Women’s indie television: the intimate feminism of women-centric dramedies

ABSTRACT

When HBO’s Girls debuted in April 2012, it was unlike anything else on television, but today there are echoes of Girls’ indie tendencies and feminist sensibility across the Anglophone television landscape. In retrospect, it is clear that Girls is the flagship series of a recent cycle of women-centric dramedies on US television, which includes (but is not limited to) Transparent, Broad City, Insecure, One Mississippi, Catastrophe, Divorce, Better Things, SMILF and Shrill. These series are inspired by, in conversation with and/or reacting to the aesthetic, generic and/or feminist template established by Girls. This cycle represents the dialogic flow between and across film and television in the convergent era and is enabled by cultural, industrial and political conditions specific to the “peak” television moment. Owing to the centrality of production-based spectacle to both contemporary definitions of cinematic television and popular media feminisms, this cycle is rendered somewhat invisible to both categories. This article argues that the cycle and its series are perhaps best understood in relation to women’s indie cinema, or as a televisual manifestation of women’s indie cinema that could be called women’s indie television.

KEYWORDS:

• Dramedy
• television
• feminism
• indie cinema
• women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Jessica Ford

Jessica Ford is a Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is a co-founder of the Sydney Screen Studies Network and a Contributing Editor of MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. Jessica’s research examines women and feminism on television and she has published on Roseanne, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Girls.