How Netflix cashes in on the fashion for women behaving badly
First they just wanted to have fun, but now they’re behaving very badly. Streaming services have created a whole new cohort of women with attitude — and guns. What does it say about our hunger for the anti-hero?
We are two decades into the golden age of television, which was jump-started by a dodgy band of antiheroes — Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper and Omar Little — whom we didn’t warm to yet couldn’t stop watching.
While we binged on box sets of long-form dramas featuring casual executions, pop-up meth labs and chronic infidelity, antiheroes dominated the spotlight as generations of morally flawed male characters from Macbeth to Dirty Harry, had done before them.
These days, however, a new archetype — the woman who behaves badly — has moved into writers’ rooms and into the limelight across free-to-air, cable and video streaming platforms. As often as not, she is as likely to kill, break the law, cheat on her partner or neglect her children as her male antecedents.
From British actor Jodie Comer’s Emmy award-winning portrayal of wild-eyed assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve; to Laura Linney’s frosty turn as the complicit wife of a money launderer in Ozark; Claire Danes’ decade-long depiction of the bipolar, child-abandoning, virgin-seducing CIA agent in Homeland, and Australian Sarah Snook’s Emmy-nominated portrayal of a coolly calculating media heiress in Succession, the anti-heroine is now a permanent fixture on our smart screens.
It’s easy to forget, as Time magazine’s Eliana Dockterman has reported, that up until the past decade, “shows about women made by women had always been rare’’. Female-centred comedies such as Murphy Brown, Sex and the City and SeaChange broke new ground in the ’80s and ’90s, but mostly, they were exceptions.
As Dockterman observes: “Networks perceived women as a niche audience and argued that there simply wasn’t room for women’s stories in prime time. But with the rise of Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, space became limitless, nullifying the sexist excuses of the past.’’
American drama Why Women Kill, now streaming on SBS on Demand, underlines the new paradigm’s stunning role reversal: The show’s opening credits are accompanied by animations of 1950s women who gaily murder their spouses, with one throwing an electric fan into her husband’s bath (that old trick!)
Why Women Kill is not a documentary about domestic violence, but a camp comedy dreamt up by Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry. It focuses on three women who live in the same Californian mansion in different decades and are driven to kill someone they love, or once loved. The twist is that these well-heeled lead characters — a cheated-on ’60s housewife (Ginnifer Goodwin); an ’80s socialite (Lucy Liu) whose husband has affairs with men, and a millennial lawyer in an open marriage (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) — will remain more sympathetic than their victims, even when they have blood on their hands.
This is surely a sign that the anti-heroine has arrived, double standards notwithstanding. (Let’s face it, any comedy that opened with images of men knocking off their female partners set to parodic lyrics about how “love was made for you and me,’’ would be cancelled long before it was pitched. Yet, despite lukewarm reviews, Cherry’s CBS web series has been renewed for a second season.)
The impulse to kill is never far away in Netflix drama Ozark, about a middle-class American family forced to become money launderers for a Mexican crime cartel. Initially, Linney’s Wendy Byrde is a victim of her husband’s bad decisions; a former political adviser and stay-at-home mum, she becomes caught up in an underworld nightmare not of her making.
On the other hand, from the outset, she is a morally compromised figure who is having an affair with an older lover who (in one of the show’s many shock tactic set pieces) is thrown off a high-rise building by drug-running gangsters. Despite her lover’s brutal murder, Wendy is nothing if not pragmatic: By season two, she is buying a funeral home and blackmailing local politicians so she and her husband can “wash’’ millions of dollars of cartel money. And dispose of the body of a murdered cartel minion.
Then again, Linney’s character looks like Jacinda Ardern compared to her female neighbours in the lakeside Missouri community she and her family escape to. Two local women — one of whom could pass for a schoolgirl — commit murder without betraying a shred of remorse. In one of the killings, the wife of an opium grower shoots the head off a Mexican cartel member because he calls her a “redneck”. She is a redneck — she hates Mexicans and blacks — but clearly, she is a redneck with standards.
What factors underlie the inexorable rise of such transgressive leading ladies? UK television writer Sarah Hughes has noted how the past decade has “rung in some huge changes for television — perhaps greater than in any other single decade’’. A key change was the exponential growth of Netflix “from an online DVD rental service to the world’s biggest streaming platform”, and the explosion of content (and roles for women) on this and other streaming platforms.
Another factor is the rise of female showrunners who go on to make female-led shows, a trend that has accelerated over the past decade. Among these auteurs are Lena Dunham (Girls), Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag), Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe and Motherland), Jenji Kohan (Weeds and Orange is the New Black), and Australia’s Alison Bell (The Letdown).
Hughes discusses a third, less obvious trend: the death of the anti-hero and the ascendancy of a more nuanced form of masculinity seen in shows such as Succession and The Bodyguard.
“The era of prestige cable TV was also the age of the anti-hero,’’ she argues on the BBC website. “ … TV drama was stuffed full of brooding, complicated men doing the wrong thing even as they struggled to get it right. But, as the decade progressed, so the types of men we saw on screen began to change, with fewer alpha-males, and more questioning of masculine norms.’’
She says that for the younger male characters in the Emmy Award-winning drama Succession — which focuses on power plays inside a media and entertainment mogul’s family — “winning isn’t the prize it first appears’’. Rather than compete with her brothers for influence inside the family business, Snook’s Shiv Roy becomes a political operative who initially blazes her own path — aligning herself with a politician who detests everything her influential father and his multinational business represents.
Snook, who was nominated for an Emmy for her performance, is the ultimate Teflon anti-heroine: she projects a permanently bemused and detached air that means no one can read her thoughts.
In series one, she confesses to her adoring (and annoyingly obsequious) husband on their wedding night that “I had a little number’’ (an affair), as if she’s fessing up to having one cocktail too many. (She has, of course, invited the lover to the grand wedding in an English country house.) “I’m not sure I’m a good fit for a monogamous marriage,’’ she says, fearing it could be a “box-set death march’’. Yet the over-the-top wedding, conducted in front of the famous and feted, was her idea. Even on her wedding night, it’s clear that Shiv’s only loyalty is to herself, and that makes her a screen heroine for our times.
Succession is produced by high-end pay television network HBO, but interestingly, a new study by San Diego State University has found that in 2019-20, it was the new kids on the block — the streamers — which were home to the highest proportion of female protagonists.
According to the study, “original programs appearing on streaming services featured substantially more female protagonists than programs on cable channels or broadcast networks. By platform, 42 per cent of streaming programs had clearly identifiable sole female protagonists, (while) 27 per cent of cable programs and 24 per cent of broadcast programs featured female protagonists.”
The streamers were also doing the most to advance the careers of women off-screen. According to the study, “women also reached historic highs as creators, directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors, and directors of photography on streaming programs’’.
In her 2016 book The Rise of the Anti-Heroine in TV’s Third Golden Age, academic Margaret Tally credits premium TV network Showtime as being the leading, early champion of the 21st century anti-heroine through shows such as Homeland and Weeds, which revolved around a suburban “bad mother’’ (Mary Louise Parker) who sells marijuana to support her family.
Free-to-air networks, and especially Netflix, subsequently picked up the baton, with the streaming behemoth having “gone so far as to create a specific category called TV Programs Featuring a Strong Female Lead’’. This move, Tally argues, is a business strategy as much as a social and cultural evolution.
Netflix executives, she writes, are “aggressive in terms of following how their viewers are streaming their programs. For example, more women are now ‘bingewatching’ television shows than men are … and Netflix has arguably taken the lead with developing programs that are ‘bingeworthy’.
“This is part of their larger business strategy of focusing on data about what their viewers are watching and using this as a basis for making decisions about what kind of content they will create.’’
The bigger point, she says, is that “Netflix, like Showtime, has realised the potential for creating content that features anti-heroines as a way to draw large audiences”.
It’s clearly a radical change that half the population are no longer treated as a niche audience and that lead female characters are seen as boosting the bottom line of a multinational company.
But, as I asked in 2017, do TV’s wicked women reflect the true complexity of female identity and experience, or are showrunners fetishising badness in a bid to court notoriety and attract subscribers in an increasingly crowded field? Around that time we saw a plethora of shows, including House of Cards and Game of Thrones, where transgression by female characters was promoted as innovation and shock tactics masqueraded as serious art.
In Game of Thrones we saw a female character feed her abusive husband to his killer dogs, and in House of Cards, Robin Wright’s Claire Underwood poisoned her lover, a decent man, then watched him die as she had vigorous sex with him. At times, Ozark indulges in the same kind of hysterical realism about rural Americans, constructing these characters as backward, amoral and cunning.
Elsewhere, showrunners’ appetite for sensationalism has been dialled back, in favour of more nuanced representations. Olivia Colman’s restrained portrayal of the Queen in Netflix’s The Crown is a case in point, as is the bingeable drama, The Split, which recently screened on the ABC. It centres on a lawyer and married mother of three (played by Nicola Walker) who conducts a tortured affair with an old flame. Walker’s character is the chief transgressor in her marriage (what’s more, her lover is an outrageously good-looking singleton straight out of chicklit heaven). Even so, we barrack for the emotionally torn protagonist at least some of the time — a reflection of how the old Madonna/whore binary is dissolving into something more finely calibrated and complex.
As The Hollywood Reporter’s Robyn Bahr recently wrote: “The deluge of streaming content continues to flood the entertainment marketplace, (so) there’s finally room for more than just charismatic scoundrels to mesmerise us. It’s now the women’s turn to breathe fire …. (and) there’s power in watching women get to be likeable and villainous simultaneously.’’