In text display, line wrap is the feature of continuing on a new line when a line is full, such that each line fits in the viewable window, allowing text to be read from top to bottom without any horizontal scrolling.

Word wrap is the additional feature of most text editors, word processors, and web browsers, of breaking lines between and not within words, except when a single word is longer than a line.

A soft return is the break resulting from line wrap or word wrap, whereas a hard return is an intentional break, creating a new paragraph.

Similarly, a hard wrap inserts actual line breaks in the text at wrap points, whereas a soft wrap puts the text into separate lines without inserting line breaks.

Soft wrapping allows line lengths to adjust automatically with adjustments to the width of the user's window or margin settings. Soft wrapping is a standard feature of all modern text editors, word processors, and email clients.

Word boundaries, hyphenation, and hard spaces[link]

The soft returns are usually placed after the ends of complete words, or after the punctuation that follows complete words. However, word wrap may also occur following a hyphen inside of a word. This is sometimes not desired, and can be blocked by using a non-breaking hyphen, or hard hyphen, instead of a regular hyphen.

A word without hyphens can be made wrappable by having soft hyphens in it. When the word isn't wrapped (i.e., isn't broken across lines), the soft hyphen isn't visible. But if the word is wrapped across lines, this is done at the soft hyphen, at which point it is shown as a visible hyphen on the top line where the word is broken. (In the rare case of a word that is meant to be wrappable by breaking it across lines but without making a hyphen ever appear, a zero-width space is put at the permitted breaking point(s) in the word.)

Sometimes word wrap is undesirable between adjacent words. In such cases, word wrap can usually be blocked by using a hard space or non-breaking space between the words, instead of regular spaces.

Word wrapping in text containing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean[link]

In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, each Han character is normally considered a word,^{[citation needed]} and therefore word wrapping can usually occur before and after any Han character.

Under certain circumstances, however, word wrapping is not desired. For instance,

• word wrapping might not be desired within personal names, and
• word wrapping might not be desired within any compound words (when the text is flush left but only in some styles).

Most existing word processors and typesetting software cannot handle either of the above scenarios.

CJK punctuation may or may not follow rules similar to the above-mentioned special circumstances. It is up to line breaking rules in CJK.

A special case of line breaking rules in CJK, however, always applies: line wrap must never occur inside the CJK dash and ellipsis. Even though each of these punctuation marks must be represented by two characters due to a limitation of all existing character encodings, each of these are intrinsically a single punctuation mark that is two ems wide, not two one-em-wide punctuation marks.

Algorithm[link]

Word wrapping is an optimization problem. Depending on what needs to be optimized for, different algorithms are used.

Minimum length[link]

A simple way to do word wrapping is to use a greedy algorithm that puts as many words on a line as possible, then moving on to the next line to do the same until there are no more words left to place. This method is used by many modern word processors, such as OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Word. This algorithm is optimal in that it always puts the text on the minimum number of lines. The following pseudocode implements this algorithm:

SpaceLeft := LineWidth
for each Word in Text
    if (Width(Word) + SpaceWidth) > SpaceLeft
        insert line break before Word in Text
        SpaceLeft := LineWidth - Width(Word)
    else
        SpaceLeft := SpaceLeft - (Width(Word) + SpaceWidth)

Where LineWidth is the width of a line, SpaceLeft is the remaining width of space on the line to fill, SpaceWidth is the width of a single space character, Text is the input text to iterate over and Word is a word in this text.

Minimum raggedness[link]

A different algorithm, used in TeX, minimizes the square of the space at the end of lines to produce a more aesthetically pleasing result. The algorithm above is not optimal with respect to this, as the following example demonstrates:

aaa bb cc ddddd

If the cost function of a line is defined by the remaining space squared, the greedy algorithm would yield a sub-optimal solution for the problem (for simplicity, consider a fixed-width font and line width 6):

------    Line width: 6
aaa bb    Remaining space: 0 (cost = 0 squared = 0)
cc        Remaining space: 4 (cost = 4 squared = 16)
ddddd     Remaining space: 1 (cost = 1 squared = 1)

Summing to a total cost of 17, while an optimal solution would look like this:

------    Line width: 6
aaa       Remaining space: 3 (cost = 3 squared = 9)
bb cc     Remaining space: 1 (cost = 1 squared = 1)
ddddd     Remaining space: 1 (cost = 1 squared = 1)

The difference here is that the first line is broken before bb instead of after it, yielding a better right margin and a lower cost 11.

To solve the problem we need to define a cost function Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): c(i, j)

that computes the cost of a line consisting of the words Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \text{Word}[i]
to Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \text{Word}[j]
from the text:

Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): c(i, j) = \left(\text{LineWidth}-(j-i)\cdot\text{OneSpaceWidth}-\sum_{k=i}^j \text{WidthOf}(\text{Word}[k])\right)^P.

Where Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): P

typically is Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): 2
or Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): 3

. There are some special cases to consider: If the result is negative (that is, the sequence of words cannot fit on a line), the cost needs to reflect the cost of tracking or condensing the text to fit; if that is not possible, it needs to return Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \infty .

The cost of the optimal solution can be defined as a recurrence:

Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): f(j) = \begin{cases} c(1, j) & \text{if } c(1, j) < \infty, \\ \displaystyle \min_{1 \leq k < j} \big(f(k) + c(k + 1, j)\big) & \text{if } c(1, j) = \infty. \end{cases}

This can be efficiently implemented using dynamic programming, for a time and space complexity of Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): O(j^2) .^[1] Faster but more complicated linear time algorithms are also known.^[2][3]

See also[link]

• Word divider
• Non-breaking space
• Zero-width space

References[link]

External links[link]

Knuth's algorithm[link]

• "Knuth & Plass line-breaking Revisited"
• "tex_wrap": "Implements TeX's algorithm for breaking paragraphs into lines." Reference: "Breaking Paragraphs into Lines", D.E. Knuth and M.F. Plass, chapter 3 of _Digital Typography_, CSLI Lecture Notes #78.
• Text::Reflow - Perl module for reflowing text files using Knuth's paragraphing algorithm. "The reflow algorithm tries to keep the lines the same length but also tries to break at punctuation, and avoid breaking within a proper name or after certain connectives ("a", "the", etc.). The result is a file with a more "ragged" right margin than is produced by fmt or Text::Wrap but it is easier to read since fewer phrases are broken across line breaks."
• adjusting the Knuth algorithm to recognize the "soft hyphen".
• Knuth's breaking algorithm. "The detailed description of the model and the algorithm can be found on the paper "Breaking Paragraphs into Lines" by Donald E. Knuth, published in the book "Digital Typography" (Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1999), (CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 78.)" ; part of Google Summer Of Code 2006
• "Bridging the Algorithm Gap: A Linear-time Functional Program for Paragraph Formatting" by Oege de Moor, Jeremy Gibbons, 1999

Other word-wrap links[link]

• the reverse problem -- picking columns just wide enough to fit (wrapped) text
• KWordWrap Class Reference used in the KDE GUI
• "Knuth linebreaking elements for Formatting Objects" by Simon Pepping 2006. Extends the Knuth model to handle a few enhancements.
• "Page breaking strategies" Extends the Knuth model to handle a few enhancements.
• "a Knuth-Plass-like linebreaking algorithm ... The *really* interesting thing is how Adobe's algorithm differs from the Knuth-Plass algorithm. It must differ, since Adobe has managed to patent its algorithm (6,510,441)."[1]
• "Murray Sargent: Math in Office"

In language, a word is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed).

A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock-s, red-ness, quick-ly, run-ning, un-expect-ed), or more than one root in a compound (black-board, rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases (a red rock), clauses (I threw a rock), and sentences (He threw a rock too but he missed).

The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a written word, or sometimes to the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, and written words of symbols called graphemes, such as the letters of the English alphabet.

Definitions[link]

The ease or difficulty of deciphering a word depends on the language. Dictionaries categorize a language's lexicon (i.e., its vocabulary) into lemmas. These can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a "word" in the opinion of the writers of that language.

Semantic definition[link]

Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of "Minimal Free Forms" in 1926. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves.^[1] This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms, as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of).^[2]

Some semanticists have proposed a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, indefinable words representing fundamental concepts that are intuitively meaningful. According to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations.^[3]

Features[link]

In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words (also called lexical items in the literature) are construed as "bundles" of linguistic features that are united into a structure with form and meaning.^[4] For example, the word "bears" has semantic features (it denotes real-world objects, bears), category features (it is a noun), number features (it is plural and must agree with verbs, pronouns, and demonstratives in its domain), phonological features (it is pronounced a certain way), etc.

Word boundaries[link]

The task of defining what constitutes a "word" involves determining where one word ends and another word begins—in other words, identifying word boundaries. There are several ways to determine where the word boundaries of spoken language should be placed:

• Potential pause: A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words, or fail to separate two or more closely related words.
• Indivisibility: A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become My family and I have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes, which are put inside a word. Similarly, some have separable affixes; in the German sentence "Ich komme gut zu Hause an", the verb ankommen is separated.
• Phonetic boundaries: Some languages have particular rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly stresses the last syllable of a word, a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish):^[5] the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.
• Orthographic boundaries: See below.

Orthography[link]

In languages with a literary tradition, there is interrelation between orthography and the question of what is considered a single word. Word separators (typically spaces) are common in modern orthography of languages using alphabetic scripts, but these are (excepting isolated precedents) a relatively modern development (see also history of writing).

In English orthography, compound expressions may contain spaces. Examples are ice cream, air raid shelter, get up, and these must thus be considered as more than one word. (Ice, cream, air etc. indisputably exist as free forms, the case of get is less clear.) In contrast, brownstone is spelt as a single word and would thus be considered as such for most purposes even though brown and stone are free forms.

Vietnamese orthography, although using the Latin alphabet, delimits monosyllabic morphemes, not words. East Asian orthography (languages using CJK characters) also tend to delimit syllables (in the case of Chinese characters) or morae (in the case of kana) rather than full words. Hangul the Korean alphabet, delimits both syllables and words, by grouping graphemes into syllabic blocks but also adds spaces between words. Conversely, synthetic languages often combine many lexical morphemes into single words, making it difficult to boil them down to the traditional sense of words found more easily in analytic languages; this is especially difficult for polysynthetic languages, such as Inuktitut and Ubykh, where entire sentences may consist of a single word.

Morphology[link]

In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However for some purposes these are not usually considered to be different words, but rather different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes. In Indo-European languages in particular, the morphemes distinguished are

• the root
• optional suffixes
• a desinence, or inflectional suffix.

Thus, the Proto-Indo-European *wr̥dhom would be analyzed as consisting of

1. *wr̥-, the zero grade of the root *wer-
2. a root-extension *-dh- (diachronically a suffix), resulting in a complex root *wr̥dh-
3. The thematic suffix *-o-
4. the neuter gender nominative or accusative singular desinence *-m.

Philosophy[link]

Philosophers have found words objects of fascination since at least the 5th century BC, with the foundation of the philosophy of language. Plato analyzed words in terms of their origins and the sounds making them up, concluding that there was some connection between sound and meaning, though words change a great deal over time. John Locke wrote that the use of words "is to be sensible marks of ideas", though they are chosen "not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea".^[6] Wittgenstein's thought transitioned from a word as representation of meaning to "the meaning of a word is its use in the language."^[7]

Classes[link]

Grammar classifies a language's lexicon into several groups of words. The basic bipartite division possible for virtually every natural language is that of nouns vs. verbs.

The classification into such classes is in the tradition of Dionysius Thrax, who distinguished eight categories: noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, preposition, adverb, conjunction and interjection.

In Indian grammatical tradition, Pāṇini introduced a similar fundamental classification into a nominal (nāma, suP) and a verbal (ākhyāta, tiN) class, based on the set of desinences taken by the word.

See also[link]

• Longest words
• Utterance

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Adger, David (2003). Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-924370-0. 
• Barton, David (1994). Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Blackwell Publishing. p. 96. 
• Bauer, Laurie (1983). English Word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-28492-9. 
• Brown, Keith R. (Ed.) (2005) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.). Elsevier. 14 vols.
• Crystal, David (1995). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40179-8. 
• Fleming, Michael et al. (2001). Meeting the Standards in Secondary English: A Guide to the ITT NC. Routledge. p. 77. ISBN 0-415-23377-1. 
• Goddard, Cliff (2002). "The search for the shared semantic core of all languages". In Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and Empirical Findings. Volume I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 5–40. http://www.une.edu.au/lcl/nsm/pdf/Goddard_Ch1_2002.pdf 
• Katamba, Francis (2005). English Words: Structure, History, Usage. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-29893-8. 
• Plag, Ingo (2003). Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-52563-2. 
• Simpson, J.A. and E.S.C. Weiner, ed. (1989). Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-861186-2. 
• Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-870002-4. 

External links[link]

Look up word in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• What Is a Word? – a working paper by Larry Trask (see [1] for attribution), Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Sussex.

Look up wrap in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wrap or WRAP may refer to:

Storage and preservation[link]

• Overwrap, a wrapping of items in a package or a wrapping over packages
• Plastic wrap, a thin, clear, flexible plastic used to cover food
• Shrink wrap, a polymer used to bundle boxes on a pallet for transport
• Gift wrap or wrap paper, used to enclose a present

Media and the arts[link]

• Wrap (filmmaking), the end of filming on a movie set
  • "That's a wrap!", an idiom often used by a director on a film set
• wRAP (album), 2002 album from Finnish rapper Kana
• "Wrapped" (Gloria Estefan song), the lead single from Gloria Estefan's album Unwrapped
• "Wrapped" (Bruce Robison song), a Bruce Robison song; covered by Kelly Willis in 1998 and George Strait in 2006
• WRAP (AM), the first radio station in Central Florida
• WRAP-CA, a low-power television station airing infomercials in Cleveland, Ohio on channel 32
• Gallery wrap, a method of mounting an artist's canvas onto a frame
• Word wrap, how text is continued onto the next line

Marketing and finance[link]

• Wrap advertising, a method of advertising on vehicles
• Wrap account, a financial product/platform in which a brokerage manages an investor's portfolio for a flat quarterly or annual fee
• Service wrap, a set of non-core services which are bundled with a core service to form a complete package of services that are sold

Products and services[link]

• Sandwich wrap, a food item where an outer shell is wrapped around another food item, often a standard sandwich filling or vegetables
• Mud wrap, a type of spa treatment
• Wrap (clothing), a skirt-like garment

Other[link]

• .wrap, computer video file format
• Waste & Resources Action Programme, a nonprofit quango in the United Kingdom
• Wellness Recovery Action Plan, a therapeutic method and series of self-help books
• Western Regional Advocacy Project
• Wireless Router Application Platform, a very small form factor personal computer
• Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production, a not-for-profit organization in the United States
• Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production
• To wrap up, an idiomatic verb used to indicate the completion of a task
• Wrap-up, a slang term for a conclusion or summarization
• A form of vandalism where a victim's property is covered with toilet paper

See also[link]

• All pages beginning with "Wrap"
• All pages with titles containing "Wrap"
• Wrapper (disambiguation)
• Wrapping (disambiguation)
• Cover (disambiguation)
• Enclose (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

The L Word is an American co-production television drama series originally shown on Showtime portraying the lives of a group of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and their friends, family and lovers in the trendy Greater Los Angeles, California city of West Hollywood. The show ran from 2004 to 2009.

Main crew[link]

The show was created by executive producer Ilene Chaiken (Barb Wire, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air).^[1] Other executive producers include Steve Golin (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Larry Kennar (Barbershop). Besides Chaiken, writers of the show have included Guinevere Turner (Go Fish, American Psycho), Cherien Dabis (Amreeka), and Rose Troche (Go Fish, Six Feet Under).

Production[link]

The pilot episode premiered on January 18, 2004. The original five year run ended with the series finale's airing on March 8, 2009. Outside the United States, the series is distributed by MGM Worldwide Television. The L Word was filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, at Coast Mountain Films Studios, which was formerly known as Dufferin Gate Studios Vancouver, as well as on location in Los Angeles, California. The studio was once owned by Dufferin Gate Productions, the sister company to Temple Street Productions, the Canadian producer of the U.S. version of Queer as Folk.

Characters[link]

The main characters throughout the series, and the seasons in which they appeared and left:

Title[link]

The original code-name for the project was Earthlings, a rarely used slang term for lesbians.^[2]

Contemporary use of the phrase "the L word" as an alias for lesbian dates to at least the 1981 play My Blue Heaven by Jane Chambers, in which a character stammers out: "You're really...? The L-word? Lord God, I never met one before."^[3]

Historical use of "the L word" as code language can also be found in the sentence of a letter written by Daphne du Maurier to Ellen Doubleday: "By God and by Christ, if anyone should call that love by that unattractive word that begins with 'L', I'd tear their guts out." (Du Maurier, author of Rebecca and other works, was deeply conflicted about her attraction to and unrequited passion for Doubleday, as she would later be about her affair with Gertrude Lawrence.)^[4]

Season synopsis[link]

Season 1[link]

Season 1 premiered in the United States on January 18, 2004, on Showtime and featured 13 episodes presenting several entwined story lines. Set in West Hollywood, the series first introduces Bette Porter and Tina Kennard, a couple with a seven-year relationship who want to have a child. Tina eventually becomes pregnant through artificial insemination but has a miscarriage during episode 1.09: Luk, next time. Later in the series, Bette develops an affair with Candace Jewell.

The pilot introduced a coming out/love triangle storyline involving Tina and Bette’s neighbor, Tim Haspel, his new-in-town girlfriend, Jenny Schecter, and Marina Ferrer. Marina is part of Tina and Bette’s circle of friends, and owns the neighborhood café, The Planet, which serves as the group's hang-out and focal point for the show. The season also introduces Shane McCutcheon, an androgynous, highly-sexual hairstylist and serial heart-breaker; Alice Pieszecki, a girly, bisexual journalist looking for love in any way she can, and Dana Fairbanks, a professional tennis player who is still in the closet and torn between pursuing her career and finding love. In the first season, Dana falls for a sous chef named Lara Perkins whose sexuality is questioned by the group until Lara has an unexpected meeting with Dana in the locker room.

Season 2[link]

Season 2 began airing on Showtime on February 20, 2005 and featured thirteen episodes. It starts by unveiling to the viewers a secret Tina is keeping from everyone: she successfully became impregnated after a second insemination. Tina begins seeing Helena, while Bette’s life is portrayed as a wreck, with alcohol abuse, problems with her job, the death of her father in episode 2.12:L'Chaim, and being fired during the season finale. Tina and Bette reconcile during the final episode. The character of Louise was written out of the show, and the Planet was bought by Kit Porter.^[5]

Introduced in the second season are Carmen de la Pica Morales, a confident DJ who becomes part of a love triangle with Shane and Jenny; Helena Peabody, the daughter of a wealthy supporter of the arts who later becomes Tina's love interest; and Mark Wayland, a documentary filmmaker who moves in with Shane and Jenny. Mark makes them part of his latest documentary by setting up hidden cameras in the house to videotape them. During episode 2.09: Late, Later, Latent, Jenny discovers Mark’s tapes and also discovers the truth about Carmen’s true love.

Season 2 introduces a developing affair between Alice and Dana, which becomes public in episode 2.07: Luminous. It also presents insights into Jenny’s past as an abused child in episode 2.11: Loud and Proud, and reveals episodes of self-harm that reach their climax in the season finale.

Season 3[link]

The television show set up contest at the website FanLib.com where fans could submit a femme slash fanfic. The winner's story was incorporated into a scene of a third season episode.^[6][7]

Season 3 first aired on January 8, 2006, with 12 episodes. It begins six months after the birth of Tina and Bette's daughter, Angelica. New characters in this season include Moira Sweeney (a working class butch portrayed by Daniela Sea who is Jenny’s girlfriend for most of the season) and Angus Partridge (portrayed by Dallas Roberts), Angelica’s male nanny who later becomes Kit's lover.^[8] Sweeney starts the process of transitioning from female to male, switching his name to Max. Erin Daniels' character Dana Fairbanks starts in a multi-episode storyline dealing with a breast cancer battle and culminating with her death.^[9]

Notable of this season is that each episode begins with a short pre-credits vignette of two individuals meeting romantically or sexually. As the season progresses, lines from Alice's chart (see below) connect one member of each vignette with a new individual in the next.

Helena's character storyline was switched from being Bette's rival into a new member of the circle of friends. Her story arc for the season involves the acquisition of a movie studio^[10] in which Tina later works,^[11] and which further derives a sexual harrassment lawsuit^[12] that triggers her mother to cut her off financially in the season finale. Sarah Shahi's character, Carmen, ends her appearance in the show in the finale when Shane leaves her at the alter.

Season 4[link]

Showtime announced renewal of the series, in a February 2, 2006, press release:^[13]

On the heels of a year highlighted by industry recognition and critical acclaim for its award-winning original programming including Weeds, Huff and Sleeper Cell, Showtime has ordered a fourth season of its hit drama series The L Word.

The season premiere of the fourth season, Legend in the Making, first aired on January 7, 2007.^[14] The filming of the season's twelve episodes began in Vancouver, on May 29, 2006.^[14]

New cast members for the show's fourth season included Academy-Award winner Marlee Matlin,^[15] three time Golden Globe winner Cybill Shepherd,^[16] Kristanna Loken,^[17] Rose Rollins, Jessica Capshaw and Janina Gavankar.^[16] Karina Lombard reprised her role as Marina Ferrer for two episodes.^[18] Film and television star Annabella Sciorra guest-starred in several episodes as lesbian film director Kate Arden, chosen to direct the film version of Jenny's story Lez Girls.

Season 5[link]

Showtime picked up a fifth season of The L Word for 12 episodes, touting the show as "a signature franchise among our viewers". Production began in Vancouver the summer of 2007 and ended in Los Angeles early November 2007. The fifth season premiered on January 6, 2008, with episode LGB Tease.^[19]

Eva "Papi" Torres (Janina Gavankar), and Dallas Roberts' male token character Angus Patridge were both written out. Clementine Ford, reprised her role as Phyllis Kroll's daughter and began a relationship with Shane McCutcheon.^[20]Malaya Drew and Kate French were cast as guest characters for this season.^[21] Drew played Adele, a young fan of Jenny's work who gets hired as her personal assistant. French played Niki Stevens, an ambitious young actress and closeted lesbian who won the lead role of Jenny's character, Jesse, in the feature film production of 'Lez Girls'. She also began having a relationship with Jenny, who was directing the film. Elizabeth Keener joined the show as entrepreneur Dawn Denbo, who started a rival lesbian bar with her lover Cindi.

Season 6[link]

Showtime confirmed a sixth and final season for The L Word. Unlike the show's previous seasons, it only lasted 8 episodes to conclude the show with 71 episodes in total. Studio executives commented on the longevity of the show, with the Showtime president of entertainment Robert Greenblatt saying that The L Word has "surpassed its niche as a gay show". The sixth season premiered on January 18, 2009 and ended its original run on March 8 of the same year.^[22] Producers and writers of The L Word took viewers' opinions regarding the final season’s episodes. The main story of the season is related to the death of Jennifer Schecter and the rest of the season is a flashback from that point.

Before airing the show, Creator Ilene Chaiken denied reports of socialite Paris Hilton guest starring on an interview on gaydarnation.com.^[23] Ilene Chaiken said in an interview with the New York Post Magazine that she had offered DJ Samantha Ronson a guest spot in Season 6 but Ronson declined as she was busy.^[24] In July 2008, it was confirmed that Elizabeth Berkley would star as Kelly Wentworth (née Freemont) in a multi-episode arc of the final season.^[25] Mei Melançon also made guest appearances for the last season as Jamie Chen, a counselor from the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Youth Center who befriends Alice and Tasha and becomes their third-wheel crush.

Interrogation tapes[link]

Shortly after airing the final episode, Showtime began releasing short videos in which characters revealed secrets that weren't revealed during the course of the show. Each video showed the interrogation of one character with a new video being released each Monday after the final episode via the Showtime website. At some point in time Showtime's website ceased carrying the videos, but they can be found on YouTube.^[26] All episodes feature Lucy Lawless as Sgt. Marybeth Duffy and Sean Tyson as Det. Sean Holden who are investigating the death of Jenny Schecter.

Following the seven interrogation tapes (featuring Bette, Tina, Alice, Max, Helena, Niki & Shane), the same URL offered an interview with series creator Ilene Chaiken in two weekly installments.^[27] Chaiken discussed several aspects of the show's history and plotlines, but would only consent to reiterating that Alice went to jail for Jenny's murder while not necessarily being guilty of the crime. Ilene Chaiken and the cast have commented on different theories about Jenny's death.^[28]

Unaired spin-off series and film proposals[link]

Series creator Ilene Chaiken wrote and produced a 20-minute presentation for a possible spin-off centering around another lesbian group in a women's prison where Leisha Hailey's character Alice Pieszecki is detained. The Farm started shooting in December 2008, while the sixth and final season of The L Word premiered in January 2009. Famke Janssen, Melissa Leo and Laurie Metcalf were part of the cast.

Showtime's CEO Matthew Blank announced plans for the new show at the Television Critics Association press tour in July 2008.^[29] It was announced in April that Showtime declined to pick up The Farm as a series, which may leave the open-ended element of the series finale as permanently unresolved.^[30]

Chaiken has expressed interest in producing a film based on the series in an interview aired through The L Word's website, although according to her declarations, it probably would not emphasize any of the unresolved plot lines of the show and would simply continue the story of the characters' friendships. No official proposals or green-lighting related to an L Word film have been publicized.

[edit] The Real L Word

Chaiken continued The L Word franchise with the Showtime series The Real L Word, debuting June 20, 2010. The reality series followed the lives of six lesbians in Los Angeles. In an interview for the new series, Chaiken revealed Alice did not kill Jenny in the original series.^[31]

Music[link]

As of March 2008, The L Word has released five compilation CDs with the show's soundtrack. The music composer of the show is EZgirl. The music supervisor is Natasha Duprey.

All three of Leisha Hailey's bands have been referenced in the series. A song by The Murmurs, Hailey's first band, was used in a first season episode and included on that season's soundtrack. During the second season, the character Shane is sometimes seen wearing a t-shirt for Gush, Hailey's second band. Songs of Hailey's most recent band, Uh Huh Her, were featured during the show's fifth and sixth seasons; the character Tasha Williams is seen wearing an Uh Huh Her t-shirt during the sixth season.

The Chart[link]

A small portion of The Chart, covering some of the relationships established along the series through Season 6. Pink represents main female characters, blue represents main male characters, purple and green minor characters featured in the series (female and male respectively), and grey signifies characters that are only alluded to.

"The Chart" is a graph of the affairs that occur among Alice's friends and acquaintances; it is an undirected labeled graph in which nodes are labeled with people's names and the lines represent affairs or hookups. Originally, The L Word was to be based around a lesbian Kit Porter, and "The Chart" was tattooed on her back.^[2] When Kit Porter was changed into a straight character, The Chart was given to Alice instead.

The Chart is a recurrent element in the show's storylines, especially those related to its creator within the series.^[32] During Season 3, it also serves as a marginal storyline that advances through each episode and concludes in the season finale – as well as a way to track the characters and get to know how they interact within the lesbian community.

The Concept of the Chart was further exploited in Season Four. Within the series, the Chart evolves into an internet social network hosting profiles and provides the introduction for the character of Papi in Episode 4.01:Legend in the Making. At the same time, a real-world parallel project OurChart.com was launched.^[33] The website, which allowed registered members to create their own profiles and also hosted several blogs on the show, was fully operational until the launch of the Sixth Season, after which Ilene Chaiken announced through an online statement that OurChart.com had merged with Showtime's website.^[34]

Reception[link]

The show's first season was "broadcast to critical acclaim and instant popularity"; as an article from The New York Times pointed out:^[35]

Before "The L Word," lesbian characters barely existed in television. Interested viewers had to search and second-guess, playing parlor games to suss out a character's sexuality. Cagney and Lacey? Jo on "Facts of Life"? Xena and Gabrielle? Showtime's decision in January 2004 to air The L Word, which follows the lives of a group of fashionable Los Angeles lesbians, was akin to ending a drought with a monsoon. Women who had rarely seen themselves on the small screen were suddenly able to watch lesbian characters not only living complex, exciting lives, but also making love in restaurant bathrooms and in swimming pools. There was no tentative audience courtship. Instead there was sex, raw and unbridled in that my-goodness way that only cable allows.

But co-creator and executive producer Ilene Chaiken had some issues with the reaction:^[35]

I do want to move people on some deep level. But I won't take on the mantle of social responsibility. That's not compatible with entertainment. I rail against the idea that pop television is a political medium. I am political in my life. But I am making serialized melodrama. I'm not a cultural missionary.

While the show is seen as fulfilling lesbians' "obvious and modest representational need"^[36] or even the "ferocious desire not only to be seen in some literal sense... but to be seen with all the blood and angst and magic that you possess",^[37] the show has been criticized for various scenes which serve to "reify heteronormativity".^[38] The show has also been praised for its nuanced consideration (in the first season) of how and in what ways lesbians should stand up to the religious right, with the "Provocations" art show storyline being "a fictionalized version of what happened when Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center booked a controversial exhibition of Mapplethorpe photographs in 1990".^[39]

Unlike its network predecessor Queer as Folk, praised critically for its ground-breaking material that was both well-written and well-acted, there have been complaints from critics regarding The L Word's watered-down, unrealistically glamorous characters and melodrama. Some reviewers (and fans) are put off by the theme song (introduced in the second season) and the "graceless, clunky dialogue".^[40]

Several shows have referenced The L Word, including South of Nowhere's first season episode "Girls Guide to Dating"; According to Jim; the medical drama House; the first season finale of Weeds, Jon Stewart's The Daily Show (July 24, 2006); Chapelle's Show: The "Lost Episodes"; The Sopranos episode Live Free or Die; the US version of The Office; Gilmore Girls fourth season episode Scene in a Mall; G4's Attack of the Show skit Lesbionic Women; The Big Gay Sketch Show; The Simpsons episode You Kent Always Say What You Want; and Family Guy episode Brian Sings and Swings. Also, movies such as Puccini for Beginners, I Can't Think Straight, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World have made mention of The L Word as to reference lesbians.

By the time the sixth and final season began, The New York Times was calling the show a "Sapphic Playboy fantasia" that has "shown little interest in variegating portrayals of gay experience. Instead it has seemed to work almost single-mindedly to counter the notion of "lesbian bed death" and repeatedly remind the viewer of the "limits and tortures of monogamy" while "never align[ing] itself with the traditionalist ambitions [for same-sex marriage] of a large faction of the gay rights movement".^[41]

Awards[link]

In 2006, Laurel Holloman won a Satellite Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama for her portrayal of Tina Kennard; the International Press Academy also nominated the show for a Satellite Award for Best Television Series – Drama. In the second season, Ossie Davis won a posthumous Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a drama series in recognition of his portrayal of the father of Bette and Kit Porter. The show received multiple nominations for GLAAD Media Awards and both Pam Grier and Jennifer Beals were repeatedly nominated for NAACP Image Awards.

In 2008 The L Word's companion website was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for Best Use of Commercial Advertising on Personal Computers.

International broadcasts[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The L Word

• Official L-Word Wiki for Showtime Showtime's Official L-Word Wiki
• AfterEllen's L Word section Comprehensive news, reviews, interviews, recaps, and polls related to the series.
• The L Word at the Internet Movie Database
• The L Word at TV.com