The Two Newest Women on HBO
What happens when a show is created, written and co-produced by the two actresses that star in it? Apparently it becomes a series that successfully portrays professional women as real women. Doll & Em, HBO’s newest mini-series premiered the first two episodes last night and the characters were spot on.
Em is the Hollywood actress who, in hopes of rescuing her childhood friend from a bad breakup, hires Doll as her personal assistant. As anyone who’s ever had a best friend already knows, this is a recipe for disaster. Real life best friends, Emily Mortimer (of the HBO’s Newsroom) and Dolly Wells (Bridget Jones Diary) have managed to create a show that is at once charming and painful to watch, in other words, it’s realistic.
Doll & Em’s take on women in show business is so involved it’s basically Meta. Made by these two women, the show very clearly promotes women writers and producers in Hollywood, while the series’ plot-line highlights Em’s struggles with being a woman in Hollywood.
In the second episode alone, Em’s age is brought up by another woman to suggest that Em is no longer lust-worthy, guest star Chloë Sevigny tells Em to cherish her role in the film because it’s so hard to find a “strong, complex, female character.” Sevigny also compares Em’s fictional film to “The Godfather as women.” And if that wasn’t enough, only minutes later the film’s director calls Em a “modern day Joan of Ark.” It’s as if both the audience and Em is being told she can’t be simultaneously sexy and strong, a combination that the entertainment industry has long grappled with for women characters.
Flawed as they might be, the fictionalized versions of themselves are some of the television’s only multifaceted female characters. Rarely do we see Oliva Pope’s emotional side, and Claire Underwood is frequently accused of lacking that side entirely. But Dolly and Emily do in fact have emotions. They are also anti-heroes. Slate Magazine went as far as to place this series alongside shows like House, Breaking Bad, and House of Cards and labeled the genre “jerk TV.” Like many of today’s TV protagonists, both Dolly and Emily are flawed characters who easily win the viewers’ affections.
Though the series will be short-lived it is well on its way to questioning – and maybe even confronting – the role women play in the media today. Enjoyable, dark and sometimes uncomfortable, Doll & Em shows “a bittersweet, intimate portrait of female friendship,” says the show’s press release. But it also shows real, multifaceted professional women.
Photos courtesy of HBO.com
TAGS: entertainment television Women Producers