A few weeks ago, Kyra Sedgwick won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her work in The Closer (She had also been nominated four previous times). I like the show a lot, but thought that the last season was the weakest so far. Thankfully, the current season is much better.
(Last season’s big conflicts were a recalcitrant teenaged niece and the death of a cat. This season, it’s combating for a promotion against your boss. See the difference?)
I went back to the pilot episode, which still stands up, and found that Sedgwick’s performance was not quite as broad as it’s become. I was also reminded how good that first season was (as I noted in this post at the time).
One thing that was so effective in the beginning was the idea of positioning Chief Brenda Johnson as a very strong woman in an environment that was actively hostile to the idea of a woman in charge.
Of course, the idea of making a TV show like that is also a fairly modern practice.
In their 1981 book Stay Tuned, famed television producers Richard Levinson and William Link wrote about the challenges of a female character anchoring a drama in 1972.
…we turned our attention to two new projects, both of them pilots. One was called Partners in Crime, starring Lee Grant and Lou Antonio…
Both shows were meant to be escapist entertainment, but each was interesting to us because it went against the tide of traditional industry practice. Partners had, as its leading character, a judge – a female judge. Few women had ever carried a dramatic television series, and it was not until Angie Dickinson starred in Police Woman several years later [1974] that a series with a woman in the leading role was a success. The Powers That Be were unshakeable in their belief that a woman could prop up a sitcom (I Love Lucy, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, et al), but not a dramatic series.
From 2006, here’s a look at the evolving role of female characters:
Since its beginnings in the 1940s, television often portrayed women as wives and mothers who did not work outside of the home. If women had lead roles, networks confined them to comedies such as “I Love Lucy,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Roseanne,” and “Murphy Brown,” and to individual characters in male-dominated dramatic settings.
Women achieved central roles in dramatic narratives that included emphasis on adventure, such as “The Avengers” and “Police Woman,” but they often were partnered with a man. By the late 1970s, some dramas starred women without male partners, including “Charlie’s Angels,” “Wonder Woman” and “The Bionic Woman.” Like their predecessors, these women relied on their sex appeal yet were featured in empowered roles, she says.
A shift in shows emphasizing sex appeal and empowerment occurred in 1982 when the able female cops of “Cagney and Lacey” led to fairly conventional roles for women in “Murder, She Wrote” (1984), “Sisters” (1991) and “Touched by an Angel” (1994).
It seems like we’ve had strong female characters on TV for a while, but as you look back over the last 40 years, this is still a pretty recent phenomenon.
Amanda Lotz, assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan is quoted for some specific numbers.
The number of female-centered dramas jumped to 14 in 1985-1994, up from eight shows during 1975-1984. In 1995-2005 the number jumped to about 37 shows, peaking in 2000 as television executives and advertisers saw the value of developing strategies to target the female audience.
ABC has Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, featuring multiple lead actresses. Showtime has Weeds, Nurse Jackie and The Big C. CBS has had shows like Judging Amy and Ghost Whisperer, and currently has The Good Wife.
This is one of those areas in which television is a lot more advanced than the film business, which remains reluctant to let an actress anchor a film.
UPDATE: Did I neglect to mention that tonight was the season finale of The Closer? Yes, I did.