This didn’t sit well with her friends, who were often literally fighting for their lives against the police. A dreamer who was looking for a fairy tale romance, she caught the eye of a police officer (played by Luke Kirby), but she still ended up living a slight double life, because his colleagues couldn’t know that she was trans. Played by Jen Richards, the younger version of Anna left her family and moved out west to truly start her life as a woman. Morelli revealed the truth to the audience first, by delivering a standalone flashback episode that explored Anna’s early days in San Francisco. It felt like we could dirty her up a little bit in an interesting way,” Morelli explains. “I really wanted to complicate Anna this season because I think she could just be in this magical trans lady place where she’s wonderful and magnanimous and gives wisdom. Her investigation takes the story down a different path than Maupin’s novels, in what Morelli calls a “parallel universe” version of the story. This doesn’t sit well with her tenants, least of all Mary Ann, who decides to dig into what is really going on.

The new version of the story starts with the intention of a celebration (the aforementioned birthday party), but things quickly get trickier after Anna receives a blackmail letter and decides to put her infamous, inclusive community home up for sale. “It was elaborate graphs of, ‘What does the audience know, and what do they need to know, and what do we withhold?’ You’re never quite sure how to calibrate how much the audience needs to know and how do you know if they’re going to get ahead of you?”

“The writers’ room board looked like we were serial killers,” Morelli tells Variety. SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City,” streaming now on Netflix.Ĭertain parameters for the new limited series version of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” were already set when showrunner Lauren Morelli joined the project - most notably the fact that Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney) would be returning to 28 Barbary Lane for Anna Madrigal’s (Olympia Dukakis) 90th birthday, which Morelli calls “a really amazing log line.” From there, though, Morelli had reign to bring the story forward for the modern audience, as well as to create a new mystery around Anna’s past - a mystery, she says, that “almost killed” her writers.

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