Flawed working women on TV are catnip to real women
With single moms now the norm, these shows have ushered forth a new era of females on TV
There’s a wealth of high-powered professional women we all to love to watch on the small screen these days, from Alicia Florrick, the cool, resourceful lawyer, mother and wife of a philandering politician, played to an Emmy-award-winning turn by Julianna Margulies on CBS’s The Good Wife, to actor Tea Leoni’s kinder gentler but just a tad too tame take on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on Madame Secretary, also a CBS drama.
These pretend working women are catnip to real women I know who can’t get enough of seeing highlevel, driven women doing their jobs as part of a show’s narrative arc.
You might say these shows cater to the new female fantasy — to have a fabulous job. The more gritty details there are, the better.
In the olden days, it was precisely these details that were missing. Marlo Thomas in That Girl, and comedian Mary Tyler Moore on her own show were working women who didn’t seem to do a lot of actual work. Their personal lives as independent single women were really the story as the second wave feminist movement gained ground.
Now television is alive with fascinating, flawed and sometimes believable working women. Single moms are the norm. They stay up late poring over legal briefs, snap irritably at colleagues, battle sexism and their own insecurities, and many times perform their jobs brilliantly.
They don’t always dress sexily, sometimes look like hell (well, TV hell) and they give a more nuanced idea of what it’s like to be a woman in a demanding job. Even when they make horrific mistakes, these TV women exude intelligence and resilience.
In another rich Good Wife role, British actor Archie Panjabi excels as Kalinda Sharma, the law firm’s shrewd in-house investigator with a complicated bisexual private life. Panjabi, according to her biography, actually earned a degree in management studies.
You want nice? Try Amy Poehler’s hilarious Leslie Knope in Parks and Rec, arguably the funniest mid-level bureaucrat in history, a character one critic described as “a battering ram of optimism” who cheerfully solves problems in the parks department at Pawnee, Ind. (Poehler by the way, reputedly earns a cool $4.4 million a year in her “bureaucrat” role.)
Then there’s the most problematic female high achiever on television — Homeland’s Carrie Mathison. Claire Danes flawlessly plays the relentless, brilliant and monumentally screwed up CIA analyst — now station chief — who chases terrorists and heedlessly crosses moral, ethical and professional borders in Showtime’s post 9/11 surveillance thriller. Season 4 revealed such character flaws that even I, her most loyal follower, shouted “Carrie, don’t do it!” as she ruthlessly seduced a tender young male informant.
Carrie washes down meds for her bipolar condition with white wine, behaves in a chillingly narcissistic fashion, takes insubordination to Olympian levels and unlike real life, still gets to keep her job, making life and death decisions that have global consequences.
I’ve found another new British careerist to slavishly follow — barrister Martha Costello in Silk, a BBC series that ran for a few seasons and is now available on Netflix. It features actress Maxine Peake as Costello, who vies with other colleagues to become a Queen’s Counsel (called “taking silk” in Britain.)
I am still smarting from the depiction of two female journalists on House of Cards, one of whom asserts: “We’ve all done it” when it comes to sleeping with sources
Silk underwhelmed the critics, who found it humdrum, but Martha Costello is a revelation: she’s steely and formidable, but with a conscience, at one point, while acting as a prosecutor, she nearly throws a case because being “a bully is just not me.” A single woman, she casually sleeps with a male colleague, a decision with life-changing consequences.
Around all these pretend jobs go the personal challenges — the yearning for a mate or a more satisfying intimate life. Madame Secretary offers one of television’s few female achievers with a good solid marriage and an adorably supportive husband. Some find it boring when an alpha woman sleeps with the person she is supposed to, but why not show more happily married female achievers? They do exist out there.
Clearly, when it comes to portraying successful women realistically, television has a way to go.
I am still smarting from the depiction of two female journalists on House of Cards, Netflix’s Washington political drama, one of whom asserts: “We’ve all done it” when it comes to sleeping with sources. Guess the majority of top female journalists I know missed that memo.
So what real life advice could these make-believe careerists actually give the women who adore donning pyjamas and watching them win their cases and catch their terrorists?
How about don’t drink so much, honey. Opening the fridge after a hard day’s work and hastily inhaling a few glasses of wine is a major trope for almost every onscreen female professional, no matter what career she has. Some don’t even bother with a glass.
Think twice before you sleep with your law partner, your client, your political source or your terrorism target. Without giving away plot points, someone’s likely to die as a result.
And in case you hadn’t figured it out already, the only way you can make $4 million as a mid level bureaucrat is to do what Amy Poehler did — create a show and play one on television. Now there’s a working woman fantasy few will attain. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson