Death is a plot device — but why are so many women being killed on TV?

WHY ARE SO MANY WOMEN BEING KILLED OFF TV SHOWS RIGHT NOW?

Seeing Red, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer sixth season episode, opens with girlfriends Willow and Tara in bed together in the afterglow of finally consummating their long- held sexual tension.

They pillow talk about their family and their friends, and the episode carries on, eventually returning to the pair in a scene where Buffy and Xander are on the street outside Willow’s house. Suddenly, Warren, a character known for having attacked and killed his girlfriend, arrives. He shoots Buffy directly in the shoulder. And as he runs away, he sends a random array of bullets behind him. One of which bursts through Willow’s bedroom window and into Tara’s back as she faces her.

Blood flows onto Willow, which Tara sees without immediately understanding what’s happened. Her last words are “Your shirt…” before collapsing and dying. Then, the episode ends with Willow holding Tara, in tears.

Seeing Red aired in 2002. It’s a timeless moment of television, something that played as dramatically then, as it would now. In fact, it might even find a better fit in today’s network dramas. The last two weeks on primetime television have been so blood soaked as to make even Game of Thrones’ body count look tame. At least the HBO fantasy series has the decency to diversify the genders of its deaths.

Within days of each other, a smattering of female characters have found themselves violently killed off their respective series, with a good helping of those characters being LGBT and/or non- white, hearkening back to Tara and Willow and the infamous bloody shirt.

While most major character deaths serve a crucial purpose to the plot, in recent cases, each loss has served, seemingly, no greater purpose than shocking viewers at home with an unexpected turn of events. We have The 100’s Lexa, a popular lesbian character who found herself accidentally shot in the stomach and The Walking Dead’s Denise, offed by a stray arrow, to Orphan Black’s Delphine, also shot in the stomach and Jane the Virgin’s Rose, who was strangled out of her misery.

TV Tropes long ago coined the phrase “Dead Lesbian Syndrome,” and what it lacks in subtlety it more than makes up for in accuracy: gay characters have a tendency to meet their end far sooner and in more happenstance ways than their straight counterparts, and this trend has existed since gay characters began appearing on television in the 70s.

In a research report spanning the past 40 years, Autostraddle found that queer women are the most likely characters to die on TV. Since 1976, 11 per cent of television shows have featured a lesbian or bisexual character, and of those, 65 per cent feature a dead lesbian. Thirty- one per cent of all lesbian characters to make an appearance on a show have been killed off, with a mere 11 per cent leaving a show the way most might, with a happy ending.

This level of representation sends LGBT viewers a message that there isn’t much story to be told around characters like them, aside from their sexuality. So, once these characters ultimately seal the deal with their respective love interests, like Lexa finally did on a recent episode of The 100, their expiration is inevitable.

The recent trend has also extended past lesbians and into women as a whole. In just the last two weeks, maj or and marginal female characters have been creatively killed off on The Blacklist, Sleepy Hollow, Arrow, Vikings, The Americans and, if rumours are to be believed, Castle, in a short while.

In the most infamous of the bunch, James Spader’s The Blacklist pulled off its cut last week, shocking fans when Megan Boone’s lead character died shortly after childbirth. A cynical reading of such would suggest that the character had completed her purpose once her child was born.

Sleepy Hollow, a show that’ s been struggling through ratings and time slots in its short three- year tenure, also recently killed off its female lead. Much like the he- she dynamic in Castle, Nicole Beharie’s Abbie Mills plays a no- nonsense detective to the kooky male lead — Tom Mison as Ichabod Crane.

Although rumours stand that Beharie had been wanting off the show for a while, as a black woman, her character’s death was strictly a way to move the plot forward for her white male partner, trivializing her history on the show and her presence as one of few leads of colour on a network series. According to Sleepy Hollow showrunner Clifton Campbell, Beharie’s character fulfilled her purpose and “has taken Crane as far as she can, and puts him at the doorstep of his next journey.”

Here’s where the numbers come in again, and hammer home just why the conversation for greater diversity on our screens is becoming louder. According to San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, 74 per cent of executive producers on television are men, and 87 per cent of writers are white.

Without more diverse voices creating positive representation, the battle becomes harder to fight. But it’s not all about diversity. From suggesting it was “for the story” or “the actress wanted to leave,” another common cry heard behind the scenes has been based around contract negotiations.

When it comes to Castle, Katic and Jones were informed they were being cut for “budgetary reasons,” with The Hollywood Reporter suggesting there had been tension between the cast’s leads for several years, leaving producers to choose one or the other.

It wasn’t too l ong ago that series leads were untouchable — you knew your favourite character would never die because she was the detective, the doctor, the love interest, even. The beauty of a show with an axe as sharp as Game of Thrones ( and even trigger happy Grey’s Anatomy) is that anyone really could be killed at any time, and there is no particular lean towards gender, sexuality or colour.

Death has long been a crucial plot device, the stuff of premieres and finale. When used ( incidentally or not) to prove that women are expendable on television, it begins to feel a little more personal and a little less fictional, with the claw of the grim reaper reaching beyond our television sets to tell us the female fixers, surgeons and spies we root for as representations of ourselves don’t matter quite so much as the men who stand tall next to them.

And that’s a death knell that looms larger than a mere plot device.

SLEEPY HOLLOW RECENTLY KILLED OFF ITS FEMALE LEAD.

NBC The Blacklist shocked fans last week when Megan Boone’s lead character died shortly after childbirth. A cynical reading of such would suggest that the character had completed her purpose once her child was born.