How to Write a Lesbian Spinoff
How to Write a Lesbian Spinoff
So, you’re the producer/showrunner/writer of a TV show and you’re considering whether to spinoff the lesbian characters from your show into a new vehicle. Is it financially worth it? How can you ensure it will be successful? This article is offers a “how to” based on two recent case studies and argues that a spinoff can be both creatively fulfilling and financially successful. Let’s look at how.
Until 2020, there had never been a full lesbian spinoff (although there were a few semi-spinoffs. In 2006 for example, the American show “South of Nowhere” gave its pairing of Ashley and Spencer (Spashley) webisodes to accompany the second season). This year, not one but two lesbian storylines got spinoffs. How these two spinoffs were made and how they have been received by their audience teaches us an extraordinary amount about what to do and what not to do when making a lesbian spinoff.
Our Two Case Studies
#Luimelia. The pairing of Luisita Gómez and Amelia Ledesma on the soap opera “Amar es Para Siempre,” airs (for only a little longer) on Antena 3 in Spain. The couple’s storyline began on season 7 (2018) and quickly became a juggernaut in the queer female TV viewing community. Without going into Luimelia’s metrics, which are themselves their own case study, it suffices to say that Luimelia’s social media metrics have been consistently through the roof for the show. The couple has been so popular that Antena 3 give them their own dedicated section on “Amar”’s website (something no other storyline on the show has), which includes curated “best of” scenes, behind the scenes videos, and articles about Luimelia. Antena 3 calculated Luimelia was popular enough to work as a webseries spinoff, and the resulting #Luimelia aired on the pay site ATRESPlayer Premium beginning in February 2020. #Luimelia was so popular it was renewed for two more seasons before the first season had even finished airing.
Podcast Maitino. The pairing of Maite Zaldúa and Camino Pasamar on the soap opera “Acacias 38,” aired on RTVE (Spanish Radio and Television Corporation) in Spain. The couple’s storyline began in season four (2019) and experienced consistent growth in popularity, leading it to become a highly popular lesbian couple with viewers internationally. The couple is so popular that the Acacias 38 main page is still mostly Maitino even though both actresses have now left the show. And as previously noted, almost all RTVE’s top "Acacias 38” YouTube videos feature Maitino. RTVE decided to capitalize Maitino’s popularity to spin the characters off into Podcast Maitino, which has been airing for free on its website since July 2020.
Two highly popular lesbian couples on two simultaneously airing soap operas in the same country, both of which were made into spinoffs. The conditions are perfect for a comparison. Here are the lessons learned about how to make a successful spinoff:
Lesson 1: Know Who Your Audience Is
The undeniable truth is, if you’re making a spinoff of a lesbian TV pairing, regardless of the format, language, or country of origin, your audience is queer women. Endstop. There are no working class men, grandmothers, or heterosexual teenagers eagerly awaiting this content. The audience is queer women in Indonesia, Namibia, Canada, and Spain, who in some cases hold this content as precious as life itself. But while “queer women” sounds on the face of it to be a limited audience, it’s actually a deceptively huge audience. It’s much larger than any European country’s population. Based on statistics, this potential audience of queer women is larger than the population of the entire United States because it spans every country in the world. But to effectively tap it, you have to know who this audience is and what they want.
In the entire world, there are very few TV cast and crew who intimately and fundamentally understand the international queer female audience. The people involved with “Wynonna Earp” are one. The others are the makers of #Luimelia. Queer female audiences are qualitatively different from heterosexual audiences. They are a distinct market segment with a different relationship to storytelling and characters (I’ve got an upcoming article on this exact subject). How do we know the creators of #Luimelia understand their audience? Because the most lesbian meta episode that has ever aired in the history of television is episode three of season one of #Luimelia, in which in the space of only a few minutes, the writers/producers demonstrate their understanding of the following things about their audience/fans/the history of LGBT representation on TV:
Queer women are passionate about their queer female “ships” and have a personal relationship with them that transcends the normal passive viewer role.
Queer women create highly socially connected fandoms online for their ships, and in these fandoms there are a limited number of figureheads that act as what I call “first mates” (in #Luimelia, Luisita acts as the ship mate for the imaginary ship “Lurelia”) that cheerlead and rally the fans on behalf of the show. The significant other of this ship’s mate may or may not watch the show, and may or may not share their partner’s passion for it.
TV shows may spark disgruntlement among some queer female viewers if a female character who was once in a same-sex relationship later has a relationship with a male character. This is viewed as a betrayal of the queer community and a reversion by the show’s writers to heteronormativity.
TV shows all but never have more than two queer characters on the show at a time (or else the universe implodes).
TV shows—very notably including Spanish ones—have historically had an egregiously high kill rate for queer female characters, or what the Spaniards call “Dead Lesbian Syndrome” (#Luimelia included an allusion to the death of Silvia on “Los Hombres de Paco,” one of the worst examples).
Depictions of lesbian physical intimacy are normally extremely truncated on TV, both in the amount of time shown (mere seconds before the camera pans) and the expression of intimacy (gentle fade away and then cut to a different scene).
#Luimelia was successful first and foremost because its creators knew the almost exclusive consumer of the webseries would be queer women around the world, and that the audience for #Luimelia was not the same audience as for “Amar.” That ATRESPlayer offers #Luimelia with English subtitles is a savvy recognition that likely half or more of Luimelia’s fans are not able to understand the show in Spanish. By offering subtitles, Antena 3 was able to be inclusive to its target audience while also maintaining control of its content and therefore its profits.
Lesson Learned: The audience for lesbian-themed spinoffs is almost exclusively queer women. Subtitling in at least English will enable a broader global audience. Putting content behind a pay wall will not prohibitively deter the queer female audience provided there are translations.
Lesson 2: Write For That Audience
The universal cry of queer women is they want their characters to be treated with as much respect and dignity as heterosexual characters. They want their characters to love and have happy endings. And they want their characters to be able to kiss without the camera panning away after a few seconds. They want equality, in short.
Queer women know that a spinoff may be the only way their characters may get these things. As expressly stated by its creators, #Luimelia is a recognition of the limitations of telling Luimelia’s story on “Amar” and the proactive identification of a workaround. By moving Luimelia to a different platform, they were able to overcome “Amar”’s restrictions on showing physical intimacy and give Luimelia more screen time. They could focus on telling the story the cast and crew knew Luimelia’s audience wanted. Although each of the six episodes is only ten minutes, in those ten minutes, viewers are treated to exactly what they want: Luimelia kissing, touching, and being in love. Each episode is, in essence, a gift to the queer female audience.
Conceptually, #Luimelia is the equivalent of Alternate Universe (AU) fanfiction, and the creators’ decision to take this approach to telling the story was a stroke of genius. It recognizes that fans are drawn to the relationship dynamic between the two characters in a pairing, not the setting. Luimelia in “Amar” live in 1978. Luimelia in #Luimelia live in 2020. The setting doesn’t matter because #Luimelia is a celebration of two women in love and the push-pull dynamic in their relationship. The webseries isn’t about Luimelia and Amelia and their twelve friends and their existential angst. It’s about them and the story of their relationship.
Podcast Maitino, on the other hand, has displayed a disconnect between the storyline and the audience. Maitino fans had hoped that like #Luimelia, the Maitino spinoff would let the characters live out the happy ending of their love story. Contrary to #Luimelia, however, Podcast Maitino is not a celebration of love. It’s a pessimistic take on the difficulty of making relationships work. It tells a story of jealous drama rather than of joyful love. And to tell this story, it altered the beloved, sacred relationship dynamic between Maite and Camino. The creative decision to focus on drama rather than the heart of the Maitino relationship has backfired by alienating the queer viewers who wanted a clear happy ending. The resulting mutiny in the fandom, which includes one of the key translators in the fandom, has already reduced the podcast’s audience size. The people most likely to listen and most likely to champion the podcast have stopped. Either the podcast misunderstood its audience and assumed more “Acacias” viewers would tune in, looking for additional soap opera drama, or the writers didn’t understand what content its queer viewers wanted. In any case, the answer evidently wasn’t “more drama, less love.”
Lesson Learned: A spinoff will perform best if the focus is on the shipper couple and their relationship. Fans also prefer when drama is minimized in favor of “happy episodes,” particularly ones with nods and inside references to the fandom’s fans. Changing the setting into an “AU” is one way to revitalize the story while maintaining the fanbase.
Lesson 3: Pick the Right Format
#Luimelia was a smashing success. Per ATRESPlayer, in season one the webseries got 250,000 tweets, 64 million impressions (times browsers showed its content), and was among the top 3 most commented Spanish shows. The webisode format was a perfect vehicle because while it was a comparatively light lift for the cast and crew (one hour of content), it was disproportionately successful. It also laid the groundwork for the future of the characters, so that even though the actresses are leaving “Amar,” the characters can live on through the webseries.
Conversely, moving Maitino into a podcast format was less successful. While a podcast was an even lighter lift for the cast and crew than filming would have been, the audio-only format excluded the half or more of the Maitino community that can’t understand spoken Spanish, forcing them to rely on translators in the fandom to understand what’s happening and totally undercutting RTVE’s ability to track listener numbers and gauge the size of the audience. (One way this language barrier could have been overcome would have been by having the actresses—who all happen to speak English—also read their lines in English. It is unclear why the producers didn’t pursue this option.)
Lesson Learned: Fans prefer webisode to podcast spinoffs, but will settle for the latter if it’s the only option. The best format will have translations into at least one additional language to help spread the content in the fandom.
Lesson 4: Publicize the Hell Out of Your Spinoff
It is an almost tautological truth that any show considering a spinoff must already be publicizing it. Fan-show interaction invigorates fans and invites them to be invested in the show. And few fans love Maitino as much as the user behind the @acacias_38tve Twitter handle, @PedroValdezate. Podcast Maitino couldn’t have a better cheerleader than the official Twitter handle of its mother show. Pedro retweets #Maitino posts, engages with the fans, and does everything it can to support Maitino’s success. In fact, everyone associated with the pairing is as enthusiastic as a Eurovision audience. Ylenia Baglietto and Aria Bedmar, who play Maite and Camino, respectively, have agreed to probably every interview request they’ve gotten (including ours), and Bedmar’s wife Kenzy Loevett is established as an honorary ship captain (a position normally reserved for the actresses themselves). There is no question that when it comes to publicity, Podcast Maitino did everything right.
For a spinoff to be successful, it will have to keep its current fanbase. But a spinoff can also use the opportunity to grow its fanbase through strategic promotional activity. Something that has been underutilized by both #Luimelia and Podcast Maitino is building connections to different fandoms through hastagging and cross-pollination. The shows would benefit from, for example, linking themselves to other internationally popular couples like WayHaught and Flozmin through hashtagging. “Wynonna Earp,” for example, just used an opportunity to reference the show “Legends of Tomorrow,” tapping into the latter’s audience base. By showing more awareness of other fandoms, #Luimelia and Podcast Maitino could raise their profile among fans that might not have heard of them yet.
Lesson Learned: Most shows build spinoffs to cater to their existing audience. They would benefit, however, from using social networking to try and capture a wider audience. With hundreds of millions of potential viewers, they should work to maximize exposure, including by posting in multiple languages and by creating connections with other examples of positive LGBT representation.
The Final Secret to Success
Here is a little secret to writing a successful spinoff, from WhatAboutDat to you: if you are a showrunner or writer and you’re trying to think of a storyline for your spinoff, go to Archive of Our Own and read the top ten fanfiction stories for your lesbian couple. There is likely to be some sort of a trend within these ten. That trend is what your fans want to see. It’s what’s missing from the existing storyline. These top ten are the most liked for a reason. There may also be examples of fanfiction stories called “one shots:” brief scenes for the characters. In episodic storytelling, #Luimelia has mastered the art of the “one shot:” Luimelia go on a date. Luimelia hang out at home and watch TV. Luimelia fight but make up. This is what fans want to see, because these precious moments—so mundane and regular to heterosexuals—are often shortchanged on regular TV. All Luimelia’s one shots combine into an arc, but each individual episode can stand on its own. If a spinoff can only be a small number of short episodes, that’s an ideal to shoot for.
And now, a final argument: it’s not weakness to engage directly with the fandom. It’s not weakness to ask the fans what they want and to gauge their reactions. If a spinoff seems to be spinning out of control, it makes sense to try and figure out why and how to put it back on course. Every fandom acts as an ecosystem, and that means it’s a symbiotic relationship. Communication can go both ways. Although it’s perhaps never been done outside the “Wynonna Earp” fandom, there’s no reason showrunners and writers can’t directly reach out to members of the fandom and talk to them. If you’re considering a spinoff, ask the fandom first mates what they think. Ask the fans what they want to see. 140 character tweets are not the same thing as conversations. If “expertise” is gained from doing 10,000 hours of something, most fandoms have a hell of a lot of “lesbian TV watching experts.” They’ve seen what works and what doesn’t, and can articulate why. They’re a fantastic, underutilized, free resource pool.
In the last five years, many fandoms have unsuccessfully advocated for spinoffs for their characters (Barcedes, Juliantina, etc.). #Luimelia and Podcast Maitino are the test cases for lesbian spinoffs. #Luimelia, at the very least, so far has proven it can be a viable model. It’s too early to tell with Podcast Maitino. But these two examples should give confidence to anyone considering a spinoff. The audience is there. The money is there. It just takes planning, creativity, and maybe a little humility to put all the pieces together.