By Patrick O’Dowd
Left to right: Brian Cunningham, Director; Lauren Virginia Albert, Ling; Abisha Uhl, Bender; Matt Niehoff, Director.
You may or may not know it, but one of the hottest shows portraying today’s young lesbian culture is shot right here in Lexington, Kentucky. Girl/Girl Scene is an online web series that has quickly grown in popularity, gaining significant notoriety over its first season of eight episodes.
Today marks the launch of Girl/Girl Scene’s second season and all signs point towards continued growth with the show being increasingly spoken about as heir to Showtime’s The L Word (Williams also appears on Showtime’s reality series, The Real L Word this season, which began July 12.)
Girl/Girl Scene has deep Lexington ties beyond simply being shot here. The show’s star, writer, and creator is Tucky Williams (Evan is her character’s name) holds a degree in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Kentucky and has worked at WTVQ on-air, the local ABC affiliate. Other members of the show’s ensemble cast have connections to Lexington as well including Lauren Virginia Albert (Ling), Joe Elswick (Jessie), and Jackson Cofer (Elliott).
Williams tells Desert Outlook she describes the show as, “like Sex and the City, except all the characters are lesbians.”
Much verbiage has been spilt about the freedom of cheap online distribution and the ever shrinking cost of tools to shoot a show like Girl/Girl Scene but that doesn’t mean success is guaranteed or that shooting a successful show is necessarily cheap. The show’s first season was done on a budget of “literally $0,” according to Tucky Williams in an interview at AfterEllen. And while there are production issues in the first season, the show’s technical quality is constantly improving and the first episode of season 2 seems to mark another step forward.
In that same interview, Williams describes the show as “a celebration of the lives and passions of a group of lesbian friends. It is not meant to reflect all of gay society.” It is this attitude that might mark why this show has risen above the online fray. The show isn’t popular because it’s online, or because it seems to follow in the footsteps of The L Word; it’s because Girl/Girl Scene—like its characters—isn’t trying to be anything other than itself.
