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ABSTRACT
This essay examines the use of sororal discourse and imagery in post-network television, and situates this “rhetoric of sisterhood” within the broader traditions of both female-driven network programing and independent feminist filmmaking—as well as the more recent tradition of “Quality TV.” Taking as its primary case studies series including Big Little Lies, GLOW, Claws, Top of the Lake, Dietland, and Orange is the New Black, it argues that these shows invoke an aspirational ideal of sisterhood that at once recalls second-wave feminist discourse and updates it, by staging a more self-consciously intersectional vision of female solidarity. If these idealized ally narratives diverge from much previous feminist broadcast programming, in their willingness to prioritize politics over plausibility, this essay demonstrates their debts to the frankly polemical work of feminist filmmakers like Agnès Varda, Lizzie Borden, Marleen Gorris, and Julie Dash. At the same time, it suggests these displays of female kinship constitute a radical response to the punitive treatment of women that has come to dominate prestige TV. I conclude, then, by suggesting these shows constitute an important strain of counter-programming, which media scholars might use to complicate prevailing narratives of post-network TV that center so-called male anti-hero shows by factoring in these narratives of collective female heroics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Although Top of the Lake was an international co-production by the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, it simultaneously premiered on the Sundance channel in the U.S., BBC Two (in the UK), and BBC UKTV (in Australia and New Zealand).
2. There have been a number essays to examine TV through the lens of these contemporary cultural movements. See, for instance, Jen Chaney’s “2018 is the Summer of #MeToo TV”, Sophie Gilbert’s “How Television Anticipated the Weinstein Moment in Citation2017,” and Danette Chavez’s “For the Women of Claws, Time’s Been Up”(Cheney Citation2018, Gilbert Citation2017, Chavez Citation2018).
3. See Christian and Lotz for comprehensive accounts of the post-network television landscape. As Lotz observes, the “‘flattening out’ of profits” that has taken place in the twenty-first century “changes the type of programs the industry is likely to produce … and allows a much broader array of programing to exist and ‘succeed’—albeit by a variety of measures—than was the case in the network era” (Amanda Lotz Citation2014b, 96).
4. A recent interview with Mindy Kaling provides compelling anecdotal evidence to this effect. Speaking to The New York Times, she describes the dramatic increase in the number of women and people of color in front of and behind the camera; significantly, she attributes the shift in representation less to individual creators than to industry forces—specifically, to “networks’ fear of being called out” (Mindy Kahling Citation2019).
5. See Dow’s Prime-Time Feminism for more on the history of feminism’s representation in broadcast television (Dow Citation1996, 24). See also Lauren Rabinovitz’s study of feminist sit-coms of the 1970s, and Lotz’s Redesigning Women, which considers the rise of female-oriented (if not specifically feminist) programming in the 1990s (Rabinovitz Citation1989, Lotz Citation2006).
6. Dow considers Designing Women an early exemplar of the “sisterhood” show, and suggests it offers a vision of “postfeminist nirvana” (Dow Citation1996, 107).
7. See Hollinger’s In the Company of Women: The Contemporary Female Friendship Film for an authoritative history and theory of this cinematic genre (Karen Hollinger Citation1998).
8. See D’Acci for more on the “jiggle phenomenon” and representative series of the mid-seventies (D’Acci Citation1994, 16).
9. Hollinger adopts the terms “sentimental” and “psychoanalytic” from Janet Todd and Paulina Palmer, respectively. The former derives from Todd’s taxonomy of female friendship in literature, which encompasses the following categories: the sentimental, manipulative, political, erotic, and social (Hollinger Citation1998, 8).
10. D’Acci theorizes a spectrum of televisual engagement with feminist discourses, ranging from “explicit general feminism,” to “women’s issue feminism,” to “tacit” or “ambiguous feminism.” See Chapter 4.
11. D’Acci provides an authoritative account of the fate of feminist programming through the lens of Cagney and Lacey.
12. McCracken’s original tweet referred to critical reactions to the premiere of the 2019 Deadwood movie.
13. For an expanded version of this argument, see Sophie Gilbert’s review of the third season in The Atlantic, which argues that the show “continues to assert its feminist credentials while keeping its central character in subjugation” (Sophie Gilbert Citation2019). See also Francine Prose’s essay in The New York Review of Books challenging the show’s feminism: “In what sense is it ‘feminist’ to provide viewers with a glossy, sensationalized portrayal of women’s deepest anxieties and paranoias? What exactly is feminist about seeing women insulted, raped, humiliated, disfigured, beaten, tasered, tortured—and subjected to the sadistic whims of other women?” (Francine Prose Citation2017).
14. See Jason Mittell (Citation2015a) for an account of narrative complexity and the dominance of this “storytelling mode” in contemporary American television.
15. Ford includes Girls, Broad City (2014–2019), and The Mindy Project (2012–2017), among others, in this category.
16. The first season of Big Little Lies—created by David E. Kelley and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée—is the only series discussed here not overseen by a female showrunner. That said, it was shaped by a team of executive producers including Witherspoon, Kidman, and Bruna Papandrea, among others, with Andrea Arnold directing the second season.
17. A statement that may be challenged by events of the show’s second season, which is airing at the time of this article’s writing.
18. Interestingly, it is precisely the real-life solidarity among the actresses that has been mobilized in the marketing and promotion of the second series—as exemplified by recent media coverage of the women’s group chat.
19. The reluctance of the Handmaid’s Tale cast and creators to publically identify the show as feminist provides an interesting case in point; see Laura Bradley’s coverage of the show’s post-screening discussion at the Tribeca Film Festival for more (Laura Bradley Citation2017).
20. Although Barrois serves as Claws’ showrunner, the series was created by Eliot Laurence, who is credited with writing a number of episodes, including the pilot.
21. For more on representations of masculinity in the post-network era, see Lotz’s Cable Guys (Lotz Citation2014a).
22. D’Acci argues that exploitation programming was “considered … an inevitable mainstay of prime-time television, especially for programs directed toward women,” and especially during the late 1970s and 80s (D’Acci Citation1994, 134).
23. Joy Press characterizes Shondaland shows as implicitly progressive, noting the relative absence of direct discussion about race, and Rhimes’s own account of herself and her cohort as “post-civil rights, post-feminist babies” who “take it for granted we live in a diverse world” (Joy Press Citation2018, 121). (Notably, this would shift in later seasons, as Scandal took up police brutality and the criminal justice system.) See also Levine’s analysis of Grey’s Anatomy which she calls a “product of [a] postfeminst cultural environment” (Levine Citation2013, 140).
24. The video and accompanying comment can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSmJUxtkBx8 .
25. A trend I explore in an earlier article, “The Unbearable Darkness of Prestige Television” (Elizabeth Alsop Citation2015).
26. In her study of Chantal Akerman, Ivone Margulies considers not only the “alienating force of her work’s hyperrealism,” but more generally, feminism’s troubled relation to cinematic realism, which, she quotes B. Ruby Rich observing, “has never included women in its alleged veracity” (quoted in Ivone Margulies Citation1996, 7). Along similar lines, Annette Kuhn has expressed concern about the limitations of cinematic realism as embodied by the “new women’s cinema” of the 1970s; see D’Acci, p. 175.
27. A representative example is the recap by Guardian critic Rebecca Nicholson, who after expressing her profound disappointment with the series’ second season, notes that “the last few minutes”—those in which the scene in question occurred—“blew away any chance of redemption” (Rebecca Nicholson Citation2017).
28. In her canonical essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey pits “spectacle”—usually, eroticized shots of female bodies—against the forward-moving male-focalized narrative (Laura Mulvey Citation1999, 837). Such spectacles function to “freeze[s] the flow of action,” but only temporarily, since the mechanisms of Hollywood film ensure they are “integrated into cohesion with the narrative” (Mulvey Citation1999, 837).
29. See, for instance, (Kotsko’s, Citation2012) Why We Love Sociopaths and (Mittell’s Citation2015b)“Long Interactions with Hideous Men,” as well as the revealing short-list of “Brooding TV Anti-Heroes” compiled by The New York Times, which includes protagonists of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Sons of Anarchy, The Shield, Narcos, and Mad Men.
30. Lanser exemplifies a mode of reading collective storytelling forms as inherently political. Specifically, she frames the “communal voice” as a feminist tactic, noting that “I have not observed it in fiction by white, ruling-class men perhaps because such an ‘I’ is already in some sense speaking with the authority of a hegemonic ‘we’” (Lanser Citation1992, 21).
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Elizabeth Alsop
Elizabeth Alsop is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at the CUNY School of Professional Studies. Her essays have previously appeared in The Journal of Film and Video, The Velvet Light Trap, Adaptation, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and she has also written about film and television for The Atlantic, The LA Review of Books, Salon, and The New York Times Magazine.