Good things, they say, must come to an end, in some cases twice. I wondered about the wisdom of Armistead Maupin's autumnal revival of the Tales saga back in 2007. When you have find memories of something, particularly if it seemed to be of such importance, or came at a critical time, it can be risky going back. The original Tales series seemed like a lifeline to backward, chilly, clause 28, Aids-panicked Britain in the 1980s. At a time when being gay meant less hedonistic, stylish lives and short-lived affairs against a backdrop of nightclubs and discotheques, more queer-bashing, endless marches and benefit gigs, and Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners, Uncle Armistead came along with his so very American stories of recreational drugs, lifestyle choices and cruising the Marina Safeway. And like a lovely, comforting warm blanket it was too.

I first came across Tales of the City on a bored morning in Cambridge student digs c.1988. The school chum I'd come to visit had gone to an occasional tutorial and I had a few hours to kill. I was looking for something to read. Eschewing Marxism Today, the choice of his flat mate, I picked up a trashy looking Corgi paperback. Two hours of delightful, feverish reading later I was hooked and had to be prized out to a beer festival on Parker's Piece. The characters - Mouse, Mary Ann, Mrs Madrigal and their friends became so much a part of my internal landscape that the prospect of a Channel 4 miniseries almost had me writing hate mail to Jeremy Isaacs ("don't you dare fuck with MY book!" - in unconscious echo of the housewife from the Bay Area suburbs who wrote to Maupin threatening dire consequences if he "let Michael Mouse die" during one particularly dramatic storyline). It got you like that. But bear in mind in those days we gays were lucky to be allowed Out On Tuesday in terms of broadcasting access, so exciting this worthy low budget show felt that we actually had dinner parties to watch it on the evenings of its broadcast.

So a return was risky. People would bitch that he'd lost it if it wasn't as funny, sharp, zeitgeisty and on the button as the original series. Philip Hensher carped that Maupin was remembering that he used to be loveable and trying to remember how he did it. Ouch. It's a very American thing to want closure - even the word makes British toes curl - and this is very much about wrapping it up, making sure the loose ends are pulled tight. In some ways I was happier with the author's comment - in response to a reader's worried enquiry as to how Mrs Madrigal might have fared in the last San Francisco earthquake - that he thought she'd have been ok, pulled from the rubble after her cloche cap was spotted sticking out.

There's a tiny grain of truth in Hensher's comment in The Days Of Anna Madrigal. Not so much Maupin trying to be loveable as trying to please both himself and his readers - with neat ends to the story which is at last drawing to a close. It feels laboured - part of the be charm of the series was that it was as messy madge random as real life, albeit with more outrageous situations. Characters would suddenly change skin colour or run off to join a cult or become involved with a child pornographer and then bounce back, often with the flimsiest of expositions. But with his lightness of touch Maupin could get away with it. The fun kept you going through the more bizarre plot twists and it helped that the episodic format of the first three books made it feel like soap opera. And no one's ever thought of soap as real have they?

But the revival has been more serious in construction and ponderous in tone - understandable as the author can now reflect back on the he intervening 20 years, but this brings a more earnest tone that feels - not alien exactly, but more the style you'd get in an Edmund White. The desire to convince the reader of something, educate them. Tales didn't do this in its earlier incarnation. And I'll draw a veil over the ghastly Burning Man festival, a temporary city of self-absorbed and selfishly anachronistic hippiedom which, in seeking to laud, he unconsciously portrays as a kind of outer circle of hell.

I can't give Maupin less than three stars because of what this series means to me but I think it's good to be thankful that it's now drawing to a close for a second time and let's remember it warmly for the original spirit rather than its soupy, nostalgic ending.