Reflections on Feminist TV Series: The Good, The Bad, and the Downright Disturbing

There are three trends in feminist TV series that have caught my eye the last few years--and two of them I'm very troubled by.

Above: Please note that while Jessica is the one facing the camera, Kilgrave is taking up more space in the pic

In the last decade or so, me and the rest of the world have seen a couple things happen:

• Feminism has become mainstream
• Due to the overwhelming demand for fresh, exciting content across TV and streaming platforms, we have seen a lot more explicitly-feminist series make it to the small screen

When I say "feminist" tv, I think of a few things:

• The people making the show are mostly women or at least not cisgender men
• The storylines regularly pass the Bechdel Test
• The female characters get fully developed and interesting storylines 
• We tend to see more diversity of the cast with regards to race, size, sexual orientation, and gender

While this is good to see, I've noticed a distinct emergence of three trends (bad and good) when it comes to "feminist" TV that have caught my eye in particular. 

1. The women starring in the show aren't actually the show's main focus
2. The explicit storylines focusing on racism, sexism, etc, make the show too upsetting to watch
3. Reimagining stories of well-known heroines has been extremely interesting and entertaining to watch

Trend 1: Losing Focus

Above: Sam Sylvia in GLOW

There are three shows from the last few years that got a lot of acclaim and hype to start for being more explicitly feminist:

• GLOW
• Jessica Jones
• Strange Empire

I watched the first season each of GLOW and and Jessica Jones and promptly lost interest.

To me at least,  it kind of seemed like the first season of GLOW was more about Sam Sylvia, the wrestlers' manager (played by Marc Maron) more so than our actual gals.

Similarly, I was so distracted by Kilgrave (played by David Tennant) in Jessica Jones that I wonder to myself a couple times why the series was even called "Jessica Jones" since we were so heavily focused on Kilgrave.

The last show, Strange Empire, is a little Can Con special (remember, I'm lowkey obsessed with CBC Gem) and initially checked all my boxes. It's a Western based in south Alberta in 1869 starring three women: a badass not-white cowboy Kat Loving (Cat Gee), queer lady doctor Rebecca Blithely (Melissa Farman), and Isabelle Slotter (Tattiawna Jones), a psychic/con-artist Madam who is also not white. Sounds like a dream come true, right? Watching the opening credits is also a delight with most episodes being written, directed, edited, and produced by women. 

Above: John and Isabelle Slotter from Strange Empire

CBC clearly put a ton of extra special care and work into this series, but despite all this, our trio of stars was continuously overshadowed by John Slotter (Aaron Poole), and much like GLOW and Jessica Jones, our Strange Empire stars faded into the background as John Slotter stole the show--everything revolved around this character.

Trend 2: Wayyy too upsetting

Above: From Season One of Dear White People

TBH, Strange Empire was also wayy too upsetting and belongs in this category as well the one above, so if you're going to watch please take care to note that there is a trans* character who suffers sexual assault, as well as extreme violence against First Nations characters.

At any rate, back to this second trend, in which I would include

• Dear White People (the Netflix series)
• Orange Is The New Black 

For Dear White People, I don't even think I made it through the full first season. For OITNB I thiiiink I got through Seasons One and Two and couldn't quite put my finger on my sudden and waning interest until I read Karol Collymore's piece  The Racism on “Orange Is the New Black” Makes It Traumatic to Watch and the dots were connected. 

Above: from Season One of Orange is the New Black

I don't deny the significance of OITNB for its time and what it did for a lot of the incredible actresses on the show and our media landscape in general in North America. Nor do I take issue with the explicit and frank discussion of racism as we see in Dear White People (white people gotta learn this stuff somewhere, I guess). I also don't dispute that these shows are feminist, they def are. It's possible for media to be both feminist and bloody upsetting, after all. Just thinking of these two shows, I heard bell hooks' voice in my mind back when Beasts of the Southern Wild came out.

Quick recap on this film- Beasts of the Southern Wild, is a movie from 2012 and stars Quvenzhané Wallis. It won and was nominated for a ton of awards and bell hooks absolutely hated it. In a 2013 conversation with Melissa Harris-Perry, hooks comments on Beasts again saying:

“I just can't take another image of an abused black child 

being represented as entertaining… I'm hurting because we can't get past 

the construction of black children as little mini-adults 

whose innocence we don't have to protect, 

who we can consider cute if they're being 

slapped around by an alcoholic father.”

bell hooks

I've kept this quote in my mind all these years, and in watching OITNB and Dear White People I couldn't help but think that I, too, "[couldn't] take another image of an abused black [person] being represented as entertaining."

Trend 3: Reimagining moves us forward (& is entertaining af)

We've seen an uptick of late of fantastic series that are taking it upon themselves to reimagine things a little differently for well-known heroines like Anne Shirley and Catherine the Great in shows such as:

• Anne with an E
• The Great
• The Haunting of Hill House

For Anne Shirley, I'm totally convinced by Samatha Ellis' argument in How To Be a Heroine: Or, what I've learned from reading too much about L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series-- Anne Shirley deserved more. 

Ellis notes, "Montgomery [...] seems to lose interest in her heroine in the later books [...] She's barely there in the last novel, Rilla of Ingleside [...] As if all eight books have been charting her journey from waif to wife." Ellis goes on to suggest:

"Montgomery also wanted to go back on her decisions about Anne. So in 1923 she created a new heroine, who was basically a rewrite of Anne. Emily Byrd Starr is another orphan and writes and she also wins over her guardians and marries her childhood sweetheart [...] The Anne books came slowly and non- chronologically but Montgomery wrote the Emily trilogy fast and in order. They're so raw and vivid, they make the predecessors feel sentimental and sepia."

Samantha Ellis 

Point being, the showrunners for Anne with an E were 100% spot-on with their additions and re-imagining of Anne's adventures--it was as if legacy of L.M. Montgomery was calling for it this whole time. Notably, the Anne with an E crew was also chock-full of women. I know Montgomery's works inside out, and while Anne with an E isn't perfect, I'm still a huge fan of the show. Heck, this show is arguably the reason why Canada has suddenly remembered our less-than-just treatment of Black history in the Maritimes. 

Lesser-known heroines from Shirley Jackson's psychological thriller novel The Haunting of Hill House are reimagined in the Netflix series of the same name. Part 1 (also called The Haunting of Hill House) came out in 2018 and is enjoying a bit of a renaissance as Part 2 (The Haunting of Bly Manor, based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James) is set for release Oct 9th. 

I've read both the book and watched the series and while yes, the series is extremely different from the book, both are equally entertaining, powerful, and, well, horrifying. 

However far-ranging this re-imagining may be, the series got a ton of acclaim for its exploration of grief, queer identities, and challenging the all-too-familiar blanket accusation of women as crazy.

As for Hulu's The Great, starring Elle Fanning, "re-imagining" is pushed to its limit--even the title credits explicitly note events depicted in the series as "occasionally true". Thank goodness we have the team at The Mary Sue to keep tabs on more accurate events for us.

While The Great raises both eyebrows for its...elastic approach to historical events, I can't help but think...why not? Men have embellished their import and contribution to history for literal ages, why not start doing this for the gals as well? We don't even have accurate portraits for figures such as King Charles the Second of Spain, for example. Why not make Catherine the Great's legacy even more legendary, even if it means just adding a small reminder that events depicted might not necessarily be true? 

It's called His-story after all. It's high time we hear from the gals, re-imagined or not.