You do grow into a different version of yourself after you face your own death.” “It was an incredibly profound period and it changed him, but he still has that buoyancy. “Mouse went through the whole AIDS epidemic and thought he was going to die,” says Bartlett. Bartlett tried not to think about the other actors who played the role before he did, but he re-read all nine novels in the Maupin series. Murray Bartlett (“Looking”) joins the show as Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, the no-longer-young man who explored his sexuality in the original, survived the AIDS plague that decimated the city and now has a younger boyfriend played by Charlie Barnett (“Chicago Fire”). Olympia Dukakis plays Anna Madrigal in the series.

There are new faces as well, some in roles played by another actor in the original series, others playing new characters. It launched Linney’s career and gave Dukakis an outrageous feather in her cap following her Oscar win for “Moonstruck.” They’re back, along with Paul Gross, as Brian Hawkins, and Barbara Garrick as DeDe Halcyon Day. “Tales,” originally a 1993 series inspired by Maupin’s 1970s columns in the San Francisco Chronicle, aired on PBS in 1994. You bring back the famous faces to make us forget that reality. “How do you tell stories about Barbary Lane that tell people it’s not so easy to live in San Francisco?” “The reality is so grim, it’s so counter to everything ‘Tales of the City’ is,” she says. Series executive producer Lauren Morelli acknowledges that the tech boom has made San Francisco one of the country’s most expensive cities.

Her home at 28 Barbary Lane, an interlocking jungle gym of apartments that housed gay outcasts as well as innocents such as Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney), is now worth a fortune - and its inflated value stands as a symbol of what’s wrong with San Francisco. Madrigal, played with beguiling charm by 89-year-old Olympia Dukakis, was a pioneer - one of TV’s first transgender characters - but she also knew how to invest in real estate. A 90th birthday party for Anna Madrigal is the setting for Netflix’s nostalgic revival of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” premiering Friday.

28 barbary lane