Showtime later picked up two of Maupin’s sequels - “More Tales of the City” and “Further Tales of the City” - as limited series, the second ending in 2001.
A PBS representative said at the time that the assessment was “unfair,” arguing, “We don’t follow the commercial television model, where a ratings success immediately spawns sequels and spinoffs.” Maupin, among others, has said that he believed PBS caved to homophobic pressure over the show’s same-sex story lines and characters. Robert Knight, then the director of cultural studies for the Family Research Council, referred to the show as “a slick piece of gay propaganda,” joining the American Family Association in a push to cut public funding for PBS. In a Corporation for Public Broadcasting balance hearing for interest groups with a stake in the show, conservative groups came down hard on the show. Some of the most explicit scenes had been edited for American audiences, but opposition was powerful. The new series jumps forward in time, with Linney and Dukakis reprising their roles alongside new additions like Ellen Page, Charlie Barnett (“Russian Doll) and Murray Bartlett (“Looking”). Produced and aired first by Britain’s Channel 4, the original starred Laura Linney as a naïve Midwest transplant and Olympia Dukakis as a transgender pot-growing landlady. But its path to revival was fraught and circuitous - at least on this side of the Atlantic.
Twenty-five years later, it returns for mainstream American audiences with 10 new installments set to drop Friday on Netflix. people in the late 1970s.Īnd then, after six highly successful episodes, PBS chose not to renew the show almost as soon as it had begun in the face of vigorous conservative opposition. Like New York in “Sex and the City,” San Francisco is one of the most beloved characters in the short-lived 1994 mini-series “Tales of the City.” A soapy adaptation of the stories by Armistead Maupin, the series caused a sensation when it aired on Channel 4 in Britain and PBS in the United States, with its frank depictions of sex, drugs and the lives of Bay Area L.G.B.T.
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