Why Tales of the City is still a revolutionary show
Armistead Maupin’s creation has been rebooted for a new generation. Laura Linney and its makers talk LGBTQ life on TV
For five decades, Tales of the City has been life-affirming, life-changing and even life-saving. Armistead Maupin’s books, which began as a newspaper column in 1976, took readers inside the daydream world of Barbary Lane, where the matriarch and landlady Mrs Madrigal presided over a group of friends and lovers in San Francisco – straight, gay, cisgender and transgender – at a time when queer life was rarely depicted outside of queer circles. The series concluded with a ninth instalment, The Days of Anna Madrigal, in 2014, but there is new life for these characters in the form of a glossy, hypercolour Netflix TV revival, or reimagining, depending on who you talk to. It is rare that a fictional universe is held quite so dearly as the world of Mouse, Mary Ann and Mrs Madrigal. Maupin knows it all too well. “All I have to do is go out in Soho to a bar, and, my God!” he exclaims.
The author admits that he had some apprehension about allowing a new version to be adapted. “I was nervous,” he concedes. “Turning your baby over to these other people, and God knows what they’re going to do to it … ” But he soon realised it was safe with the (mostly) younger generation of new writers and directors. “Soon as I saw the scripts, I knew they were not only on the right track, they were going to make me sound hipper than I was,” he chuckles. Maupin is 75, and has recently relocated to London with his husband for what he calls “a last chapter that is different”. The move has coincided with a revived interest in Tales of the City, which first came to the small screen as a pioneering Channel 4 miniseries in 1993, and has been revived sporadically ever since.