After five seasons of faithful viewing, I can say a couple of kind things about The L Word. I think it’s a groundbreaking series, and I appreciate that it puts queer women front-and-centre instead of consigning them to supporting roles. It makes a good-faith effort to showcase a diversity of queer experiences. And it means a lot to those of us who watch it to the point of masochism, clustering together in bars, parties, or apartments and communing on the internet through forums, fan fiction, and sites that stream grainy, poorly-dubbed episodes with character-based subtitles.

Having said that, I’ve also got my fair share of reservations. Of course, there are the usual objections about stereotypes, identity, and representativeness that go along with any show that is self-consciously linked to a minority group, and everyone has a few of these. Beyond this, there are the flaws that are quickly apparent to anyone familiar with the medium of television. After a first season where everything seemed so blessedly straightforward, many of the later seasons seem suspiciously like the result of ‘Lesbian Mad-Libs’, with characters whose consistency and predictability become downright Sybilesque.

But oddly, the fiercest critics of the L Word are also often its fiercest defenders—or, at the very least, those who can’t stop watching in spite of their objections. By accident or design (and for what it’s worth, my money is firmly on ‘accident’), this kind of erratic, random, almost post-modern unpredictability basically defines The L Word for legions of its fans.

In most contemporary dramas, characters have histories and hang-ups that make them tick, and this makes them predictable and sympathetic. By contrast, The L Word is unusually issue-and-identity-driven, with narrative arcs generated by topics or groups that the writers feel obliged to address. Its characters are initially painted in the broadest strokes — the Type A personality, the loveable klutz, the irrepressible sexpot - then are quickly made to show how complex they truly are. The result is that they spend as much time rebelling against their personality traits as they do adhering to them, making it exceedingly difficult to predict how characters will react to the topical controversies, nods to pluralism and diversity, and guest stars who drive the show’s plots. (And, of course, to predict who might hook up with who.)

The plot arcs are erratic, with mildly inconvenient characters disappearing at a rate that makes the gang seem like a lesbian mafia. Unlike the leading actresses, the supporting characters are little more than stereotypes in designer clothing—the put-upon husband, the straight voyeur of lesbian sex, the girl who draws the reluctant lesbian out of the closet, the hypersexual minority. It is identity politics on amphetamines. And when they’ve made their point — usually in the season’s finale—they gracefully disappear. As the leading characters struggle with their internal conflicts, the supporting characters become vehicles for the show’s messages.

Thus, as shows like Grey’s Anatomy draw praise for their ‘post-racial’ treatments of identity politics, The L Word boasts all the nuanced subtlety of a public service announcement. The women deal with sexism, misogyny, homophobia, biophobia, transphobia, racism, classism, ageism, ableism, and various permutations of the above, and confront these tricky, delicate issues by bluntly pointing them out and delivering lengthy explanations about Why Injustice Is Wrong. Characters regularly preach to nobody in particular about hot-button issues like abortion, censorship, and gays in the military, as though they have all been writing strongly worded letters to the newspaper in their spare time. And at times, someone like Gloria Steinem - played by Gloria Steinem—will appear out of nowhere to pull up a chair and chat about feminism, and it becomes sort of like a left-wing Sesame Street.

Bizarrely, the reason The L Word succeeds—why people keep watching, and why it doesn’t come across as mere tokenism—is that characters are dynamic to the point of being erratic, and that’s oddly refreshing in television. They suddenly develop addictions, obsessions, and relationships from thin air, and rapidly change from sympathetic to intolerable in the span of a few episodes. Jenny cants from vulnerable, wide-eyed ingÈnue to a suicidally introspective writer, briefly appearing as a flower child, a stripper, very proudly Jewish, a manatee-whisperer, and lately, an incorrigible diva, directing a blockbuster with a latte and corgi in tow. While this can be artistic if done purposefully - look at the fragmentation of identity in I’m Not There—it makes far less sense when Mia Kirschner is doing it alone, and for no discernable reason whatsoever.

While this would be frustrating for any solo viewer, it’s oddly perfect for a show that is so often consumed communally—and the combination of its quirkiness and the way it’s consumed may be the show’s saving grace. While it used to be easy to identify with Bette, or Alice, or Shane, viewers have increasingly expressed themselves by saying what frustrates them about Bette, or Alice, or Shane: their successes, their failings, and the way that they respond to the curveball issues that come their way. This makes it difficult to explain to outsiders why The L Word’s fans are so loyal in spite of its unevenness. It is not the quality of the plots that keep people watching; it’s precisely the opposite. The characters are so flawed and so sympathetic that you root for them especially hard when the show veers into madness. As it is, long-time viewers have to know what happens to them—if only because they couldn’t predict it if they tried.

As the series draws to a close in its final season, it’s difficult to say what its legacy will be. It will be hard to see the last handful of episodes as anything other than a definitive statement by the show’s creators, given how frankly they’ve spoken about the show’s politics and its social ramifications. If Bette and Tina rediscover monogamy and reunite to raise their daughter, or if Shane tones down her relentless libido, or if Alice and Tasha’s interracial relationship flounders, these will be read politically. And if any of these things don’t happen, that will be read politically, too. That’s what critical viewership and a healthy, communal fan culture is all about. But it would be truly tragic if the final destinations of the characters obscure the winding, unpredictable pathways that each of them have taken to get there, and the ways that audiences have tried to make sense of those along the way. The L Word has been a rich, dynamic pastiche of a show - thanks to its critical audience as much as the questionable artistic choices of its creators - and that key to its popularity deserves to be its theoretical legacy as well.