‘Good Girls’ goes ‘Mad’ in re-creating the vibe of the ’60s
Authenticity comes from people, not stuff
Anna Camp wants to make one thing clear: Good Girls Revolt is not trying to be the next Mad Men.
The Pitch Perfect actress should know, having appeared in both 1960s-set series. In Mad
Men, the Emmy-winning drama that put AMC on the map, she had a multiepisode arc as a winsome socialite who was set up with anguished adman Don Draper (Jon Hamm). In Girls, streaming on Amazon Friday, she plays an ambitious researcher fighting for equal rights with her fellow female journalists.
“Mad Men came from a place of Don Draper’s voice, which was much more bitter and jaded,” Camp says. Girls is “from the perspective of three women who are filled with passion and light and hope. Historically, it picks up right where Mad
Men leaves off, but (the time period) is pretty much the only similarity.” The comparisons aren’t unwarranted. Even before it signed off last year, after seven seasons and a Coke jingle, broadcast and cable networks have been attempting to duplicate Mad Men’s retro charm and soapy drama with their own ’60s shows — most of which were poorly received and canceled after one season. ABC revisited the era by way of flight attendants (2011’s Pan Am) and homemakers (2015’s The Astronaut Wives Club), and NBC put a tame, stylized spin on Playboy bunnies (2011’s The Playboy Club). Starz (2012’s Magic City) and HBO (this year’s Vinyl) tried to capture the glitz and grit of the time period. Showtime’s Masters of Sex is in its fourth season, but its ratings and awards luster have faded. The problem that many period dramas run into, particularly on broadcast networks, is that “they want to be aspirational, therefore new and shiny,” says Girls creator Dana Calvo, who adapted it from Lynn Povich’s 2012 non-fiction book. “We veered into that a little in the (first episode) and reined it in” afterward. “We had a lot of clothes made and fresh (props) on set. As we were filming, we weathered things more.” As a former journal- ist for the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times, period accuracy was paramount to Calvo.
Like Mad creator Matthew Weiner, she was particular about not using songs or slang that came after Girls’ 1969 setting, and sourced vintage outfits, typewriters and telex machines from collectors around the country. Given the show’s home on uncensored Amazon, they were also able to show nudity along with smoking, which helped create a more authentic vibe.
“We would fill the newsroom with smoke. It might’ve been hard for us to breathe while we were shooting, but it was true to the time,” Camp says. “When you’re doing a period piece, you can’t hold back. Unfortunately, I think that’s why some network period pieces just don’t last, because they don’t come off (as) real.”
Another stumbling block for many ’ 60s shows is that they’re “more concerned with the major historical moments than they are with how the characters are reacting,” says Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at The Paley Center for Media. “Mad Men really excellently showed how events” — such as the civil rights movement, John F. Kennedy assassination and moon landing — “impacted or didn’t impact people.”
Good Girls eventually recounts the landmark 1970 gender discrimination case against News
week by female employees, using the lawsuit as a way to explore other hot-button topics such as the wage gap and misogyny.
“Instead of just trying to get the period right — the clothes, the music — you have to get the issues that we’re still struggling with today, and what they meant in the ’60s,” Simon says. “That’s the hardest thing to do.”
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 barbed-wire 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 likeable 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 tra- ditional 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 Da- na 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 relationship 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.