by Andi Zeisler
A decade-plus of reality-TV acculturation has recently led to the opening of a more fascinating, if no less normative, space for satirical, and even sinister, takes on the genre. Burning Love, a web series–turned–cable TV offering, lampoons the sameness of both Bachelor contestants and male “prizes” with goofball twists on the real show’s gender, race, and personality stereotypes: the “crazy bitch” character is actually homicidal, the “cougar” is an octogenarian grandmother, etc. More ethically probing is the Lifetime metadrama UnREAL, which arrived in 2015 to pull back the soft-focus bead curtain on the business of reality-TV romance and reveal the power puppeteering and mind games that go into creating a “successful” franchise. We see the male prize coached to butter up specific women. We see that, deprived of any outside contact and plied with booze, the contestants become increasingly suggestible to producers. And we see those producers competing amongst themselves for cash bonuses based on how well they craft key “characters” (the queen bitch, the ghetto princess, the basket case, the MILF) and fluff their charges toward ratings-boosting emotional money shots. The best of these producers at manipulation is Rachel Goldberg, a hollow-eyed dark wizard with a dead soul who sleeps in a prop truck; when we meet her, she’s wearing a grimy gray t-shirt that proclaims “This is What a Feminist Looks Like.” The joke is that women like Rachel and her co-producers believe themselves to be feminists, but they earn their living by shepherding other women through a self-esteem-destroying black hole of princess fantasy, horror movie, and softcore porn. They’re not just the emissaries of this retrograde version of reality; they’re also the architects.
UnREAL was created by Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who was herself a producer for nine seasons on The Bachelor, an experience she’s described as not unlike being “a vegan in a slaughterhouse.”9 And indeed, the most notable part of UnREAL is its critique of the larger illusion of equality and choice that defines marketplace feminism. Rachel’s life is a microcosm of the show-within-a-show, in which she’s as trapped as any of her charges in a disempowering game. She even has a mentor more heartless than her—the show’s executive producer, Quinn—expertly manipulating her emotions and actions. The close of the first season found Quinn and Rachel sprawled on lawn chairs at the set’s mansion, assuring each other with well-meaning lies that things would be different in the next go-round. It was a perfect illustration of how the reality-TV marketplace defines “freedom”—and, by extension, feminist autonomy—as freedom within a circumscribed fantasy realm where women hold only a small handful of the puppet strings.
Radicalizing the Antiheroine
By the mid-2000s, with scripted offerings less and less of a priority for major networks, premium cable became the place to watch a new paradigm of television in the public interest take shape: topical, well-written shows about complex, not-always-likable, often straight-up immoral people. This time is now fondly recalled as the beginning of TV’s “new Golden Age,” and the writers, producers, and actors on the shows that ushered it in—The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under—are these days held up as pop culture kingmakers. Except, notably, for one HBO show that was there at the same time as the others, but has since been relegated to a gaudy footnote: Sex and the City.
When the series debuted in 1999 in the guise of a sexually sociological comedy (it was based on Candace Bushnell’s 1997 nonfiction book of the same title), it was kind of a big deal. Though HBO already boasted a number of prurient documentary series like Real Sex and G-String Divas, most viewers didn’t openly admit to watching them; Sex and the City was bona fide watercooler material. The NYC-centered series fell short of reality on a number of levels—the diversity of the characters, the profusion of stiletto heels as streetwear, the fact that one column in a weekly newspaper supported Carrie Bradshaw’s lavish lifestyle—but in terms of reshaping conventional wisdom about women and sex, it was a weighty cultural coming-out that mirrored conversations all kinds of women were already having. But as time went on, the characters became caricatures, and once-serious dialogue about feminism’s place in sexual mores and negotiations became flip one-liners. As the New Yorkers television critic, Emily Nussbaum, mourned in a 2013 consideration on the occasion of SATC’s fifteenth anniversary, once cable networks began crafting more and more prestige TV, the groundbreaking series was swiftly reduced to “a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind” that former viewers were relieved to no longer have to contend with as a constant pop culture touchstone.
I agree with Nussbaum that Sex and the City’s rise and fall in pop culture estimation can be explained in part by “the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior.” Against its Manhattan backdrop, SATC’s lack of engagement with race as a force that shapes and impacts sexual mores became increasingly indefensible, especially compared to its often pointed takes on class. And, certainly, the two cartoonishly bad feature films based on the series didn’t do anything to shore up its cultural legacy. But as someone who watched the show from the beginning, the show’s implicit feminism also became less and less credible as it shifted from an ostensibly collective view of women’s desire to be authentic sexual agents to one that was all tunnel-vision egotism and individual quirks.
Consider the first season, which, watching it now, seems almost indie-movie spartan in its aesthetic. The unifying theme was an anthropology whose signature “I couldn’t help but wonder . . . ” queries addressed the ways feminism (as well as capitalism, AIDS, and urban gentrification) had and had not changed the stakes of dating and sex. Women could have sex “like men,” for instance—without attachment or expectation—but what if their partner doesn’t know that? Is fidelity a realistic expectation when casual sex has become a sport? What counts as “weird” or a fetish when everything is pretty much on the table? The four women represented four different responses to feminism “taken into account,” understood as a thing of the past whose “spent force,” as Angela McRobbie theorized, has given rise to a range of at-will meanings untethered from political significance.
Charlotte, as the most traditional of the foursome, symbolized the outright rejection of feminist social politics and the embrace of the idea that, despite all this equality talk, what women really craved was the stability of heterosexual marriage. Miranda was the frustrated embodiment of second-wave feminism: career-focused, beauty standard-rejecting, occasionally even emasculating (“Sometimes it’s like you’re the guy,” raged her on/off lover Steve in one episode); her outrage on behalf of women as a category was funny to everyone but her. Samantha was postfeminism, leveraging her occasionally aggressive sexuality against men because it was the most expedient route to getting what she wanted from life, and confused when she realized that it didn’t always translate into actual parity. And Carrie represented marketplace feminism, blithely picking and choosing from a buffet of various ideological and material stances as they suited her, and discarding them when they didn’t.
But though it’s been tarnished by time, hindsight, and memories of giant flower brooches, Sex and the City remains a turning point in feminist television because its characters were so polarizing, flawed, even unlikable. The show was the realization of what Bella Abzug had characterized in 1977 as the measure of true equality: “Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.” Equality is not simply elevating women, but also allowing them to fail as spectacularly and often as anyone else, and these four women were the female schlemiels that television had never quite created for fear of driving audiences away from women who were as challenging and unlikeable as any other kind of human.
It would be inaccurate to say that we’re now swimming in female schlemiels—but we have definitely entered the age of female antiheroes. This isn’t only because more channels, more web series, and
more streaming services have brought us more television in general, but also due to a cultural re-envisioning of television as a writer’s medium, populated by a more diverse range of writers than ever before; as well as those writers’ understanding that audiences don’t want everything packed neatly up and tied with a bow at the end of each episode.
Putting Up the Numbers
Twenty years ago, the main front in what onlookers described as a “culture war” was in the country’s living rooms. When Pat Buchanan campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination at 1992’s national convention, his doomy conjuring of a godless America included not just the specters of abortion, homosexuality, women in combat, and other right-wing faves, but also pop culture in particular. Vice President Dan Quayle invoked TV’s Murphy Brown in a now-famous speech positioning “family values” as America’s bedrock, suggesting that she was making single parenthood acceptable, contributing to a nationwide poverty crisis, and “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”10 Groups like the American Family Association and Christian Leaders for Responsible Television galvanized crusades against TV shows like Roseanne, Saturday Night Live, and Ellen by targeting sponsors like Clorox and Burger King until they pulled their financial support from the offending shows.
I sometimes like to think about Buchanan turning on his television any given night in 2015 and promptly bursting into flames at the sight of homosexuals, transgender parents, women in combat, single mothers, and even the odd abortion—but also of drug dealers, extravagantly corrupt government officials, amoral religious leaders, ass-kicking spies, and heartless crime bosses. Oh, and those are just the women. Buchanan and his culture crusaders have continued to try to influence the moral fiber of our small-screen content, but the combination of a new generation of writers, directors, and showrunners; as well as the evolution of TV industry economics, has turned down the volume on their outrage. TV has prevailed, and many of its fictions have far surpassed real life in political intellect, social and legal justice, gender equality, and more. On episodes of police procedurals like Law and Order and CSI, the killer, rapist, kidnapper, or criminal mastermind is just as likely to be a doctor, lawyer, stockbroker, or clergy member as a mental patient or drug addict or punk teenager. The drug addicts, mental patients, and punk teenagers, in fact, might be the sympathetic leads in their own shows. In the past decade, four TV presidents have been women. In culture-war terms, the “immoral” have triumphed—and they’ve made for some great viewing.
Meanwhile, the increasing number of female creators who have ushered in what Huffington Post TV critic Zeba Blay calls “The Golden Age of Feminist TV”—among them Mara Brock Akil, Tina Fey, Jenji Kohan, Liz Meriwether, Shonda Rhimes, and Jill Soloway—have been both heralded and complemented by feminist coverage in blogs, magazines, and social media. And a critical lens on feminism, antiracism, and LGBTQ representation has become almost commonplace in mainstream television criticism, from Entertainment Weekly to Rolling Stone to the Wall Street Journal. But while what’s on TV right now offers pop culture’s closest reflection of real life—with almost 42 percent of characters that are women, including transgender women—a look behind the scenes reveals that television is neither a feminist industry nor a particularly female one.
The Directors’ Guild of America report on diversity for the 2014-15 TV season revealed that while 16 percent of all episodes that year were directed by women, 84 percent of first-time directors were men—suggesting that, much like with movies, the men tend to end up with a disproportionate vote of confidence from above. The Center for the Study of Film and Television numbers for the same season noted that women created 20 percent of all shows and comprised 23 percent of all executive producers; meanwhile, they accounted for 13 percent of directors and 17 percent of editors, with a whole 2 percent working as directors of photography.
In other words, the Golden Age of Feminist Television is thrilling to watch and gratifying to hear its creators discuss, but, as with TV itself, things are often much better looking on the surface. It’s absolutely crucial for people—young people, in particular—to see that the creators of shows that they love are people who look like their parents and teachers and friends, to be able to see themselves in the position to construct their own stories and worlds for TV. But the flip side is that too much emphasis on all the good stuff can lead us to gloss over how many intractable barriers remain. “It’s still not enough women creators, not enough women writers,” emphasizes Women in Hollywood’s Melissa Silverstein. And, she adds, the dialogue that exists around these numbers is evidence enough that core attitudes that have informed the industry still run deep. “You don’t hear people say to the showrunner, ‘Listen, you have enough male writers on this TV show.’ But I’ve had showrunners regularly tell me stories about being told, ‘You have enough female writers now.’” The fear of a conference room in which men hear the voices of more than one woman and imagine dozens is a perception fallacy that exists in many spaces, but it’s so endemic to film and television production it’s even been studied.
Geena Davis left a celebrated career of roles in films, like 1991’s Thelma & Louise, that were supposed to change everything for women in Hollywood. They didn’t, of course, and she founded the Geena Davis Institute for Media Studies in 2004 to research and quantify gender imbalance and find ways to rectify it. More often than not, she found that male producers and studio heads with whom she spoke were shocked—shocked!—to hear how few women appeared in their movies. They scratched their heads over the Institute’s finding that in family-rated movies, women and girls comprise only 17 percent of any given crowd. “If there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50,” Davis revealed on an episode of NPR’s The Frame. And if there’s more than that, well, it may as well be a full-blown matriarchy; Davis found that in a group that was 33 percent women, men perceived themselves outnumbered.11
That said, money seems to talk at least slightly louder in television studios than in those that make movies, perhaps because the sums tend to be less bloated, and this goes some way toward explaining why television seems light-years ahead of film, if not behind the scenes than in front of them. When I interviewed Blay in July of 2015, she’d just been to the “upfronts,” the events where TV networks preview the next season’s offerings for advertisers and industry media. At ABC’s, she reported, “suddenly we’re seeing all these shows with black leads and female leads, and we’re all very excited. And I think we should be, ultimately.” But she also notes that it may be less a true measure of institutional change than one of big-money potential. “[Diversity] is not a decision that an executive has made because”—she shifts to a blissed-out voice—“‘Oh, diversity is so important and we need more powerful women onscreen.’ No! They’re doing it because they realize that we’re in a moment right now where people are more and more concerned with these things. They’re not doing it out of a moral or ethical obligation; they’re doing it to make money. And that’s the sort of insidious part of this.”
The Social (TV) Network
Television is a prime vehicle for marketplace feminism because its features and values are primarily subjective: ask fifty people what feminist television looks like, and you may well get fifty different answers. For Blay, Orange Is the New Black is the new standard, a show that “is a blueprint for how to do women on television the right way.”12 For some viewers, a feminist TV show or series is one that, regardless of the subject, is made by a staff that is diverse in race and sex and gender presentation; for others, it’s a never-before-told story that creates an entire world from scratch. And part of what seems exciting in this new Golden Age is that fans, once entirely at the mercy of the least objectionable content, now have a sense that their own voices might be a critical part of shaping TV’s trajectory, particularly in realms that have been erased, sidelined, and marginalized throughout the medium’s lifespan.
TV has a co
lorful history of audience-fueled activism. A vocal fandom saved Star Trek from cancellation after only two seasons, via a 1967 letter-writing campaign organized by a couple named Bjo and John Trimble. (“All the news at that time was about Women’s Lib and ‘the little housewife speaking up,’” Bjo recalled of her sudden media notoriety.) In the 1980s and early ’90s, the advocacy group Viewers for Quality Television convinced networks to save shows like Designing Women and Cagney & Lacey that weren’t commercial blockbusters but did attract a prized advertising demographic of middle-class, college-educated viewers. The cancellation of cult sci-fi series Firefly in 2003 provoked such an injured response from fans (and a subsequent run on DVDs of the series) that director Joss Whedon had a chance to offer closure with a stand-alone movie. And the Internet pioneered a new way to engage both audiences and creators, often at the same time.
At Television Without Pity, one of the first—and definitely the best—TV fan sites, viewers could read witty, analytical recaps of their favorite shows (often a necessity in the years before digital video recorders and instant-streaming technology made the scene) and discuss them in fan forums where writers and producers might also be lurking. As fan sites multiplied and social media enabled even more rapid response, the relationship between viewers and creators began an ineluctable shift. Everyone—literally, everyone—was a critic. But while paid, professional critics were charged with keeping an objective distance from the shows they reviewed, fan-critics had no such responsibility, and began loudly contesting plot points they hated, characters they felt were half-baked, and motivations they didn’t buy. For viewers, says Zeba Blay, “we’re at a place now where we almost can’t consume pop culture without breaking it down, even as we are entertained by it; even as we’re watching Orange Is the New Black, we’re not just watching it as this really great, funny show, we’re thinking about, ‘What does this scene say about rape?’ and ‘What does this scene say about relationships between white and black women?’ It makes me wonder what it means for us to, you know, not just gobble them up but constantly be analyzing them. Does the analyzing come to anything? Or are we just doing it because that’s just how we experience entertainment now?” The constant buzzing of social media makes it hard for creators to filter out criticism, feminist and otherwise, a fact that can be both exhilarating and discomfiting.