Women's Intuition

There aren’t a whole lot of capable, independent female TV heroes.  A couple of this winter’s new premieres feature women billed as protectors of men, excelling at jobs usually associated with men:  a Texas Ranger (Killer Women) and a Secret Service agent (Intelligence).  And they’re as competent as billed—both very good at their jobs—but despite their disparate professions, they have two things in common:  intuition and vulnerability.  In Killer Women, the lead’s effective investigation draws predominantly on her unique ability to understand women—to get in their heads and understand their motivations better than the men around her, even in the face of evidence tending to contradict her intuitions.  In Intelligence, the co-lead is assigned to protect a high-tech intelligence operative who is perfectly capable of looking after himself—except in situations that require intuitive or emotional (rather than logical) reasoning.  For that, he needs his female protector.  And in both shows, the women, putatively protectors, end up relying on the men around them for safety almost as often as they provide it themselves.  Apparently, their core competencies are intuitive.  Is this something we presume about women?  That they’re physically and/or emotionally vulnerable, but provide value by understanding people?  Maybe it’s true—I know plenty of women who understand people exceptionally well—but I don’t think of it as a particularly gendered trait.  In fact, I’d be very surprised if research showed any connection at all between gender and intuition.  So I wonder where the idea of “woman’s intuition” came from.  Is it a way to marginalize women away from more privileged skills like logic, reason, and technical problem-solving?  Is it associated with a survival narrative, in which those historically granted less power became attuned to the nonverbal cues of the more powerful?  Is it a way to associate women with non-physical value?  To maintain the privilege of male intellect?  I wonder.

I should note that Intelligence features a second very capable female character—Marg Helgenberger as the head of a CIA intelligence program—and she carries the role well, field-marshaling in a way that is neither gender-specific nor neutered.  She’s just a leader who happens to be female, which I understand is, incidentally, quite common in the intelligence community.   So I’m not trying to say that these shows represent a universal problem—only that these shows provide an opportunity to examine our cultural assumptions about what it is to be female.  How often do we assume that women are more intuitive, or more vulnerable, than men?  

Killer Women (ABC, new.  Law enforcement procedural.)

Watched: first two episodes

Premise:  Female Texas Ranger in a man’s world solves murders with female perpetrators/suspects.

Promise:  This show has a sort of retro vibe that’s a lot of fun.  It’s not deep, or gritty, or particularly thought-provoking, but it’s a reliable, somewhat sexy, crime-solving hour.  It feels like a procedural from my youth—straightforward investigation using a combination of gut intuition and solid police work, interspersed with predictable developments in the characters’ personal lives.  It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what feels retro to me—it has something to do with the filming, but even more to do with the fact that the mysteries can be solved by taking only one or two steps away from Occam’s razor.  The result is formulaic, but in a way I find comforting rather than boring.  Like Hart to Hart, or Magnum, PI, or the old Hawaii Five-O. 

I really like the strong female investigator angle, and I’m totally charmed that this one plays the trumpet.  (Yay for women brass players!)   I also really love that she’s a survivor, thriving in a man’s world.   I like that she’s able to express her sexuality without sacrificing her professional competence.  But for all of those good things, the show is remarkably un-feminist.  I’m not speaking here about show’s gaze, which is overtly voyeuristic about the female characters.  That doesn’t bother me, particularly.  It’s that all of the women in the show are, in one way or another, victims.  The lead is a survivor of spousal abuse, and I appreciate her strength in that context, but the show creates drama by highlighting the ways in which she is still at the mercy of her abuser.  The female perpetrators have—at least in the first two episodes—been inspired to crime by the fact that they are victims of one sort of another.  So the show gives us two models of female strength: fortitude, and snapping—but it only gives us models of strength-as-reaction.  It doesn’t present any models of strength-as-basic-personal-trait.  The show also leans pretty heavily on the tiresome trope of a woman who is good in a man’s job but has a messy family life.  By implication, divorce, poor romantic judgment, and complicated family are the cost of competence.  I’m thinking here of shows like Motive and In Plain Sight.  Actually this show has a lot in common with In Plain Sight – the lead has personality that’s crunchy on the outside but has a soft, compassionate, romantically-needy center.  It’s a character type with lots of dramatic possibilities, so I can’t fault the show for relying on it—but it doesn’t feel terribly new, either.

Verdict:  Entertaining procedural, but don’t look to it for any sort of deep social commentary.

Intelligence (CBS, new. Spy procedural.)

Watched: first two episodes

Premise: Jake 2.0 meets Person of Interest meets Chuck without the humor. 

Promise:  This show has a difficult setup—Josh Holloway’s character is given a computer-enhanced brain that makes him, by design, more or less perfect.  He has infinite knowledge, unmatched physical ability, and the ability to literally control computers with his mind.  So it struggles to find weaknesses for him and purposes for its other characters.  It settles on judgment, emotion, and hardware, things that even infinitely good software can’t provide.  So the supporting characters are one person who provides emotional support and acts as a backstop of physical protection; one person who directs him (providing judgment); and a couple of people to address hardware issues.  It makes a decent ensemble, but my guess is that the main character’s near-perfection is going to provide a recurring struggle from a storytelling perspective.  Two episodes in and I’m already getting a bit tired of his emotional fixations.  I’m not even going to get started on the troubling elements of a hero that has infinite access to every piece of information about every person in the world.  It uses things like “you should really have different passwords for your work and home accounts” as jokes.  Clearly we are not supposed to think about the privacy and civil rights/civil liberties implications of this show.  So for the moment, I won’t. 

The show is visually gorgeous—production itself is very lush, and layered with cool special effects—and there are hints of fun interplay between the characters (particularly the father-son technical team).  The show generates good tension and excitement, and has a good engine for both individual episodes and longer arcs.  The result is solid, although not always remarkable.

Verdict:  Solid CBS procedural.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  The Assets,  Chicago PD, The Spoils of Babylon, Enlisted, Helix, True Detective, Bitten, Chozen.