Is TV for the Girlies?

Compared to the “boys' club” of the film industry, TV has always been for the ladies… for better or worse. This, in so many words - so many more academic words - was the topic of my master's thesis, and remains my main squeeze, if you will. Is TV a feminized medium? Duh, of course it is. I believe this not just because some of the first series I ever binged were female-led - Sex and the City, United States of Tara, Orange is the New Black - back before I looked at TV with a critical eye, but also because television was, in more ways than one, built on the backs of women.

MJ Robinson describes TV as a synecdoche: a term that represents every part of a whole. When we talk about TV we’re not just talking about a TV set anymore, or even what’s physically on the screen, we're talking about everything that it encompasses and that encompasses it — broadcast TV, network programming, the studio industry, commercial advertising, scripts, series, streaming, and the stories told on screen. It’s textual, paratextual and contextual all at once. Particularly now that the parameters of viewership have expanded beyond the TV set, it’s hard to define exactly what TV is. Is it still TV if I watch it on my laptop in bed? What if I torrent it? Is YouTube TV? Who’s to say.

In its early days, the majority of television (particularly daytime TV) was created for women, marketed towards women, and largely weaponized against them. In post-war suburban America, when television was widely introduced and only consumed in domestic spaces, it was the ideal catalyst by which to engage with the middle-class homemaker: suburbia’s shiny new consumer with time and money to blow!

Early print ads depict Rockwellian families gathered before a television set, targeting women as the primary consumers almost as if to say “If you buy our TV set, you’ll be the perfect host, the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect woman.” Academic Lynn Spigel argues TV replaced the piano as the domestic familial hub, but carried forward the unyielding pressures of Victorian hospitality onto the modern woman. Once the TV set was in your family room, every show and commercial that flashed across its screen advertised illusory domestic ideals.

TV - it’ll rot your brain!

However, domesticity is the very thing that distinguishes television from other cinematic media. To me, this is what makes TV so accessible and intimate… but it’s also the reason that, up until recently, it wasn’t taken seriously as an art form. Not unlike boy bands or the colour pink, the trivialization of TV is easily attributed to its feminized roots. Society doesn’t look favourably upon the female consumer base, even if they’re a major economic asset.

In other words, TV is feminized due to its heavily female audience-base, but also for its familiarity with the viewer. At its core, TV was intended to be viewed in the comfort of your own home, with your family and even a good TV dinner, if you’re so inclined. It’s domiciliary, it is the homemaker!

The rise of “Prestige TV” in the early aughts marked a shift in the artistic significance of television. As much as I love The Sopranos, it is curious that we mark the beginning of this era with a slew of shows centred around the adult male mid-life crisis (and why we don’t esteem Sex and the City as highly as Sopranos.)

Unfortunately, even though TV was so heavily marketed towards women for so long, women took up little space behind the scenes, which meant even less room for nuanced female characters on screen. Until now.

Television’s “feminine” qualities — domesticity, intimacy, and accessibility — create the perfect storm for dramatizing the female experience. It is my opinion that a story like Fleabag or I May Destroy You could not succeed as a film with the same impact. It’s also no coincidence that these writers, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Michaela Coel both started out in theatre, but that’s a rant for another day. The feminine origins of the institution of television have trickled down to form a new era of TV from which female auteurs can reclaim television as a medium.

This was a very long winded way of saying TV is undoubtedly for the girlies.