COMPLEX WOMEN STEAL SHOWS
Wave of compelling, flawed characters powers TV season
It wasn’t that long ago that “Murphy Brown” caught hell for its title character’s decision to raise a child on her own. Yes, that was a thing in the late 1980s. And just last month, the president of the United States upbraided a reporter, saying she “wasn’t Donna Reed,” referring to the actress who embodied the 1950s TV ideal of the good housewife.
Expectations of women as shaped by television — especially as to their moral character — have long been pretty narrow. It would be many years after “Murphy” before female leads could be seen as unapologetically independent, complicated and neither fully “good” nor fully “bad.” That multidimensional territory had long been reserved for men. But then came “Nurse Jackie” and “Girls” and even “The Mindy Project” and “Fleabag.”
Now a new crop of quality shows has these kinds of flawed but compelling young women bursting forth in all their human messiness — strident, selfish, rebellious and all.
Sara Kucserka, co-creator of Hulu’s series adaptation of “High Fidelity,” grew up in the age of “Murphy Brown” and has watched the TV landscape change. She largely credits the evolution of women characters to a “huge groundswell of female creators who are rising up and saying, ‘We are just as complex and difficult and complicated as any male character you’ve been seeing on television.’
“I think that hunger has always been there, and there were baby steps to getting there. Streaming has opened up new avenues, new voices. It has allowed, I think, not just diversity behind the camera but in front of it and allowed more and more people to say, ‘Yes, that’s me.’ It’s representational. ‘That’s me. Nobody has seen it before, but that is who I am.’ ”
The hero in Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity,” Rob, is a self-pitying, pop-music-obsessed man-child. He was memorably played by John Cusack in a 2000 film. In the 2020 Hulu series, Rob’s gender is flipped and ethnicity changed, but pretty much everything else is the same. As played in the show by Zoë Kravitz (an executive producer who co-wrote an episode and whose mother, Lisa Bonet, played one of Rob’s girlfriends in the film), Rob has the same appetites, flaws and appeal, and is just as sympathetic.
“For a long time, if you wanted to have a woman behaving the way Rob behaves, in order to explain it and make it OK for the audience, there had to be some deep trauma that her behavior was a byproduct of,” says Kucserka. “As some of society has become more comfortable with the fact that women can be just as messy without some huge catalyst, it’s gotten better and better.”
Flaws and dimension are fine, but showrunner Alena Smith wants to make one thing clear: “I see Emily Dickinson as a hero. Not an antihero; a hero. I think Emily was up against a lot and fought really hard for what she believed in.”
Apple TV Plus’ “Dickinson” is a frequently absurd, hip, anachronistic take on the beloved poet (played by Hailee Steinfeld). We see Emily as a teen, moving through discoveries sexual, artistic and philosophical. All this happens in antebellum Massachusetts, where women were not expected to pursue dreams outside the family. We even see her hiding her identity to write a contest-winning poem.
Smith also agrees series like hers might not have been possible until recently. “There has been a new mold created in, say, the last 10-15 years,” she says. “It wasn’t that long ago that women were kept in some pretty tight boxes . ... It’s kind of up to us, as things do become more open, to reengage with that history and pull the old dresses out of the closet and say, ‘What was it really like to wear these? And are we still wearing them now?’ ”
HBO’s Italian drama “My Brilliant Friend” looks deeply into Lenù and Lila, each the other’s brilliant friend. It’s based on a series of novels by
Elena Ferrante (a pseudonym), but the show is created, co-written and mostly directed by a man: Saverio Costanzo.
The young geniuses in “My Brilliant Friend” are generally discouraged from any ambitions beyond taking low-level jobs in the little universe of their neighborhood and serving a husband. It’s not a box that fits them well. They’re guilty of pettiness and selfishness; they make some terrible decisions despite being the smartest people in the series.
“When cinema and television describe women, usually, especially in Italy, we have very simple characters. There’s no complexity, the dark side that makes a character interesting. These two girls are very bad at some things. We can identify with them.”
At the center of “The Great” (as in Catherine) is Elle Fanning’s portrayal of a naive girl thrown into court intrigue before rising to become one of Russia’s greatest leaders. Her dreams of humanist reform fall into the meat grinder of a society so patriarchal, women aren’t allowed to be formally educated.
“You go into the show thinking you know what’s going to happen,” says Fanning, noting Catherine’s staggering accomplishments. Fanning says viewers might expect her to be “strong” and prepared from the start, which she emphatically is not. But, says the actress, “‘strong female character’ always sounds a bit condescending to me. Like when people say it, they sound surprised.”
Creator Tony McNamara (“The Favourite”) says, “She’s not simple and not all good. As the series goes on, you’ll see more and more complications of what it’s like to have power and how she tries to retain elements of herself. She has got an arrogance; she’s got this ruthlessness, which she needs. So I do see it as part of that line” of complex female protagonists.