(Photo Credits: Screengrab from Tales of the City’s Instagram Account)
Tales of the City is being revived by Netflix and is coming this summer 2019. Here is what you need to know about this mini-series:
- Tales of the City is the title of the first novel out of 9 books in the series. Its first three books were adapted into a mini-series in 1993 which stars Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney. The series follows the lives (and love lives) of the residents of an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane where a young secretary named Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney)—who is visiting San Francisco—ended up deciding to stay and leave her life in Cleveland, Ohio behind. It has sequels titled More Tales of the City (1998) and Further Tales of the City (2001).
- It is considered a classic gay literature and was written by gay San Francisco author Armistead Maupin.
- The 1993 version was set in 1976, before the HIV/AIDS pandemic and is considered groundbreaking and revolutionary for its portrayal of LGBT people and for showcasing the queer culture at that time.
- The new series by Netflix will have 10 episodes. Laura Linney, Olympia Dukakis, and Barbara Garrick will be reprising their roles as Mary Ann Singleton, Anna Madrigal, and DeDe Halcyon Day respectively.
- Joining them are Ellen Page who will play “Shawna,” Murray Bartlett (Looking) as “Michael ‘Mouse’ Tolliver,” and Josiah Victoria Garcia who plays Anna Madrigal’s transgender man caregiver “Jake Rodriguez.”
- Netflix has dropped a first look for fans of Tales of the City on Instagram:
Oh I loved the books! Great mini series also.
Tales of the City, originally published serially in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s, was my introduction to the word: gay. I was only a child, but the original novel (Tales of the City) had a cover that was basically a map of the locations described in the narrative; it was beyond mesmerizing to my young self! I asked, and my mom purchased it for me, based on nothing but a judgment of its cover! My gosh, how wonderful it was to my young self, to discover the City of San Francisco, in detail, with vibrant characters from diverse… Read more »