From Reese Witherspoon to Sharon Horgan women are rewriting the scripts

From the ‘kamikaze parents’ of Reese Witherspoon’s Big Little Lies to Sharon Horgan’s caustically comic Catastrophe, women are calling the shots on and off screen,
Women's hour: Shailene Woodley, ReeseWitherspoon and Nicole Kidman in Big Little Lies
HBO
Johanna Thomas-Corr31 March 2017

Feel so ashamed for saying this,” says Nicole Kidman’s corporate lawyer turned stay-at-home mom Celeste, a few episodes into Sky Atlantic’s new suburban noir, Big Little Lies. “But being a mother is just not enough for me. It’s just not. It’s evil, right? I said it aloud. I’m evil.”

Women have been making similar confessions to one another for a long time — and consoling their friends that no, it doesn’t make you evil, or a nasty woman. Just human. But to see these dilemmas and disappointments expounded in such depth on TV is a new phenomenon.

Big Little Lies is on one level a darkly comic thriller set in an affluent Californian seaside community. Reese Witherspoon (also the show’s executive producer), Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern and Zoe Kravitz form an A-list ensemble cast of frustrated mothers who Instagram their sun-kissed children, drink expensive pinot and go all Mean Girls on each other at the school gates.

But while the narrative hinges on a murder at an extravagant school fundraiser, what drives the drama is the sadness and anger that roils beneath the placid surfaces of their artfully designed lives. It has all the caustic humour of Desperate Housewives but much more compassion, nuance and realistic depictions of sex, from the mundane to the deeply messed-up.

Parenting: Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan in Catastrophe

Big Little Lies is part of a new wave of female-created, female-driven TV series that plunder the tragi-comic truths of women’s lives and look beyond the masks they wear to hide their disappointments and regrets.

The BBC’s Apple Tree Yard dared to foreground a middle-aged woman’s sexual desire; The Replacement turned maternity leave cover into the subject of nail-biting suspense, while Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag presented us with a depressed, porn-obsessed, thieving drifter by way of a heroine.

Big Little Lies may be the first high-end US TV drama to use the word “perimenopausal” — which may inspire grim cackles in anyone suffering hormonal fluctuations in her thirties or forties. But by a strange coincidence, the word also pops up in the latest episode of Catastrophe — Channel 4’s caustic comedy about the awfulness of marriage and parenthood — when Sharon Horgan’s character goes for an egg-count.

Horgan, who co-created the unflinching sitcom, reprises her role as one of TV’s most messy, flawed heroines. We resume the series shortly after her husband Rob has discovered her drunken infidelity — it turns out she’s not beneath using Brexit and Trump’s election as excuses for adultery. We’ve all been there.

These characters — women who have lived long enough to be rumpled by insecurities about motherhood, money, careers and sex — have traditionally existed in TV’s blind spot. While shows such as Homeland, The Killing, House of Cards, Spiral and The Fall created a renaissance for strong and smart female characters, the conflicts of their protagonists have tended to focus on their professional lives.

These women have tended to deal with exterior menaces: terrorists, misogynistic serial killers, political rivals. Much of the pleasure has come from seeing women move in on traditionally male territory, bringing with them sass, cunning and covetable wardrobes.

These new dramas, by contrast, focus on women who are dealing with something more unnerving and subtle: the consequences of their own free choices. Or should we say mistakes?

Having an affair, marrying the wrong man, giving up on their careers to have children or — in the case of Fleabag — preferring masturbation to sex with her boyfriend. Which is why they can feel much closer to home. We sympathise with them, we cherish their resilience, but we’re unlikely to envy them.

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The clothes these women wear are carefully chosen (see the unremarkable jersey dresses worn by Emily Watson in Apple Tree Yard) but aren’t there to confer cool (see Robin Wright’s sleek athleisure wear in House of Cards or Gillian Anderson’s shirts in The Fall.)

Even the ocean-side mansions, lithe figures and luxe interiors in Big Little Lies never look worth the pay-off. We don’t need to fetishise these women’s lifestyles to find their darker recesses and contradictions compelling.

Comical: Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Fleabag. (BBC/Two Brothers Pictures Ltd.)
BBC

Witherspoon has said she developed Liane Moriarty’s novel (originally set in Australia) because it offered “five meaty roles that dig deep into what it means to be a woman”. The calibre of talent who jumped on board suggests that the lead actresses had been waiting for a project like this.

“Reading the novel, I saw myself at different stages of motherhood through my life,” Witherspoon told The Hollywood Reporter. “It explores so many aspects that are relatable to the lives of women. It wasn’t about them being good or bad — it showed every colour of women’s lives.”

Big Little Lies is notably unafraid to depict women behaving abominably. Witherspoon’s meddling Madeline — a sort of Emma Woodhouse in yoga pants — isn’t above sabotaging a little girl’s birthday party in order to get revenge on Laura Dern’s high-powered career mom. As the children’s headmaster observes, they are not so much helicopter parents as “f****** kamikazes”. Madeline herself is less one for an elegant putdown, more one for a: “Go f*** yourself in the head.”

But these dramas also play with our expectations. They depict women being ferocious when we expect them to be weak, vulnerable when we’ve been trained to believe they’re invincible, selfaware when we expect delusions. Kidman’s character wrestles with her own complicity in her husband’s abuse of her. She defies easy categories of victim and villain.

And all these shows deal with women’s anger. Madeline initially appears to be a cartoonish busybody — an opening scene shows her breaking her heel as she marches to berate an irresponsible driver. However, her rage is justified (the driver in question was on her mobile phone).

In Fleabag, the anger is often turned inwards. “I have a horrible feeling that

I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist,” as Waller-Bridge’s character says during one late-night drunken rant.

Gripping: Vicky McCLure in The Replacement
Mark Mainz/Left Bank/BBC

There is a feeling that these stories have been waiting for their moment. Waller-Bridge — like Horgan — is a writer first and a performer almost by necessity. Then there are the actresses who can’t find substantial roles — even Oscarwinners such as Witherspoon and Kidman, Viola Davis and Natalie Portman — who are setting up their own production companies to take creative and business control.

The 2017 Hollywood Diversity Report, published by UCLA, shows that while women and minorities remain woefully under-represented in film, on television at least, things are moving in the right direction. A lot of it has to do with the sheer volume of TV shows that are being commissioned as upstarts such as Netflix and Amazon compete with established channels. “On some level, the industry has to fill the space, so they can’t go back to the same 15 white guys,” said the report’s lead author, Darnell Hunt. “It’s created opportunities.”

In the US, women have gained more prominence both as lead actors and as creative forces, as commissioners look to repeat the success of shows such as Lena Dunham’s Girls.

But before you get too excited, women still only make up one in five TV writers. That goes some way to explaining why exploring what it is to be female feels so fresh. But considering women make up half of potential TV viewers, it also suggests there’s some way to go.

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