Women be CRAZY.

If I’ve been harping a bit lately about how women are portrayed on TV, it’s only because a lot of shows in the last few months that have brought the topic to the fore.  On one hand, that’s good:  more shows about women could mean more opportunities for female actors (and one hopes, more female writers, directors, producers, etc.) to show their stuff.  Plus, more shows about women could mean more opportunities to portray a variety of female characters.  It goes without saying that there are so many different ways of being a woman, and portraying the rich variety must be the inevitable consequence of more shows about women….right?  That’s one possible take away from wonderful shows with female leads like The Bletchley Circle, and Call the Midwife, and Continuum, and Orphan Black.  But actually, that list is a pretty stark reminder that none of those shows are produced by U.S. networks.  As much as I want to encourage more shows with female leads, I am a bit surprised at how little variety I’m seeing in the newest wave of American fare.  The trend here, instead, seems to be shows about how women exert unpredictable, illogical sexual power over men.  I'm not saying it's the only theme we're seeing, but it's awfully common.  Really very common.  It isn’t a new trend, of course.  It’s a true classic--as old as stories are.  So maybe I shouldn’t be as surprised.  But I really thought we’d be tired of it by now.

Black Box (ABC, new.  Drama.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise: Successful neuroscientist hides her severe bipolar disorder from colleagues and all but a few loved ones.

Promise:  The show follows Grey’s Anatomy in the schedule, and mostly conforms to its soapy mode, right down to the character-name pun in the title.  In that context, it provides a relatively unflinching look at how disruptive severe bipolar can be, and the many challenges it can pose not only for those who have it, but also those around them.  I’m not saying it’s a terribly realistic image of the illness, but just as Oz showed an accelerated version of prison’s parade of horribles, this show does something similar with bipolar.  But it does so in a soapy way, which for my part anyway, crosses the line into sensationalizing it.  (For reference, Homeland is a less sensationalized depiction).  I’m also annoyed by the show’s illogic.  I struggle a bit to square her career success with her cavalier attitude toward her diagnosis, which implies she doesn’t value her career overmuch, but I can get past that.  The bigger issue is her secret-keeping.  It’s not that I expect people to go around talking about their mental health (although nowadays it’s more common than it has been in the past)—it’s that if there’s anyone I expect to go around talking about their own mental health, it’s someone who is renowned for studying mental health and trying to reduce the stigma of mental health disorders.  And of course when she’s manic she becomes hypersexual.  I know that’s not an uncommon symptom, but that doesn’t make it any less exploitive.  

Verdict:  Sigh.  More sexy unpredictability and emotional fragility from a woman who could be portrayed as a survivor who overcame mental illness.  Ho hum.

Salem (WGN, new. Supernatural costume drama.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise:  Politics and witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts.

Promise:  It's nifty that WGN is making original programming.  And the show did something right, because it got me to watch the second episode.  On the other hand, I was really just watching it to see whether the show was as awful as I feared.  Answer:  yup.  The show is aiming, I presume, for a sort of Game of Thrones grittiness.  I presume that’s part of what attracted the cast, a pretty impressive collection of Nikita and Fringe alums and other up and coming actors—but, sigh, it’s such a bad goal.

The show takes some explaining, so here goes:  its setup, as far as I could tell from the two episodes I watched, is thus: Mary loved John Alden, an anachronistically  humanist chap played with long-haired broodiness by Shane West.  John went off to war and became uncommunicative, largely because he was captured.  Believing him to be dead, Mary had someone use witchcraft to abort his unborn child.  This event was correlated with, and possibly the cause of, Mary’s selling her soul to the devil and turning evil.  I say possibly because although Mary’s anger and malice are manifest, the show makes no meaningful attempt to explain why she is angry, malicious, power-hungry, and generally evil.  After turning evil, Mary married, tortured, and magically dominated one of the head Puritans in town, and used her newfound influence to create a secret conspiracy of witches to amass power in Salem.  John therefore returns from war to find this state of affairs:  His former girlfriend is secretly evil, and Cotton Mather is hunting the (very real) witches, who in turn are trying to use the witch hunt to turn the town’s Puritans against each other.  Yep, that’s exactly how I learned it in history class.

I want to be clear here:  in this show, Cotton Mather (who for no apparent reason sleeps with prostitutes in this version of history) is as close as we get to a good guy.  And he’s not entirely wrong:  there are witches, and they are totally evil.  There’s a not-so-subtle implication running through everything that women’s power is mysterious, sexual, and evil; the direct enemy of love and romance.  I say this despite the fact that not all of the witches are women, and not all the women are witches—that doesn’t make up for the fact that it’s the ladies who are holding the town captive and committing straight-up murder by proxy.  In fact, aside from one plucky rebel, nearly all of the women in this show have traded their empathy and humanity for the power of an explicitly satanic, creepy, and unambiguously erotic form of witchcraft.  And if that seems sexy to you, think again:  it’s mostly writhing and muck.  Plus, bonus racism:  the witches (or at least the main character) seem to be in the thrall of the only non-white character in the show—an ambiguously Caribbean woman who is never given a last name and is (what else?) a witch—who seems to be either pulling the strings or egging the witches on for her own nefarious purposes.  Why?  Because she’s exotic, I guess.

Verdict:  In case you’re on the fence, check out this quote (scroll to bottom of page) from one of the show’s creators.

Bad Teacher (CBS, new.  Single-camera sitcom.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise: Cash-strapped airhead becomes a teacher in the hope of marrying a rich single dad.  Based on the movie of the same name.

Promise: Yup, there are so many rich single dads in this community that our main character thought this was a good plan.  Spoiler alert:  it isn’t a good plan, not least because of course teaching is a job that one must do.  But the main character is airheaded enough to believe it is.  After all, the point isn’t to be realistic, it’s to make an amusing setup for a workplace comedy (the workplace here being a middle school), and a redemption story of an overdog learning that there’s joy in helping (and in the process developing relationships with) the underdogs.  In other words, it’s  Mean Girls meets Enlisted.  It wasn’t as awful as I expected it to be, although it’s still problematic in a number of  ways.  Its main problem is that although the show centers on mocking the shallowness of popularity, it often embodies the same shallowness it purports to poke fun at.  The main character exhibits a sort of mystical attractiveness-fu that makes everyone magically do what she wants, however silly or illogical that might be, and although the show almost certainly knows that’s unjust, its solution is mostly to make her use that power for good, rather than challenging the underlying justice of the power.  It also perpetuates a connection between un-prettiness and social desperation, which is undoubtedly a symptom of the same shallowness the show pokes fun at, but at the same time it all too often turns the un-pretty people into punchlines rather than making them likeable.  I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention a weird cartoonish/madcap streak running through the show (mainly embodied by the character of the principal, played by David Alan Grier) that sometimes makes the whole thing feel like a Disney Channel comedy.

Verdict:  like the title character, the show has more humor and heart than one might expect at first glance.  But it doesn’t do it well enough that I want to spend more time watching it.

Playing House (USA, new.  Single camera sitcom/dramedy)

Watched:  First three episodes

Premise: Successful career woman moves back to her small town to help her newly-single childhood best friend raise a child.

Promise: I waited to post this whole entry until I had the chance to watch this show, in the hope that it would be an antidote to the “women’s sexuality as a trap for unwary men” trope, and while it was—mostly—it has still taken me a couple of days to process my thoughts about the show.   It’s another one of those comedies that aims for wry truths rather than steady laughs, which is a popular genre nowadays despite being difficult to pull off—but I was optimistic, because at its core, it’s about women who support each other, and friendship, and chosen family, all of which make it deeply appealing to me.  But I have to admit, it pits professionalism against friendship in a way that hits close to home and makes me very uncomfortable.  I’ll admit, this may be a personal reaction rather than a universal one, but here’s the setup:  A successful career woman whose job is high-powered but personally draining comes home to her best friend’s baby shower in the small town where they grew up.  While she is there—squeezing conference calls in between social visits—the friend’s marriage breaks up, leaving the friend to handle motherhood on her own.  So the career woman quits her job and moves back to the small town to help her friend. 

The plots promise to revolve mostly around a few topics—their odd-couple friendship; the former career woman’s coming to grips with returning to this small town; and their awkward mix of sarcasm and good-heartedness, which together get them into and out of scrapes.  On an episode by episode basis, it’s got a sort of I Love Lucy or Laverne & Shirley vibe, and overall is cute and well-meaning.  Where I get stuck is back at the setup, where the show implicitly stakes out the position that it is impossible for a woman to care deeply about her work and be a good friend at the same time—or more specifically, that permitting work time to interfere with her social time makes her a bad friend.  Our heroine is redeemed when she quits her jet setting, international (oppressively demanding) job and takes on a more traditional womanly role, and please don’t think too hard about how these two are going to support themselves. 

Verdict:  I want to like it.  I want to like the way these two former “mean girls” are redeemed by growing up and finding their hearts; I want to like the story about how friendship can conquer all, and of sisters doing it for themselves.  But as a career woman, I feel mildly unwelcome.

Finally, I’m giving a SimonBaker to Faking It (MTV, new; sitcom), which is about high school students who are mistaken for lesbians and decide to carry on the charade for the sake of their social lives.  I would have watched it had I had the time, but the premise turned me off.  From afar, it seemed (a) sensationalized (b) like it probably trivialized the challenges that real high school lesbians still face.  Reviews have been decent, though. Perhaps it’s better than I feared.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  The Red Road; Sirens; Crisis; The 100; Turn; Silicon Valley; Fargo; Last Week Tonight.