Step aside, boys, for TV’s anti-heroines
Badass female characters are dancing circles around their male counterparts
I’m over male anti-heroes on TV (at least for now).
They once seemed edgy; now they seem like before pictures for #TimesUp.
This week on Billions (TMN), for example, bad-boy billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) — Axelrod! Don’t even bother paging Dr. Freud — was facing possible jail time. So what did he do? He and his faithful second, Mike “Wags” Wagner (David Costabile), enjoyed a private dinner with real-life celebrity chef Wylie Dufresne.
Ostentatiously, they ate ortolans, tiny songbirds prized for their deliciousness.
Their entire pre-dinner conversation was about how naughty and master-of-theuniverse-y they were, because ortolans are endangered and subject to bans.
One eats the whole bird, bones and all, and the camera lingered on them as they scarfed down the little bodies and licked their fingers. Wags even rhapsodized about crunching the tiny rib cage and feeling the warm juices run into his gullet.
But instead of sounding outré and sexy, they just seemed like sad little boys who had run out of toys.
The celeb-chef cameo wasn’t even new — Daniel Boulud had made a guest appearance the episode before.
Then there’s Barry (HBO). The title character (Bill Hader) is a military veteran turned hit man. The gist is that he keeps trying not to kill, but other people keep making him.
The show’s drug gangs and hopped-up military dudes are played for laughs, but the body count has risen way too high.
To quote Paul Simon, “I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore.”
Barry is a hit man who’s enamoured with acting, but that twist feels even more creatively bereft, because that’s pretty much the plot of Get Shorty, a TV series starring Chris O’Dowd, based on a movie starring John Travolta.
I know that in Get Shorty, the hit man wants to be a producer, not an actor, but that does not make Barry totally, totally, totally different.
I am way more into female anti-heroes — anti-heroines? — right now.
Their plots feel more exciting, because their inner lives haven’t been mined to dust for the past 30 years.
The Handmaids (Bravo) are back, and they’re letting the bastards get them down even less. I am loving this final sea- son of The Americans (FX), as Soviet spy Philip (Matthew Rhys) wants to hop off the mayhem train, while his spyspouse Elizabeth (Keri Russell) is only too eager to drive the thing herself, be it to glory or to hell.
Lawyer Diane (Christine Baranski) on The Good Fight (W) is subtly turning antiheroine, and the trio of friendsturned-badasses on the crimecaper series Good Girls (NBC) have been scoring solid points. I especially loved this week’s episode, when meek-seeming Mary Pat (the great Allison Tolman), who’s working a side con of her own, kept repeating the word “rape” to a predator who was trying to pretend he wasn’t one.
Of course, TV crowned a new Queen Badass this week: Michelle Wolf, whose 20-minute routine at Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner burned the place down. She spared no one. She said tough, necessary things about Sarah Huckabee Sanders — to Sanders’ face. Afterward, both the right and left attacked her, but she did exactly what she was there to do: speak truth to power. She’s not just my new favourite anti-hero. She’s my hero.