We’re not quite finished with the 2011 Upfronts—the annual event where the television networks unveil their fall schedules and hype their new, upcoming offerings—but it’s already looking like one of the most female-centric primetime TV landscapes in a long time. New shows led by Debra Messing, Chelsea Handler, Ashley Judd, Ginnifer Goodwin, Emily VanCamp, Kerry Washington, Zooey Deschanel, Krysten Ritter, and Jaime Pressly are all poised to become vehicles for strong women living independent lives.
But while all of those shows got the green light (so far, we’ve heard from ABC, NBC, and Fox), so too did three shows with more “throwback” approaches to feminism and female empowerment. The series—two dramas set in the 1960s and a reboot of Charlie’s Angels from the ’70s—seem to be presenting audiences with more vintage looks at women and femininity.
On NBC, there’s The Playboy Club, which features women in the traditional Playboy Bunny outfits, ears and all. They work as waitresses, dancers, and accessories—but not prostitutes, one asserts in the show’s trailer—and make bank off of rich men. It all looks very glamorous for the male club patrons, a notion only propelled further by promotional language from NBC: “They’re your wildest dreams. The club makes them come true. All you need is the key.”
ABC is launching a series from a similar era called Pan Am, starring Christina Ricci, which tells the 1960s-set story of an airline team with enviable, Don Draper–style pilots and sexy, would-be pin-ups posing as stewardesses. Many of the stewardesses, it seems from early buzz, will become card-carrying members of the Mile High Club over the course of a few episodes. The ABC press release winks, “The planes are glamorous, the pilots are rock stars, and the stewardesses are the most desirable women in the world.”
These rookies, along with the crime-fighting beauties we’ll be seeing in Charlie’s Angels, are troubling to Maureen Dowd, a writer for The New York Times who sees the upcoming television season as a return to “Jiggle TV,” a term used to describe shows like the original Charlie’s Angels that prominently feature young and sexy women.
Dowd also draws comparisons between these three series and Mad Men, and in the Dayton Daily News, she quotes a “top male TV producer” with insight into the desire for more retrograde programming. The producer told Dowd:
It’s the Hendricks syndrome. All the big, corporate men saw Christina Hendricks play the bombshell secretary on Mad Men and fell in love. It’s a hot fudge sundae for men: A time when women were not allowed to get uppity or make demands.
Now that gender roles have seen changes and shifts in the past decade, with women getting out of the home, working in executive positions, and edging closer to an equal playing field with men, Dowd posits that some TV executives are trying to work backward. By returning to the ’60s, when the gender roles were more clear and more separate, the men in charge can be more comfortable—and they’re banking on male TV audiences following that mindset. Dowd explains:
Hollywood is a world ruled by men, and this season, amid economic anxieties, those men want to indulge in some retro fantasies about hot, subservient babes.
By telling these stories in the smoky, mystical, days-of-an-era-past way that it looks like Pan Am and The Playboy Club are adopting, the producers of these shows risk paying tribute to these specific, unequal gender roles in a way that may contest our country’s recent strides toward equality.
With the success of Mad Men, especially with male audiences, TV producers may be assuming that this sort of archetype is what we’re looking for—a show where men are still the boss, where men don’t have to sacrifice their power, and where men still have women at their disposal for playthings or distractions from work. But not all of us are going through this masculinity crisis. Not all of us need a show to take us back to an age where we can reclaim our dominant masculinity.
We can’t say definitively if that’s how these new shows will be—they very well may successfully model Mad Men and churn out series that present intricate, critical portraits of men and their specific societal role. But the risk is there. All feminist eyes, I’m sure, will be on Pan Am and The Playboy Club this fall. In the meantime, check out the trailer for The Playboy Club, and we can all judge for ourselves when we have more material to examine.
(Photo ABC)
I think you’re looking at this a little too simplistically. MadMen has an almost all woman writing team. The show is not about ‘weak’ women being ‘subservient’ in fact, if you watched the shows… its rather subversive. You have Joan who is big bosomed but you see her inner workings and how she chafes against the norms whereby unqualified men have higher positions than her, how she is unsatisfied with her marriage and realizes she drank the domestic goddess Kool-Aid. Then you got Peggy Olson… her whole story line is about being a pioneer, glass ceiling breaker. Also the side… Read more »