Drama inspires with tale of nasty women rebellion
‘ Good Girls Revolt’ charts equalrights case at magazine
Sometimes, the good guys — and girls — win.
Let that serve as a welcome reminder to anyone feeling overwhelmed by the increasingly grim attitude that dominates the TV drama landscape. For every sweet moment of uplift you get from NBC’s This Is Us, it seems, you get a hundred blows to the head from a barbedwire bat — literally on The Walking Dead, figuratively elsewhere. What a relief, then, to find Amazon’s Good Girls Revolt ( Friday, out of four), an inspiring 10- episode series set in 1969 that follows some young female journalists as they fight for equal rights. Laced with humor and likable leads, this is a show with a few good guys ( most of them women) and a few hidebound guys ( all men) — but no flat- out villains. The bad guy here is a traditional view that relegated women to being subservient to men, and anyone who knows anything about the late ’ 60s knows that tradition was about to be challenged.
In this case, we also know in general how it turns out.
Good Girls is based on Lynn Povich’s book about the successful lawsuit she and other Newsweek employees filed to force the magazine to provide equal opportunities to women.
As an onscreen warning will advise you, however, the show is only “inspired by real events,” not wed to them. So while victory in general may be assured, victory for these individual, fictionalized women is not.
The story here is told through the eyes of three young women at News of the Week, where women ( habitually referred to as either “girls” or “ladies”) can be researchers but not writers.
Patti ( Genevieve Angelson) is a budding feminist; Cindy ( Erin Darke) is a wife whose marriage is beginning to chafe; and Jane ( Anna Camp) is a prim virgin who follows the rules.
One of the nice things about this series from Dana Calvo and Darlene Hunt is that rather than sidelining the “prim virgin” to the ash heap of social history, she’s allowed to be smart, competent and more ambitious than she initially appears.
The women work for the male reporters to whom they’re assigned — a rela- tionship that’s always sexist and often sexual. Patti works for Doug ( Hunter Parrish); Cindy works for Ned ( Michael Oberholtzer); Jane works for Sam ( Daniel Eric Gold) — and they all work for the editor, Finn ( Chris Diamantopoulos).
That just seems to be the way of things, until the system is challenged by a new employee — Nora Ephron ( Grace Gummer), one of the show’s real- life characters.
Her action eventually leads them all to another real- life character, Eleanor Holmes Norton ( Joy Bryant), and an EEOC suit.
But not quickly. Like most cable and streaming series, Good Girls takes its time. Still, it’s time generally well- spent, and not just on the show’s primary issue, but on other conflicts of the ’ 60s that come into play. And while every piece of clothing, music and office equipment may not be true to the 1969 time frame, the show accomplishes the main task of a series set in the past: It creates a sense of place, where the clothes and rooms feel lived in and the problems feel real, rather than just heightened examples of the decade’s issues. As for how those issues play out, it’s important to remember that Good Girls is not a documentary, so you can’t expect complete fidelity to the past or to Povich’s book. Even so, it has incorporated real people into its story, and it owes them a treatment that is essentially true to who they were and what they did. Treat them well, Good Girls, and we’ll all be the winners for it.