Mother Knows Best

Motherhood is, it appears, at least as much in the zeitgeist as epidemics are.  If we count The Lottery in both columns—which we really should—we’ve got the same number of “motherhood” shows as “epidemic” shows this summer.  

And if we can learn anything from these shows, it’s that women’s desire to be mothers makes them do totally irrational things.  Because, wow, do women do totally irrational things in these shows.  Each of these three show centers on women who are on one hand quite smart and very competent—and on the other, driven to a sort of madness by the force of motherhood.  They’re holding a womb lottery, for goodness sake, and swaddling virtual-reality babies in The Lottery; the lead is making deeply risky decisions about two different kinds of non-human children in Extant; and the fact that a woman acquired her daughter through kidnapping is the central basis of Finding Carter.  At least The Lottery acknowledges that different women are different from each other.  But the other two have pretty consistent visions of the mother as Mama Bear, ready to take on the world for the sake of their motherhood.

I’m not saying that mothers don’t, or shouldn’t, feel that sort of protective instinct for their children.  I am, however, saying that the Mama Bear mother is a trope, and we should be aware that when TV uses it, especially when it does so to the exclusion of other visions of motherhood, it’s defining a norm.  It’s not only announcing a vision of what motherhood is, but modeling a vision of what motherhood should be.  And when our models are so consistent—and so irrational!—it perpetuates stereotypes of women as defined by their reproductive capacity, as slaves to their own biology, and as unpredictable beings.  These aren’t bad shows—in fact, I’ve quite enjoyed each of them, in different ways.  But together, they send a troublingly monolithic message.

Extant (CBS, new.  SF Drama.)

Watched: first six episodes

Premise: Astronaut returns to earth after a 13-month mission to learn that she’s pregnant.

Promise:  The pilot is told in a combination of flashbacks after the astronaut (Molly, played by Halle Berry) returns, but the rest of the series moves forward and becomes something I didn’t really expect from the setup:  a drama about what makes humans human.  While Molly’s mysterious pregnancy provides the start to the story and its alien incursion into Earth presents the central conspiracy, the show quickly begins to focus at least as much on Molly's relationship with her “son,” which I put in scare quotes because he's a prototype human-emulating android who is designed to emulate humanity, and provides a lens into what that means both when he succeeds and when he fails in that regard.  The connective tissue between these otherwise-disparate ideas is provided by Molly, her husband (played by Goran Visnic), and an entrepreneur (played by Hiroyuki Sanada, who seems to have carved out a nice,  niche for himself in the U.S. playing powerful, possibly racially problematic, financiers with suspect motives).  

The result holds together better than one would expect, considering just how many ideas it’s bouncing around.  Part of it is the show’s relatively compact central cast:  it’s basically one family and the people in their orbit.  This means that although the conspiracy is far ranging, the show still has time to give its central characters the sort of internally contradictory personalities that make them seem real, and show us what humanity looks like.  It’s still a bit of a mess, though, and sometimes the android stuff feels tacked on to what would otherwise be a very serviceable Gaslight conspiracy/mystery about what happened to this astronaut.  And although both Molly and her trusted doctor are competent women, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that two out of the three women on the show are defined almost entirely by their relationships with motherhood (That is, Molly, and one of the android techs, who is clearly resentful that she isn’t a parent to the android the way Molly and her husband are).  That feels like a cop-out, and were it not for the doctor (who's well played by Camryn Manheim), I’d see that as a problem with the show.  As it is, I think it’s more an inevitable artifact of the show’s focus on parenthood.

Verdict: Feels more like two television shows (one about an android, and the other about an alien conspiracy), but both are strong enough to make me curious and keep me following along.

Finding Carter (MTV, new. Teen drama.)

Watched: first two episodes, 4th episode, seventh episode.

Premise: A teenager’s world is upended when she discovers that the woman she knows and loves as her mother actually kidnapped her from her biological parents when she was 3.

Promise:  The pilot moves very rapidly out of what appears to be a very happy, but also quite permissive, relationship between the teen and her (kidnapper) mother into the setting of the story:  the much more rule-bound and stereotypically suburban life of her biological family.  The teen, Carter, is stereotypical rebel, albeit one with a pretty convincing reason for rebellion:  she’s moving from a relatively freewheeling life, where she’s often told just how much she’s loved, into one with a lot of rules, where love largely takes the form of worry and constriction.   

It’s a great setup for teen angst.  Carter feels like she's been kidnapped into this new world, and it's a tough adjustment, at best.  Carter’s twin sister’s world is just as shaken up, but she doesn’t get the same solicitude Carter gets.  A bunch of inexplicably parent-less friends float around and influence the kids for good or ill, as they always seem to do in teen dramas.  And the most interesting character of the bunch might be Carter’s little brother, who is often overlooked, and latches on to Carter with heartbreaking affection.  Everyone wants things they can’t have; everyone keeps secrets they shouldn’t have to keep. Everyone needs something from Carter, which may not be what she wants or needs.   At its best, it’s a story about the destructive power of selfishness.  At its worst, it’s a pretty standard soapy teen drama, albeit one with a very different backdrop than most.  

Verdict:  interesting people in an interesting setup, but the sort of teen drama that one can skip some episodes of and still follow along.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  We're working our way through, although we've miles to go before we sleep.  Including Dominion, Tyrant, The Leftovers, The Almighty Johnsons, The Divide, Manhattan, The Knick, Outlander, Legends, and Intruders.