Tales Of The City

The new Netflix revisitation of Armistead Maupin's beloved "Tales of the City" begins with – and eventually circles back around to – a video interview with Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis), the elegant, slightly odd, and perpetually weed-puffing landlady who presides over 28 Barbary Lane and its cast of adorable misfits. It's a clear signal that the new series, while moving familiar characters forward in their lives, is also an occasion for self-reflection.

There's a new generation living at Barbary Lane, their lives intertwining with (and, just as importantly, diverging from) those of the original characters. When Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney) returns for the 90th birthday party of Anna Madrigal, she finds old friends to welcome her, including Michael "Mouse" Tolliver ("Looking" star Murray Bartlett) and DeDe Halcyon Day (Barbara Garrick); but she also comes face to face with her now-grown adopted daughter Shawna (Ellen Page) and ex-husband Brian (Paul Gross). When she realizes that Brian has allowed Shawna to believe that Mary Ann and Brian are her biological parents – and sees the smoldering resentment Shawna harbors toward her for the way she abandoned Shawna and Brian more than 20 years earlier, in order to pursue a career as a television personality – Mary Ann, in her usual self-absorbed way, makes the problem something she needs to fix even as she shies away from taking her full measure of responsibility.

Mary Ann's return means that the gang is all together once again – more or less – but the old guard at 28 Barbary Lane is now supplemented by a fresh generation, including 20-something couple Jake (Josiah Victoria Garcia) and Margot (May Hong), DeDe's performance artist twins Ani (Ashley Park) and Raven (Christopher Larkin), and Michael's new boyfriend, Ben (Charlie Barnett), who, at the age of 28, is considerably younger than Michael. (The new series cheats with time; the original characters ought to be about a decade older than they are, but Mary Ann and Michael are portrayed as being in their mid-50s.)

It takes the series a couple of episodes to hit its stride, and there's a calmer, more capital-D dramatic tenor about these ten fresh episodes that are markedly different to the antic energy of the three earlier miniseries. The first TV adaptation, produced by the UK's channel 4 and then aired in American by PBS in 1993, also featured Dukakis, Linney, and Gross; it involved a blackmail plot and touched upon the even darker subject of child pornography. The second and third miniseries – in 1998 and 2001, respectively, both produced by Showtime – brought Linney and Dukakis back to their roles, recast other characters, and boasted a similar mix of sexual hijinks, pulpy mystery, and late '70s topicality (Anita Bryant, Jim Jones, foreshadowings of the AIDS crisis).

The new series makes a point of reminiscing about the relationships, but ignores the madcap mysteries, except to mock them. There is a new blackmail scheme afoot – someone is holding a secret from Mrs. Madrigal's past over the elderly landlady, and threatening the very existence of the tiny sheltered community she has created – but Mary Ann's abortive attempt to jump into the role of amateur sleuth is quickly, and comically, derailed. What we get instead is an eventual deep dive into Anna Madrigal's past – not her early life at a brothel in the Nevada desert (as was referred to in the original trilogy and then depicted in Maupin's final "Tales" novel, 2014's "The Days of Anna Madrigal"), but rather her arrival in San Francisco in 1965 and the story of how she came to complete her gender transition and buy the property that would, eventually, become iconic.

Once the new series hits its stride, it fires on all cylinders. Shawna finds time, while sorting through her resentments, to have an affair with an attractive married couple (Benjamin Thys and Samantha Soule) and also drift toward a serious romance with an ambitious young documentary filmmaker named Calire (Zosia Mamet); Jake, who has recently transitioned, begins to explore his feelings for other men even as girlfriend Margot pines for the days when she owned her own authenticity as a woman who loved other women; Michael and Ben – married in the books, but together only six months in this version – hash out inevitable generational differences, while one of Michael's old flames, a handsome and successful man called Harrison (Matthew Risch), makes his own return to San Francisco, much to Ben's displeasure. This development paves the way to one of the new series' most challenging, pointed scenes: A dinner party at which Ben's Millennial sensibilities crash up against the angry bulwark of the older generation's defensively armoring snark.

The blackmail plot takes something of a back seat to the many relationship tangles, though it also serves to drive and complicate some of them. With Barbary Lane under threat, the residents are faced with the possibility that they will have to venture into the wider world – a scary proposition, especially in an unlivably-priced city like San Francisco.

What's more interesting is the flashback episode that's presented as a way to explaining the crux of Anna Madrigal's mysterious past. It's a gripping tale of a very different city, namely, San Francisco in the mid-1960s. It's a place of trans streetwalkers and corrupt cops and, yet, a burgeoning sense of community and communal power that briefly flares into resistance on the occasion of the Compton Cafeteria riot, an actual event that took place in the summer of 1966 (predating Stonewall by three years). Jen Richards plays the younger Anna in this episode, appearing alongside Daniela Vega's Ysila, a particularly fierce and forward-looking advocate for trans rights. They're both sensational.

The flashback episode in itself is a showpiece, and it arises from the series' own preoccupation with the past even as it points up the sprawling, sometimes less-than-thorough nature of the many story threads that are set in the present. This much is a perpetual certainty, in life as in art: Contemporary times are a hot mess; the past, at least in our recollections, is cleaner, simpler, and more straightforward, even when it was challenging or dangerous.

What becomes apparent over the course of these ten episodes is that although this new series draws on the final three "Tales" books, it's telling its own original story. This is not so much an adaptation of Maupin's final literary trilogy as an alternative narrative, tailored for the medium and form of the televised limited series. What also becomes clear is that – like that final trilogy of novels – this series is intended to be complete unto itself, both origin story and conclusion. This "Tales" is a last hurrah, rather than a full-scale and ongoing revival. (One assumes that Maupin, who is an executive producer on the series, had a say, if not the say, in such creative choices.)

But this return, full of zigs and zags and surprises, is both fond and fulfilling. The new iteration prefers different brands of strangeness – the quest for internet celebrity, for instance, rather than cannibal cults headquartered in Grace Cathedral – but it preserves its long-held core values, chief among them a joyous zest for life and a broad acceptance of people as they are, regardless of race, age, gender identity, sexuality, or any other identifying group marker. This might be one of the most comprehensively representational television projects ever created – sometimes a little too overtly so, to the point that you almost feel like someone was following a checklist – but it's so very generous of spirit, and so loving toward these cherished characters, that one can accept this as a final chapter with more contentment than sorrow.

"Tales of the City" is now streaming on Netflix.