TV’s young women and their epic personal problems

By On November 14, 2012 · 3 Comments · In Pop Culture

I was poking around the internet the other day for news pieces to discuss on Monday’s episode of Yeah, What She Said (8 p.m. MT! Dig it!) and I came across this blog post on The Sexes, the new sex and gender issues channel from The Atlantic (lolz cashing in on “The End of Men” much?) and I thought it was pretty interesting.

Meghan Lewit writes about the peculiar trend of female characters on TV who are competent in their professional lives but total disasters in their personal lives. For some reason, many of these women happen to be doctors. Mindy Kaling’s character Mindy Lahiri on her new show, The Mindy Project, is the most recent example of this phenomenon. They’re always professionally on the ball but in their personal lives, it’s one embarrassment after the other (usually having something to do with men).

Lewit highlights multiple examples of these women and the current antidote to them all, Leslie Knope, but she doesn’t really explore why TV has so many pathetic female characters. I’m not entirely sure why either, but I’m going to take a stab at it.

Is it because so many women are (supposedly) insecure about themselves? Would a perfect woman not sell/bring in the target female viewership? Is this just an extension of the classic schmo Dad sitcom model? And if so, am I taking this all too seriously? (Don’t answer that.)

I write/talk a lot about The Good Wife and how it is my favourite show on TV (other than Game of Thrones, I know, weird). I love it because Michelle and Robert King write a lot of thoughtful, smart plot lines about technology and gender — two subjects areas I am most interested in — and they have great female leads. Not only are they intelligent, confident, fully drawn characters, the female leads are essential to the plot lines and the show passes the Bechdel Test with flying colours.

But I don’t know that many young women who watch The Good Wife, compared to say, New Girl or The Mindy Project. I think that many young women look for TV shows that reflect themselves and The Good Wife isn’t exactly a show about young women. It talks more about parenting and marriage issues than it does dating and sex issues. Alicia Florrick is comfortable with her sexuality and her career, she just can’t decide if she really wants to be married to her cheating not-quite-ex husband.

So maybe young women relate more to Jess on New Girl and Mindy on The Mindy Project and Bilson on Hart of Dixie. Maybe they want to see women that they feel reflect themselves — smart, well-educated and successful but wholly unsuccessful in finding love and kind of awkward in their personal lives. Maybe it makes young women feel better about themselves. That they don’t have to have it all figured out, but eventually, like Meredith on Grey’s Anatomy, they will marry that dude with whom they have a totally weird affair and live happily ever after with their beautiful adopted child in their beautiful home.

But why does it have to be that way? To continue the example, New Girl and The Mindy Project were both created by and are written by young women. It’s not like we’re at the mercy of some out-of-touch older writer who doesn’t understand our trials and tribulations. Heck, when New Girl gets it right, the jokes about the great misfortunes of being in your twenties are spot on. And yet I am often reduced to watching a woman well into her thirties flail around in a romper, or something.

I prefer more aspirational TV characters, which is why I like Diane Lockhart on The Good Wife so much. She’s older, confident, established and single, without being pathetic, which is a nice flip of the traditional narrative about older women (we’re living in a Hillary Clinton Power World now, darlings). It would be nice if we could see a woman in her thirties (maybe a woman in her twenties is asking for too much) portrayed in such a positive way on TV.

As long as we continue to portray fully grown women in their twenties and thirties as total children on TV, we continue to allow women to be infantilized. Truthfully, men are being infantilized too, and many in my generation have opted to take the slow route to adulthood, but the dearth of young women on TV who are professionally and personally successful is kind of depressing.

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  • http://twitter.com/colinbrandt Colin Brandt

    OH LOOK ITS COLIN BEING CONTRARIAN.

    The shows you’ve referenced as examples of shows where the female leads are disasterpieces in their personal life while successful in their professional life are all comedies. Doesn’t it make some sense that these characters would be, in some way, damaged or dysfunctional? Comedy is pretty hard to mine when your characters are all competent – I can think of only one series (Seinfeld) where the lead character was both professionally and personally successful, and Jerry was the least funny part of that show.

    Look at Liz Lemon – she’s another example of the successful career mixed with the pathetic personal life, and she is playing a character a little older – probably closer to Diane Lockhart than Jess or Mindy. Her competence at her job is demonstrated on basically every episode, but the major conflict of that show is how badly that job effects her personal life. Also, she is occasionally a disaster with guys in that way that makes absolutely no sense (seriously, Tina Fey is exponentially more attractive than “Adorkable” over on Fox). If Liz ran TGS perfectly and had a perfect personal life, don’t you think she would be infinitely less fun to watch?

    • allisonmcneely

      I concede that comedies need material and mining your characters for their flaws is a great way to dig up jokes. To be fair, New Girl mines the female and male characters (poor Schmidt!) for material. But I do think it’s possible to create funny situations and not totally undermine the character. For example, the women on How I Met Your Mother are funny and they get themselves into pickles, but on the whole, their private lives are not total train wrecks. There is a difference between having occasional comedic challenges and just writing off the entire character as a fuck up (see: Mindy Lahiri).

      And to be honest, I’m bored with Liz Lemon. I don’t watch 30 Rock because I believe it’s one of the most over-hyped shows on TV (#hater). Liz Lemon, as Tiger Beatdown pointed out, is totally implausible as a trainwreck. She’s young, thin, smart and generally kind-hearted — her life being the worst literally doesn’t make sense. At least the Mindy Lahiri character is kind of a jerk and therefore it makes sense that she has so many personal problems.

      TL;DR — I think it’s really lazy, unimaginative comedy to assume that the only way women can be funny is if they’re thrown under the bus. They can be flawed and get into comedic messes without being totally insufferable lunatics.

      • http://twitter.com/colinbrandt Colin Brandt

        Fair point, but would you describe Jess as an insufferable lunatic? Wait, don’t answer that. I find her insufferable, but that may just be because her character makes me want to carve out my eyesocket with a spoon. I’m pretty sure my affection for Liz Lemon has a lot to do with my ridiculous crush on Tina Fey and little to do with her character, particularly in later season when she becomes kind of a bummer.

        I’m all for professionally and personally competent women in comedy – there are plenty of examples of women that mine the yuks because they are contemptible failures, and to the extent that that reinforces that ladies gotta be neurotic or terrible in some way to be funny, and I agree that it’s not acceptable if that is the only model available. I guess that I’m probably as tired of twenty-something male characters on sitcoms who are portrayed as neurotic shitheads, are incapable of growing up (see, TED FUCKING MOSBY, AUUGH I FUCKING HATE THAT GUY AND HIS SHITTY DAVID SCHWIMMER IMPRESSION)

        I probably should have just stuck to the point that you were comparing drama to comedy, but I can even poke holes in that argument pretty quickly.

        Basically I’m conceding my entire argument and changing the subject. Have you seen Firefly? I’d love to hear what you think of that show and how it manages gender. I DEMAND A VIEWING PARTY.