At any rate, I'm working things out. Moving forward, I think, although more like a snail than a cheetah. Nothing about this process is fast and streamlined, and it all seems to leave a messy trail behind it. Is that just life? I don't know. I'm still figuring this damn thing out for myself, and I'm not exactly doing a great job of it.
There are people out there who have it all figured out. I'd like to find those people and stuff them through a wood chipper. I'd interrogate them first--how the fuck did you get all the answers? Cheater! CHEATER!--but in the end, it's the wood chipper for them. Let's see them find the answer to being sliced and diced!!
(Some people say I have a sadistic side. I don't know what they're talking about.)
But while I'm muddling through, let's talk TV. More specifically, let's talk women and TV. It's kind of a touchy subject, especially since we, as a nation, have supposedly Defeated Sexism And Sent It Screaming For The Hills. Sarcastic capital letters aside, the depictions of women on television shows have changed a great deal in the past few decades--but they've settled into a series of new stereotypes that are very rarely broken, and are almost as frustrating as those of the 1950s and 60s.
I have a theory that most men can absolutely never write a satisfying female character. She's always one-dimensional, and most often (if she's the heroine) she's their ultimate fantasy. The real culprit of that is John Grisham. Allow me to take a moment and say: FUCK JOHN GRISHAM. I mean, seriously. Every single one of his female characters is leggy, gorgeous, intelligent, and always always always always always a fucking damsel in distress. There's never any variation, never any sort of freshness to his characters. Dan Brown is also terrible with this, but he's an awful writer, so his female stereotypes are less of a problem.
Admittedly, those are books and I'm talking about TV. But if you look at your program lineup, you'll see only a couple of female stereotypes dominate: the no-nonsense businesswoman (every incarnation of Law and Order), the sensible wife (every fat-guy-hot-wife sitcom ever), the clueless ditz/slut (Big Bang Theory and weirdly enough, Psych) and the kickass sexpot (every crime show on CBS).
It's rare that you
see a female character that's able to break this mold believably. Usually when a writer tries, it seems like he or she is just randomly throwing character traits or back-story in there to mix things up. When this happens, it fails miserably. Take, for example, Psych. The character of Juliet O'Hara, played by Maggie Lawson, is a junior detective at the Santa Barbara Police Department. She has a gun, she has a badge, she has detectoring powers (yeah. It's a thing.) But despite all that, her chief role on the show is just to sort of stand around and giggle at whatever Shawn and Gus do. She's not active, and she's not interesting. The writers have tried to give her angst (which is the most common character-flesher-outer), and they've tried to give her romance, and it just hasn't worked. Detective O'Hara remains as two-dimensional as one of those cardboard cutouts that I always secretly lust over at FYE.
One show that I think has admirably created a couple of female characters that have been interesting and believable is How I Met Your Mother. Robin (Cobie Smulders) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan) are fun twenty-somethings that I can actually see as real people. They're not spoiled, but they're not perfect. They swear. They can keep up with the boys, but they make space for girl-time. They're funny, they're goofy, they're somewhat crass--I think I know them! And the most interesting thing about this, from my perspective at least, is that they were created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas--two MEN.
Anyways, that's just a brief little rant about women on TV today. There will probably be more--I have a lot to say on this subject.
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