Another backlog-tackler, here, and one that
I’ve waited far too long to write, partly because it’s not as easy to unpack as
I’d like it to be. So fasten your seat
belts for another long entry discussing too many shows.
Not too long ago, I was chatting at
a party about Aaron Sorkin. I was a huge
Sports Night fan, and have loved other Sorkin offerings to varying degrees. But there are some elements of Sorkin that
really don’t hold up to time and scrutiny.
So I explained to my party friends: I just hate how
Sorkin treats women. One of the partygoers—a
woman, against the odds—said no, she thought Sorkin was great at introducing and writing
powerful women. The women are the
capable ones, she said, and the men would be helpless children without them. Well, there’s problem one, I said, the women are there to support, save, and/or
prop up the (partially undeserving) men around them. There’s a lot more to women than making good
men great. But problem two is much
bigger, and it’s the one that bothers me most:
that no matter how smart, powerful, capable, or competent the women are,
they all end up making mistakes or making the men’s lives unnecessarily
difficult because they’re irrationally obsessed with petty concerns. Another partygoer chimed in: Yes! They're all worried about craaazy
lady things! (Think of Stockard Channing’s character on the West Wing, and how
derisively the show treated her concern for her husband’s (i.e., President
Bartlet’s) health. And it’ll take you no time at all to come up with a dozen
other Sorkin-based examples alone.)
Obviously I think this isn’t just
a Sorkin phenomenon. It’s a much larger pattern in how women are portrayed as having different, stereotypically
female, concerns, and these concerns are portrayed as less reasonable or
important than male concerns. We’ve
gotten to a point in history where we don’t mind, and may sometimes favor, watching shows about powerful
women. But apparently we don’t want to
see them be completely capable. Women worry about love, family,
health. (Men don’t worry. But when they do, they worry about making
things work.) Women take the short,
personal, emotional, small-picture view.
(Men take the long, statesmanlike, logical, big-picture view.) Women are deeply and inexplicably concerned
with lady things, and become too easily fixated and too easily swayed by
them. Men’s decisions make sense. Women’s decisions, all too often, don’t. They’re inscrutable, irrational, myopic. (“Women, amirite?”) And did you ever notice how on
television, work/life balance isn’t really an issue for men, but it’s usually at the
center of stories about professional women?
Yeah. So as powerful and capable
as they may be, these craaazy lady things mean that women will never, ever, be
quite as capable as men.
A few of these shows about
putatively strong, powerful women subvert the expectation of craaazy lady
things. But all too many of them don’t.
Mysteries
of Laura (NBC, Fall 2014. Law
enforcement procedural.)
Watched: Episodes 2-6
Premise: Police detective precariously balances home
and professional life. (Adapted from a
Spanish series.)
Promise: Debra Messing’s character is a very skilled,
capable investigator, with good instincts. She’s bad at diplomacy, but good at her job. And if we ended it there, it would be like a
zillion other comedic procedurals. Maybe
not appointment television, but fine.
But because she’s a woman, the show ends up piling humor about how she
doesn’t embody femininity and isn’t demure and doesn’t manage her home
with elegant aplomb. That’s not
necessarily a dealbreaker: When In Plain Sight did it, it was wry and humanizing.
Mary Shannon was herself, not anyone else’s idea of what she should
be. Same with Kristin Lehman’s character
on Motive. But here, it feels mocking,
not only of Messing’s character, but also of all of the other professional
women who don’t prioritize beauty and homekeeping. Plus, I have trouble taking seriously jokes
that rely on the idea that Debra Messing (Debra Messing, for goodness sake!!) is old, dumpy, and/or past her prime. Mind you, no one comes out particularly
well. Stereotypes all around – men are
horndogs, wimpy men are pitiful, gay men are mincing. But that doesn’t make it ok.
And there’s also this: each episode is generally entertaining and
empowering. But each requires Laura to
do something oddly objectifying (dressing sexy for an undercover date,
struggling to zip into too-tight jeans, pretend to be a dominatrix) – before
ending on that cool, empowering note.
It’s problematic because it implies that a woman being a good
investigator isn’t enough to make her a good investigator – that she should
have to use her body, too. The men don’t
have to do this, and no one would expect them to. I like the empowering note, but wish we could
get it without the digression in the middle.
Verdict: Not awful.
But problematic enough that I didn’t want to keep watching.
Girlfriends’
Guide to Divorce (Bravo, new.
Dramedy.)
Watched: pilot
Premise: self-help author in her 40s deals with the
breakdown of her marriage.
Promise: Loosely based on the Girlfriends’ Guide book
series, but diverges from the author's own description of her divorce. As far as I can tell, the show is trying to
be an LA version of Sex and the City for the woman in her 40s instead of her 30s. It’s steeped in Los Angeles, all LA sights
and superficiality, people talking over each other, vindictiveness, and sexual
manipulation. The mean girls are all
grown up. And it’s not wholly
unentertaining. But even if I feel sorry
for these people and occasionally find their antics amusing, I neither like
them—I really don’t like them—nor want to watch them self-destruct, which seems
inevitable around every corner. Here’s
an example: a woman (don’t get me
started on the fact that she’s a lawyer) seduces her ex-husband by getting him
drunk and sleeping with him as a “last hurrah.”
Then after he leaves, she gleefully calls the cops to report a drunk
driver. ::Shiver::
Verdict: May appeal to watchers of The L Word or
Revenge. Or even of Sex and the
City. But it’s sure as heck not for me.
State
of Affairs (NBC, Fall 2014. Spy
drama.)
Watched: Season (so far)
Premise: CIA analyst walks the ethically difficult
line of neutralizing terrorist threats.
Promise: After the first episode, I was a bit
skeptical. The CIA analyst is keeping
secrets, drinking and acting hypersexual to deal with stress. The show has many clear echoes of
Homeland—it’s hard not to compare the two—but this show very quickly won me
over, and though it may be sacrilege to say, I actually ended up enjoying it more
than Homeland. That’s partly because it
avoids many of the problems that plague Homeland as a result of its
(intentionally) obsessive, irrational, unbalanced lead. And this show’s stories have no shortage of
subterfuge and tension, with all the secrets and lies of god spy stories
interwoven with political pressures. The
lead (Katherine Heigl, with more gravitas than I’d expected but no less
vitality) is smart, skilled, and effective under pressure. In fact, the whole show is, as often as not,
a really interesting subversion of the craaazy lady things trope. A female president and CIA analyst deal
pragmatically with international problems, while the men around them get irrational. In fact, the
president’s husband embodies all the craaazy lady stereotypes. Here, the women are defined almost as much by their
professional expertise as by their relationships with men. Which doesn't sound like high praise, but in this climate it is.
Verdict: strong showing.
Madam Secretary (CBS, Fall
2014. Drama.)
Watched:
First 2 or 3 episodes
Premise: Spy-turned-political-science-professor
becomes the Secretary of State.
Promise: The show strives for West Wing gravitas, and
there are moments when it finds it. But what
I find fascinating is the extent to which the show focuses on the challenges of
being competent and female at the same time.
There’s a whole storyline about how people care too much about women’s
looks (there’s an effective plot about her using a stylist to get press)—and it
works as cultural critique. But at the
same time, the show embodies a good deal of what it critiques. First is the fact that the show spends a good
bit of time on the difficult balance between work and home. We expect that of a show about a woman, but
it would be odd if the lead were a man, and I noticed the difference. But perhaps even more insidious is the fact
that despite her all-encompassing international role, the heroine’s
policymaking gaze ends up falling on “lady issues” like kids and public
health. Maybe that’s to get buy-in for
the character and make her more sympathetic and likeable to the audience than
she would if she were dealing with armed conflict from the start. But if that’s true, it’s troubling in itself,
and goes back to the ultimate question of why television is important. Television holds a mirror up to the American
viewer, showing us what we apparently want to see. And we apparently we don’t necessarily mind
watching powerful women, as long as they’re emotionally broken (State of
Affairs) or sexually objectivized (Mysteries of Laura) or focused on “lady
things” like health or family or parenting.
(Or all of them, like Girlfriend’s Guide.)
There’s a
lot to like about the show. It’s like Borgen,
in many ways—about the political and the personal at the same time. And yet, I didn’t feel inspired enough by it
to keep watching. Maybe it’s because the
stakes didn’t seem high enough or our heroine’s victories didn’t feel big enough. Or maybe it’s something else, hard to put my
finger on, something from that previous paragraph that left me feeling
uninspired. I enjoyed the pilot, and
thought it had plenty of potential, but in a season with limited DVR space, I
just didn’t quite care enough about the people to make watching it a
priority.
Verdict: Solid, but no fireworks.
Eye
Candy (MTV, new. Law enforcement
drama.)
Watched: pilot
Premise: A hacker makes herself the target of a
stalker in order to catch the stalker.
Promise: Women, beware. The Internet is dangerous place. Lurking on Tinder are stalkers who search out
“perfect” women and kill them for their imperfections. Good thing there’s this beautiful-and-brilliant
hacker out there who uses the online pseud “Eye Candy” and scoffs at her parole-requirement that she not work with computers. Police officers flirt with her, but she
dodges their attempts to stifle her vigilantism and also doesn’t seek their
help when she’s in danger. Scarred by
her parents’ death and her little sister’s kidnappng, she has lost all sense of
rationality and perspective and risks her life and the lives of her beautiful club-kid
friends to keep the world safe. There’s
also this weird romantic connection with her ex-boyfriend that makes her make mistakes
probably even stupider than the ones she makes as a result of her sister’s
kidnapping.
Verdict: But, um, everyone’s pretty? Even so, not worth it.
On
the DVR/Unreviewed: Still some 2014
backlog (unlisted), but mostly from 2015, now: Agent
Carter, Empire, Babylon, 12 Monkeys, Backstrom, Fortitude, Allegiance, Better
Call Saul.
