TV Relationships
A Look Back at Rizzoli & Isles’ Unique Relationship and Ensuing Fan Theories, 15 Years Later
When Rizzoli & Isles debuted 15 years ago, on July 12, 2010, it seemed like a typical cable TV procedural — albeit one that set a record for cable’s No. 1 ad-supported series launch of all time. Based on mystery novels by Tess Gerritsen, the TNT drama starred Angie Harmon as Jane Rizzoli, a Boston detective, and Sasha Alexander as Maura Isles, the medical examiner with whom she teams up to catch the city’s most notorious criminals.
By television standards, though, Rizzoli and Isles were atypical partners-in-crime-solving. From the jump, viewers suspected that the relationship between the lead characters wasn’t just professional. In a review of the pilot episode, The Washington Post critic Hank Stuever noted “faintly lesbian undertones” between the two lead characters. Those undertones, of course, became less faint as the show went on.
The day the fifth episode of Season 1 aired, the lesbian pop culture blog Cherry Grrl published “Rizzoli & Isles, a.k.a. The Ambiguously Lez Duo: The Drinking Game.” In that game, viewers would throw one back whenever Rizzoli and Isles shared lingering stares, complained to one another about their romantic woes, tagged along with one another for no justifiable reason, slept side by side, or participated in “adorable bickering which generally relates to sexual tension.”
In 2012, The Advocate called Rizzoli & Isles a “lesbian buddy cop show that just doesn’t know it yet.” The following year, BuzzFeed deemed the TNT drama “the gayest non-gay show on television.”
Ahead of the Season 2 premiere, the Los Angeles Times got answers straight from the source: Rizzoli & Isles creator Janet Tamaro. Though Tamaro called Rizzoli and Isles a “power couple,” she maintained the characters were “straight women who don’t fear the interest in or the speculation about their relationship.” And Tamaro said the same-sex speculation was a result of “two gorgeous actresses [having] great, natural chemistry.”
But the show seemed to be pandering to slash shippers. A second season episode featured a subplot in which Rizzoli and Isles pretended to be gay to ditch a would-be male suitor, as HitFix’s Liane Bonin Starr reported. Starr didn’t believe the hype about the characters’ more-than-friends vibes until she watched the show. Then she wrote:
“Rizzoli doesn’t seem all that interested in guys. She keeps asking Isles if they’re really best friends in a kind of desperate, slightly annoying way that suggests she’s looking for more of a connection than she’s admitting. She is completely put out when Isles decides she wants to get frisky with a guy Rizzoli deems a poor choice. If I were playing the drinking game created by the Cherry Grrl website … I’d probably be blotto before the second commercial break.”
Even Harmon had to admit that Rizzoli & Isles was fanning the flames. “I think that a lot of people are going to project on [Rizzoli and Isles’ relationship] what they want, but I’m not saying we didn’t help,” she told reporters in 2011, per AfterEllen. “We knew it was there in the first [episode], and it was absolutely no surprise to me.”
Amid all the buzz, fans proposed theories for why we were seeing a lot of chemistry but no sex between the characters. One theory posted to TV Tropes’s forums speculated that Isles is bisexual while Rizzoli is heterosexual and homoromantic. (In other words, Rizzoli only wants romance with Isles, nothing R-rated.)
“So, they are out on dates and the like, trying to find one or two men (Maura has also chosen to limit herself to men in order to not make Jane jealous over any potential relationship) who would be okay with a close friendship with one or both of them, with added committed sexual relations,” that theory suggests. “They just unfortunately have not found any such men yet.”
Another theory on the same forum post proposed that both Rizzoli and Isles are both biromantic and bisexual: “They are happy with each other, but they both want a man in their lives as well. They don’t mind if he starts off dating Jane or if he starts off dating Maura, as long as they all end up together.”
In a Reddit post about fans’ hopes that Rizzoli and Isles would end up together, one fan wrote, “I like to think that when Jane decided to go to Paris with [Maura] at the end, it was the writers’ way of getting them together without saying it. I mean, look at the dress Jane is wearing at the end… it’s clearly all for Maura.”
And though the Rizzoli & Isles’ writers never made a “Rizzles” romance anything more than subtext, countless fans have in creative works inspired by the show. Of the 2,711 fan-fiction stories currently hosted on Archive of Our Own, 2,452 are listed in the “F/F” category.
One of the most recent stories, published on July 8, is “We Are Not a Couple” by author Forbiddenthoughts. That story — spoiler alert — ends with Rizzoli agreeing to attend a family dinner with Isles on the condition that Isles makes worth her while later that night. Forbiddenthoughts wrote: “Maura’s smile was slow and seductive, her eyes dark with promise. ‘Oh, I will, Jane. I most definitely will.'”
The show may be over, but the impact of Rizzoli and Isles’ connection lives on.
Do you think Rizzoli and Isles’ relationship was just platonic or romantic? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
