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ROME — Every so often a friend who works as a talent scout for a production company calls me to ask if I have any books to recommend. Books with tough female protagonists, she tells me, that can inspire TV series.
Today it seems that putting an emancipated female character at the very center is a basic prerequisite for building a successful TV show. There is no getting away from self-determined, accomplished women in fulfilling professions, sometimes even tougher, if not authoritarian women who are always smarter than their male counterparts.
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Having definitively debunked detectives, investigators, policewomen, even women in leadership roles are beginning to be numerous. Series about proto-feminists, such as the first modern female Italian lawyer (The Law According to Lidia Poët starring Matilda De Angelis), or the scientist in Lessons in Chemistry (Brie Larson), are popular with audiences. Of course, those all come in the wake of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s success, in which television writer Amy Sherman-Palladino chronicles a woman in the 1950s who embarks on a career as a stand-up comedian.
Welcome complexities
TV in the days of pop feminism produced undeniably good, sometimes also memorable things, bringing finally complex female characters to life. For instance, now cult series such as The Morning Show, which delved into the most controversial meanderings of the #MeToo movement; or Big Little Lies, which chronicled, among other things, gender violence within a glossy, bourgeois world.
Women are no longer two-dimensional — as they always were in patriarchal culture. They are no longer just saints or whores, witches or madonnas, wives, girlfriends, housewives; they have become the protagonists of their own stories.
Yet these female characters listed so far are sentimentally unresolved to say the least.
It is undeniable that characters like Daenerys Targaryen (Game of Thrones) or Fleabag (protagonist of the eponymous series) have had a major impact on society and have even influenced the collective unconscious by offering something completely new.
Yet while these women are no longer tropes or a set of stereotypes, all of the female characters listed so far are sentimentally unresolved to say the least. And perhaps they are so precisely because feminism has not yet come to terms with “the dream of love,” as feminist theorist Lea Melandri would say.
We are almost always presented with women in crisis, heartbroken, abandoned, betrayed or engaged in an unhappy or lopsided love relationship. They are accomplished at work but submissive in love life, lead extraordinary enterprises but are betrayed by charmless men, shine in public, but desperate in the private sphere.
A need for conflict
For example, Ted Lasso‘s lovely Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) is president of the Premier League soccer team coached by Lasso, a boss in all appearances. But she turns out to be as insecure as a puppy when it comes to having a new relationship following a stinging divorce from her powerful and misogynistic ex-husband.
Is it fair to ask, then, whether feminism has succeeded in imposing models of emancipated women even in love, or do we, viewers, not mind suffering with them and identifying with them at all? And again: is the love conflict still the one that works the best from the perspective of the narrative arc?
If it is true that “all stories are love stories,” as Irish novelist Robert McLiam Wilson wrote, or at any rate all stories are stories of transformation, then it is clear that “there is always a need for conflict, a problem to be solved that involves change,” says Marina Pierri, author of Heroines. How TV series characters can help us flourish.
“In the Italian market, it is still difficult to build an antiheroine, a Fleabag.”
“Then there is a second theme, which is mainly Italian and concerns the likability of female characters: heroines must be lovable, graceful,” Pierri adds. “A tough protagonist is fine, but she must be softened by her dedication, by her belonging to the female realm.”
I immediately think of Lolita Lobosco, the police commissioner protagonist of the eponymous Italian series based on author Gabriella Genisi’s novels: a strong woman, better than her male subordinates, but problematic and unhappy in her relationships with men.
“In the Italian market, it is still difficult to build an antiheroine, a Fleabag,” Pierri says, “There is an economic demand to attract a very large audience. In general, in television, female characters’ professional happiness corresponds to a sentimental unhappiness. Today, we have a plurality of female points of view. Characters like Jessica Fletcher (Murder, She Wrote), whose only weakness was her love of writing, were already very modern. Perhaps today, we have no one like her.”
A lack of sentimentalism
But are there really so many female protagonists in TV series? And are there more female directors and screenwriters than in the past?
In Italy, Paola Cortellesi’s film There’s Still Tomorrow was a box office champion, but there are still very few women behind the camera. In the U.S., this year’s Academy Awards showed that cinema is still quite inaccessible to women: despite being a box office smash and international phenomenon, Barbie was not a success at the Oscars.
At both the Oscars (which began in 1929) and the Golden Globes (which began in 1944), only three women have won Best Director. In 2019, 12% of films were directed by a woman, and 20% were written by a female screenwriter, according to data released by Women and Hollywood. Those figures are almost identical today, according to the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative think tank.
Yet the situation is a bit better on streaming services. The think tank found that in 2021, 26.9% of Netflix films were directed by women and 38% of show creators were women, up significantly from 26.9% in 2018.
It’s almost as though writers have trouble creating imperfect or inadequate characters.
While there is no such data in Italy, two women are running the country’s most important platforms: Eleonora “Tinny” Andreatta at Netflix Italia and Maria Pia Ammirati at Rai Fiction. And there are quite a few women writing for film, TV and platforms, said screenwriter Flaminia Gressi.
Among other shows, Gressi created Circeo, perhaps the first truly feminist series produced by Rai, Italy’s national public broadcaster, and available on its streaming service RaiPlay. “While there are few female directors — it really is a problem in the industry — there are more female screenwriters,” Gressi says, citing, for example, Elena Ferrante and Laura Paolucci for My Brilliant Friend, the TV series based on Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.
“In Italy, the characters are strong professional women who have the world in their hands; they’re extraordinary and empowered — even more so if they are minorities, for example Black or trans women. It’s almost as though writers have trouble creating imperfect or inadequate characters. And when a character is, it is on the sentimental side: the character knows how to do everything except fall in love,” Gressi says, adding that these “tough, edgy women in conflict with the world” are called “Nordic characters.”
Gressi notes one exception: Euphoria protagonist Rue (played by Zendaya). She is a controversial character, because her conflict is not with the world, but with herself;: she is the one who has a fatal wound.
A truly free woman
In the essay Feminism is not a brand, Jennifer Guerra writes that there is a certain rhetoric today that “constructs an idea of a strong, self-confident, educated woman, who always knows what she wants and is able to compete with the hubris of male sexuality. But isn’t this image yet another representation of the female subject endowed with self-control and resilience that came with neoliberalism?”
In a 2020 New York Times opinion article, American filmmaker Brit Marling wrote: “I don’t want to be a strong female lead either, if my power is defined largely by violence and domination, conquest and colonization.” Today that sounds prophetic. Marling envisioned the creation of a character that was that of a truly free woman, digging into her desires, her necessities, her buried needs. Those same needs buried, among other things, to meet the desires, needs and wants of men.
