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Armistead Maupin's Tales Of The City on Netflix