Illustrations by Alice Wilson
The anti-hero has been a recurring television trope in recent years and has become a phenomenon inextricably linked with the golden era of television currently within our midst. Characters like Walter White and Tony Soprano have left an indelible impression on television audiences and with rumours circulating that Ellen Page and Kate Mara are to join the ranks of detectives in HBO’s True Detective, one cannot help but ask where has the anti-heroine been hiding? A study carried out by USC Annenberg and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media stated that strong female characters are few and far between and that for every Carrie Mathison (Homeland’s Claire Danes), there are six Real Housewives, who continue to perpetuate the representation of male superiority.
Women, however, have found their televisual niche in sitcoms and comedy, reaching their zenith in 2012 with a vast array of shows debuting such as 2 Broke Girls, New Girl and The Mindy Project. The women portrayed in these series talk frankly about sex, sleep around, curse profusely, and crack jokes as sexual or as politically incorrect as they please. These characteristics, usually attributed to males, are refreshing to see, and reflect the growing breed of independent, freethinking female characters, allowed to make mistakes and to develop and grow as characters, free from the expectations that had previously paralysed any sense of agency. Female characters are put first and although some cliches of the sitcom genre exist — getting dumped, going on a first date, etc. — these women are defined independent of their menfolk.
Tropes such as falling in love with a straight woman, co-parenting and love triangles have become a common occurrence in mainstream media and have hardened into clichés similar to that associated with their heterosexual counterparts.
This rise has been challenged by their male counterparts, who no doubt feel threatened by the growing success of these sitcoms, a once overarchingly male domain. In 2012, Lee Aronsohn, showrunner of Two and a Half Men stated that television had reached its “peak-vagina” and was experiencing a “labia saturation”, fanning the flames to the now well-known “Are women funny?” debate. The critical acclaim and popular success of these shows suggest that Aronsohn is mistaken, and that the representation of women in this light suggest that television representations have changed greatly in the last 20 years alone to accommodate the changing role of women in society.
The portrayal of women has not been as polarizing in recent years, the same cannot be said of the representation of LGBT characters on television, which experiences equal bouts of regression and progression. Controversy, for example, has been sparked by RTE’s new sitcom The Centre which crudely and openly mocks a pre-op trans* woman. LGBT characters no longer occupy a silent role on British and American television and have commandeered the starring roles in many popular series such as Queer as Folk, which was the first hour-long drama on television to portray the lives of gay men and women. In 1997 Ellen DeGeneres’ lead character in Ellen came out in a special episode, becoming the first gay lead on national television.
Seven years later, the success of The L Word, especially amongst the LGBT community, drew attention to the progressive attitudes of the industry towards realistic depictions of lesbian relationships and sex. Tropes such as falling in love with a straight woman, co-parenting and love triangles have become a common occurrence in mainstream media and have hardened into cliches similar to that associated with their heterosexual counterparts. Criticism has been levelled against this series in particular for perpetuating the gender binary and reifying heteronormativity. Although it has been termed the “queer successor” to Sex and the City, the show places greater emphasis on privileged heterosexual norms such as monogamy and committed relationships, and the female protagonists are heavily punished when they veer from this norm. Whilst Samantha, Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte may experience backlash and fallout from their infidelities or that of their partners, they do not experience the same breakdown of mental health and social ostracisation as the L Word protagonists. Moreover, all the lesbians depicted in this show can be considered “lipstick lesbians” — glamorous women attractive to straight men, thus continuing women’s subjection to the male gaze. No “butch” women appear on the show throughout its six series and the show was criticised for its transphobic portrayal of Max, originally Moira, the only transgender character in the show. The series refused to blur the lines of sexual identity and whilst actress Laverne Cox marks television history in Orange is the New Black as the first transgender actress to play a transgender role, series like this and The L Word portray lesbian relationships as liminal, subject to change depending on the presence or absence of males and the charged libido of the inmates.
Whilst the physicality of lesbian relationships are portrayed on screen with increasing frequency, the same cannot be said of homosexual relationships. To a certain degree gay characters are still often portrayed as asexual, or if they are in relationships, these relationships are sterilised with little or no displays of affection. In Glee, for example, a blatant contrast can be seen between Kurt and Blaine’s relationship and that of Santana and Brittany, the former reduced to chaste kissing, the latter shown making out in their tight-fitting cheerleading uniforms, offering an easy means of attracting male viewers. In Modern Family, the relationship between Mitch and Cameron lacks physicality, particularly its failure to show the couple kissing, a failure rectified with a chaste kiss in the second season.
Moreover, recent representations of gay men on television have been predominantly young, white, middle class Caucasians as seen in series such as Modern Family and Will and Grace. This “desirable” representation of homosexuality is a mirror image of the ideal image of straight men. Those of differing economic class or race are portrayed as occupying a silenced centre, as seen in the character of Omar Little in The Wire, who walks the streets of Baltimore at the dead of night, appearing and disappearing like a ghost, unconfined to a hetero-normative narrative.
Whilst debate still rages as to whether television is at the forefront of changing attitudes in the representation of women and the LGBT community, it continues to provide an intriguing medium to examine the conflicting notions and attitudes that are still prevalent in society. One thing is certain, characters in recent television series are more complex and engaged in more nuanced relationships and structures than previous generations, and these entanglements make for compelling television.
