MUM’S THE WORD
The real-life drudgery of motherhood has spawned a new TV genre that’s proving the hottest thing on our screens. Meg Mason investigates why ‘mom-coms’ are enthralling audiences the world over and how an Australian show is leading the way.
The real-life drudgery of motherhood has spawned ‘mom-coms’, a new TV genre that’s proving the hottest thing on our screens.
In the opening scene of The Letdown, a drug dealer approaches a sketchy-looking station wagon and asks a woman slumped in the driver’s seat which of the class-A varietals she’s after. None, it turns out. Audrey is an exhausted new mother who has finally driven her baby to sleep and is just after a moment of quiet in a back alley. If the only way to make a street criminal keep his voice down is to buy something, she’ll do it. “Fine,” Audrey says. “What’s your cheapest drug?” Technically, the runaway hit TV show The Letdown is a comedy. But for any mother who has experienced a moment of existential despair – that is, most – the show, which debuted on the ABC in 2017 and is set to hit screens again this month with the release of its much anticipated season two, feels closer to documentary.
The breast-feeding. The controlled crying. The other mothers, the post-baby sex where foreplay amounts to Audrey telling her husband to “just stick it in”. After the show reached US audiences in 2018, The New York Times called it so “achingly familiar that it’s just about unwatchable”.
Just about. What compels you to watch and keep watching, even when Audrey is crying on the bus on her way from a miserable night
out with child-free friends, is the sense that you haven’t actually seen the achingly familiar on the small screen. Or not like this.
Although parenthood has been the fodder of countless television shows, it’s difficult to recall a mother – in comedy or drama – who doesn’t look like Modern Family’s Gloria, or struggle with the demands of family life as charmingly as Claire Dunphy. Or who isn’t as saintly as Meredith from Grey’s Anatomy, as long-suffering as every 90s sitcom mum (whose baby remains invisible after its purpose as a plot line has been served – think Rachel’s baby in Friends), or a mother who wasn’t involved in the largely mythical ‘mummy wars’, as in Desperate Housewives.
But since pregnancy and motherhood are so universal and in comedy terms, so material-rich, why hasn’t television shown us the mess of loneliness and drudgery and joy and love of it all in a way that feels funny and authentic before now?
“There has always been a profound sanitisation and censorship of the female experience on screen,” says Alison Bell, who plays Audrey and co-created The Letdown with writer Sarah Scheller, “because there have always been gatekeepers and the gatekeepers are mostly men who do not enjoy seeing the real experiences of women.”
The statistics bear this out. In the US, only 27 per cent of television directors, producers, executive producers, creators and writers are women in broadcast, cable and streaming, according to recent research. Most productions – 69 per cent – employed fewer than five women behind the scenes, 74 per cent had no female writers, 86 per cent no female directors.
In Australia, representation is better, although still fewer than half of directors, producers and writers are women, Screen Australia research shows, and none of our networks are headed by women.
Comedy seems like an even more male-dominated part of the industry than others whether you go by statistics – exactly 11 per cent of British television comedies are written by females – or by the experiences of women who have broken into the writers’ room, only to find that the men there were still the arbiters of what’s funny.
“Women have been in writers’ rooms for decades, throwing out ideas and having them rejected,” says Joy Press, author of Stealing the Show: How Women are Revolutionizing Television, “because networks were uncomfortable and male, and men would ask: ‘Who wants to see that?’”
“The things that are undervalued in society tend to be undervalued in television,” says Imogen Banks, the award-winning writer and producer of Offspring and Puberty Blues. “People don’t want to make shows about things they’re not interested in, and motherhood hasn’t been considered dramatic or something that requires a lot of analysis.”
In one way, male writers and producers aren’t wrong in their perception that much of motherhood – the real, unvarnished version – is tedious and unspecial. If, as Banks points out, “drama can be made out of the most mundane things”, the foremost example of that truth is The Office. But that show was set in the traditionally male terrain of work (and gave a speaking role to one female character). When it comes to the dull minutiae everyday life, different rules apply to majority-female experiences.
For all those reasons, when Bell and Scheller started workshopping the concept of a comedy built around a local mothers’ group in Sydney, they thought: “Women and babies. No, that won’t happen,” Bell says. “But we just kept toiling away.” Although it took almost a decade for The Letdown to make it to air, “timing is everything in this industry”, Bell says, and in that exact period, the landscape shifted.
Comedy and the visibility of women in comedy started changing the moment Tina Fey dropped 30 Rock. As a sitcom about a messy, normallooking woman who cared less about sex and more about her job and eating cheese, it felt like an anti- Sex in the City – an aspirational show for women, made by men – and it soon led to proliferation of female-created, female-led comedies.
Then ‘the streamers’ arrived. Insatiable for content, studios such as Netflix and Amazon were more inclined towards boundary-pushing, original content.
“There’s been a huge shift in what’s ‘allowed’ on television, female experience-wise, in the last five or 10 years,” says Press. “Broadcast television was very squeamish about women’s bodies.” But Girls broke ground with the way it portrayed the female body, while Broad City showed women being ‘gross’ and bodily. “Those shows are significant,” Press says, “because they are about and by young women, using comedy to push back on some of these restrictions and open up what you could make of women’s physical experiences.”
Women were doing the same thing at the same time in stand-up comedy. Amy Schumer says she made mainstream “the stuff nobody else talks about, like the darkest, most serious thing about yourself … life and sex and personal stories”. Bridget Everett did biology in her show Gynecological Wonder, and Tig Notaro broke out with a set about the supreme bummer that is a double mastectomy. Next came Baby Cobra, a special that seized attention because Ali Wong, the comedian on stage making ovulation, IVF, miscarriage and married-sex jokes, was seven months pregnant. Amy Schumer’s one-hour comedy routine Growing makes her the second comic to record a special while gestating.
“It makes sense that pregnancy and motherhood would be the next step,” continues Press, “since they are really primary experiences for a pretty decent percentage of the planet and there’s been such a silence around it in pop culture.” But why did it take that much longer for television to take the filter off motherhood and to start green-lighting comedies like Catastrophe, SMILF, Workin’ Moms and Motherland?
“There’s still a massive problem with likeability,” Bell explains. She says the idea that audiences will reject a female character because she’s unattractive, unsexual, overweight, ambitious, funny or over 40 is by no means gone. And according to industry lore, the one thing that isn’t just unlikeable but unforgiveable in a lead woman is being a bad mother. Television has given us plenty of sweetly imperfect mothers, but few who are funny as well as broken, lost, angry or ambivalent about their children. Since that second kind is often is closer to the real experience, female viewers were actually hungry for characters like Catastrophe’s Sharon, who stares at her phone while pushing a swing and whispering: “I hate myself.”
“We need to see people who remind us of ourselves, authentic characters who are lovable – or hateable – in all their flawed glory,” says Sally Caplan, Screen Australia’s head of content.
Women are generally tired of “all that lean in bullshit”, Bell says … “the fact that I’m supposed to do my best, but I can’t be all those things at once and I don’t know what the answer is.”
The popularity of The Letdown can be assumed from the fact Bell finds herself constantly approached in Los Angeles, where she now lives, by women desperate to fire-hose her with anecdotes from their own mothering lives.
Whether we’d choose to describe it as a ‘mom-com cluster’ as The New York Times did last year, we’re safe to assume there are more shows like these coming. “In terms of female-led stories on screen being commercially risky, that’s a myth that’s been busted over and over again, with increasing speed,” adds Caplan, helped along by women like Shonda Rhimes ( Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder) and Amy Sherman-Palladino (of Gilmore Girls fame) rising to the highest levels of the industry.
The last question is whether television will ever move on from the idea that, as Press puts it, “shows about women and made by women are only for women”.
There is no denying Big Little Lies was a watershed moment: a show written by a woman, with women as its key characters, watched by a mixed audience. But for every review that called it great television, there was a think piece with some variation of the headline: ‘Why you should make your husband watch Big Little Lies!’ or: ‘Important lessons men can learn by watching Big Little Lies!’ If women enjoyed it as entertainment, but the inference was that men were watching it under duress to be educated about women’s lives, the gendering of TV remains entrenched.
“It’s hard to shake that,” Bell says. “I don’t understand why whenever there is a predominance of women on screen it’s ‘just for the ladies’. But in another way, I don’t care. Whoever this reaches, I’m thrilled. If it’s just women, I don’t mind.”
Maybe that’s the last question: does it matter if television thinks our stories are only funny to us? We’re going to watch either way.
“The things that are undervalued in society tend to be undervalued in television”