I have never viewed women in cinema in the same way as women on television. Film has been full of yearning to be – and subsequent internalised-misogynistic envy – towards its female characters, while female narratives on television have more often been a celebration of womanhood and educational opportunity. Television was – and still is – regarded as the death of film, the cinema, and Classic Hollywood. Television gave the viewers a broader range of options in comparison to the elitist nature of cinema. If women find themselves relating to female protagonists on the big screen, rather than glorifying and aspiring to become them, what control can male Hollywood gatekeepers of cinema ever maintain over the world? Luckily, television is freeing women from the ideals of the ‘perfect’ female character.
While noughties filmmakers fed into pop culture’s then-obsession with the ‘rich, privileged woman’, television rebelled against it. Amazing teen films, such as Mean Girls and 13 Going On 30, were glorifying the ‘mean girls’ who clearly didn’t understand their own privileges as conventionally beautiful, adored young women who girls everywhere were expected to aspire to and envy. Yet, these films also managed to also vilify these characters by portraying them as using their own desired looks and popularity to target less privileged female characters without explanation. The female characters they targeted would subsequently ‘rise up’ and retaliate by beautifying themselves and enacting the behaviour of a schoolyard bully for the cause of justice and greater good.
Several years later, Skins would portray its own Regina George, Mini McGuinness (Freya Mavor), as a teenage girl who seemed to ‘have it all’ and mistreated everyone around her out of fear of losing her power. If Skins was a teen movie in 2012, the insult “bulimic barbie” that is hurled at Mini is likely to have served as a comical ridiculing. Instead, the oxymoronic jab is not only used to highlight harmful, spite-fuelled rivalries between young women, but the reality of Mini’s drastic efforts to display a ‘perfect’ version of herself to the world. In this case, television’s ‘mean girl’ becomes more than a detested stereotype and more akin to someone to empathise with, rather than pity. When women and their actions – morally right or wrong – are explained and understood with humanity, female characters are no longer pitted against each other, removing (not all but some) discourse surrounding the ‘perfect’ woman.
As contemporary cinema attempts to leave its misogynistic origins behind, its latest obsession is the up-lifting female friendship narrative. The narratives of recent chick flicks, such as Ladybird and Book Smart, all focus on platonic love as opposed to romance – a formula television has been following quietly for years. One example is the BBC’s Miranda, whose lead characters (Miranda Hart) and Stevie (Sarah Hadland) are poles apart. In the ‘catty’ world of noughties’ chick flicks, Miranda and Stevie would become arch-enemies. Scrap that, both Miranda and Stevie would be considered too old to even sustain a friendship – a thirty-something year old woman with a career, a man, and a friend? Never! However, much of their banter and chemistry revolves around the two women’s self-awareness of how different they are to one another: Miranda is six foot and is often mistaken for a man. Stevie is petite and viewed by men as conventionally attractive. Both characters are depicted as equally deserving of desire and success. Yet again, television refuses to give airtime to the myth of the female character whose perfection is unattainable and therefore, destined to be envied by all.
Television’s treatment of female characters and narratives is on the same page as wider social and political discourse – whereas film is just about catching up. For shows such as SKAM, Sana Bakkoush – a female muslim protagonist starring on Norway’s main broadcast netwrok – is leading the way for not only well-written female leads who celebrate female community, but also those a rise in a mainstream, intersectional understadning of feminisim in media. . Hunter Schafer in Euphoria, Laverne Cox in Orange Is The New Black and Jamie Clayton in Sense8 are all trans actresses cast in major television shows, and serve as examples of a rise in non-traditional, LGBTQ + female narratives television has brought to the mainstream.
One television series which defies the archetypes which so often surround female narratives is Fleabag. Its titular character (Phoebe-Waller Bridge) is a more sinister, manipulative Miranda. She could never be a film character since, as a conventionally-beautiful, upper-class woman who attracts man after man, she is beyond the Hollywood narrative’s methods of repairing ‘broken’ women.
However, this brings problems of its own. Yes, Fleabag, is great, but there are only so many times that a female protagonist can screw up and become isolated in her own ways. In a way, this plot pattern can potentially reinforce age-old assumptions of mentally ill women as unlovable, apathetic, and without a doubt, worthy of punishment. Don’t get me wrong, I love Fleabag. She is possibly one of the most well-written and naturally multifaceted female characters in the world of television. I just can’t help but describe her characterisation as one step forward in progressing female characters and two steps back in using age-old preconceived ideas about ‘broken’ women. All the same, Fleabag isn’t even unapologetic when she wallows in the consequences of her own poor decisions. She enjoys wallowing in it. She won’t have a sudden epitome, like Amy Schumer in Trainwreck or Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids. She is beyond the possibility of ever ‘achieving’ the happy ending of becoming the perfect woman.
This summer, This Way Up has been changing this. Aisling Bea portrays Aine, an Irish EFL teacher in Britain, who spends each episode attempting to convince her loved ones that she has fully recovered and moved on from her off-screen nervous breakdown. Aine isn’t your stereotypical ‘broken’ female character. She doesn’t need to be fixed, she just needs to be shown how to accept help with and to cope with her anxieties. It’s difficult not to watch Aine’s antics through the sympathetic eyes of her sister, played by Sharon Horgan, who is desperate to, but cannot, save Aine from herself. The intertwining of tragedy and comedy is fascinating as Aine attempts to conceal the true, downward-spiralling state of her mental health with the gauze of jokes and witty one-liners.
In the Twenty-First Century, our celebration of womanhood places an emphasis of ‘having it all’. But as a recent documentary series Kathy Burke’s All Women points out, this can lead to further unnecessary expectations being placed on women. A vast majority of female-centered films have always simplified the obstacles which women encounter in their pursuit of ‘having it all’. At the height of shoulder pads and the rise of the business woman (see: Working Girl) the 1980s, Eurythmics sang ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves’. As the golden age of television coincides with #MeToo and ‘self-care’, television programmes, such as Fleabag and This Way Up, are portraying women achieving personal victories not for glory, approval, and affection, but truly for themselves.
