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Networks going girl crazy
Scripps Howard News Service - February 24, 2000
By JOANNE WEINTRAUB
In the beginning there was Ally. Then came Felicity, the college freshman, and Sydney, the glamorous Hollywood
plastic surgeon who returned to her native Providence, R.I., to work as a humble family physician.
Before long they were all over the place - not just the angels, witches and vampire slayers of past seasons, but the
judge and the social worker of "Judging Amy," the female attorneys of "Family Law," the sister
act that runs the bookstore in "Once and Again" and the best girlfriends - one's a lawyer, one's a mom -
of "Any Day Now."
Woman-friendly programming? Chick shows? SheTV? By any name, the emergence of female-centered series in a prime-time
environment long dominated by men is both inevitable and surprising. Inevitable because women are 52 percent of the
population, surprising because it happened when everyone was looking the other way.
As a senior executive and producer at 20th-Century Fox Television in the mid-'90s, "it was so frustrating to
try to sell (the networks) shows about women, especially dramas," says Dawn Tarnofsky-Ostroff, now chief of
programming and production at the Lifetime cable channel. "They just weren't interested."
That lack of interest was never clearer than it was just two seasons ago, when Ally McBeal made her first appearance
as the lone girl in a prime-time boys' club. Of 12 other network series premiering that fall, all either revolved
around strong male leads or featured ensemble casts in which the majority of players were men.
Among established dramas, "Murder, She Wrote" and "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" had both been
canceled by fall of 1998. Only in the fantasy realms of "Touched by an Angel" and "The X-Files"
were women holding their own.
But the instant impact of "Ally McBeal," created as a female-friendly alternative to Monday Night
Football, proved an hour-long show with a woman front and center could attract a huge audience. Attorney McBeal and
her mostly female co-workers eased the way for the WB's more modest success with "Felicity" and NBC's
significant one with "Providence" - which, despite negative reviews and a less than cushy Friday time
slot, was another instant hit.
This season, when the most aggressively promoted dramas revolved around singles in their teens or 20s, two of the
breakout hits - "Family Law" and "Judging Amy," both on CBS - focused on divorced professional
women in their 30s or 40s. Just as strikingly, both shows take family dynamics as seriously as "ER" takes
heart attacks.
"Since I've been in the business, the conventional wisdom has been that women are a strong audience but hard to
reach," says Barbara Hall, an executive producer of "Judging Amy," whose female viewers outnumber
males two to one.
But Hall, whose previous credits include "Moonlighting" and "I'll Fly Away," doesn't find women
hard to reach at all.
"I just went about creating a show that I wanted to watch," she says, "a show with a realistic,
believable woman who I think viewers can identify with."
Not every woman, however, identifies with the beautiful, accomplished judge and single mother played by Amy
Brenneman, or with her mother, a no-nonsense social worker played by Tyne Daly.
In a recent essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, "A Wasteland of One's Own," author Francine Prose
lumped the show in with dozens of other examples from current TV, movies, books and Web sites.
"Amy" and "Providence," she wrote, are products of "a new women's culture" that
purports to entertain and enlighten while instead selling the fantasy of "professional women who really do have
it all - rewarding careers, supportive families and really fabulous hair."
Not surprisingly, Hall takes issue with this view, noting that Judge Amy Gray grapples every week with the
frustrations of her job and the hard business of single parenthood.
"Do people even watch the show before they write about it?" she asks. "Did you see the episode where
(Amy's young daughter) had a tantrum in public ... ? Has anybody noticed that there's been no love interest (for the
main character), that this isn't just another show where a single woman is preoccupied with looking for a man?"
Prose's essay took an even dimmer view of the year's most talked-about new cable channel, Oxygen, which debuted just
three weeks ago, and its companion Web site, www.oxygen.com, which has been up for several months.
Aimed at women and currently available in just 10 million homes, Oxygen promises support, encouragement, useful
information and "a place where (women) can take a deep breath." Instead, wrote Prose, it's a
"con," an "appalling bait-and-switch" designed primarily to deliver women to eager advertisers.
Oxygen's schedule mixes sports and shopping, sketch comedy and documentaries, financial guidance and the
Friday-night frivolity of "Pajama Party," whose PJ-clad guests discuss "taboo topics" and
"mind-bending trends." Candice Bergen hosts a nighttime talk show, "Exhale"; Oprah Winfrey leads
a weekly beginner's guide to the Internet, "Oprah Goes Online."
Prose's complaint - that Oxygen, behind the sisterly facade, is just as much driven by commerce as NBC or CBS -
isn't a problem for Bill Cella, the director of broadcast and programming at Chicago's Universal McCann.
"They're taking a different look at women," says Cella, who oversees the purchase of air time for the ad
agency's clients. "They're (aiming for) a woman who has more decision-making power over her life, who's more
involved and in control."
Cella also gives a thumbs-up to Oxygen's chief rival, Lifetime, which can be seen in almost 74 million cable
households. Lifetime, whose slogan is "Television for Women," last month finished second among all basic
cable channels in both prime-time viewers and total audience for the day, a first in its 16-year history.
Once famous for its "teary-eyed" made-for-TV movies, in Cella's words, the channel has improved its image
in the last two seasons with several original series, most notably the popular and critically praised "Any Day
Now," starring Annie Potts and Lorraine Toussaint. Lifetime's Tarnofsky-Ostroff also cites the drama, which
looks at the longtime friendship of a black woman and a white woman in Birmingham, Ala., as one of the channel's
achievements.
To Cathy Cullen, who teaches a course on multicultural issues in education at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wis.,
what's most important about television that focuses on women is that it show the broadest possible spectrum of
female images, not just the young, white, thin, middle-class, heterosexual one so pervasive in prime time. In that
area, she gives Lifetime higher marks than the networks.
"I was impressed that Lifetime picked up 'Ellen,'" Cullen says of the sitcom that fell out of favor with
ABC viewers two seasons ago after both the character and star Ellen DeGeneres announced they were gay.
"I feel they've made a concerted effort to grapple with the diversity of women," says Cullen, who also
notes that the channel's frequent reruns of "Golden Girls" amount to television's only regular
representation of women over 60.
Unlike Oxygen, which is committed to original programming, Lifetime peppers its schedule with reruns of network
series, both those that have been canceled by the networks and older episodes of such current shows as "Chicago
Hope" and "Party of Five."
This season, in an unusual arrangement, Lifetime, which is half-owned by Walt Disney Co., shows reruns of "Once
and Again" on Fridays, just four nights after the freshman drama airs on Disney-owned ABC.
Created by Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz of "thirtysomething," "Once and Again," about
the romance between two divorced people and the way it affects their families, is another of the season's surprise
hits. Though its male characters get roughly as much air time as its women and girls, the series' ABC audience is 65
percent female.
For one of the show's writers, Winnie Holzman, that's a mixed blessing. Holzman, who was acclaimed for her work on
"thirtysomething," went on to create 1994's "My So-Called Life," which won extravagant kudos but
not enough viewers, thanks in part to the perception that it was strictly a show for teenage girls.
Elated about the success of "Once and Again," Holzman is less thrilled with what she calls "the
ghettoization of show business."
While acknowledging that dramas about relationships nearly always appeal to more women than men, she says: "As
a writer and a viewer, I'm not really drawn to something that's described as 'women's TV.' What interests me is
(stories about) both of the sexes."
Like essayist Prose, Holzman believes the "TV for women" concept is largely ad-driven - "a very
markety kind of thing."
Whatever is behind the growth of these shows, whether it's the ascension of women in the ranks of TV creators or
simply a belated recognition of women's buying power, ad man Cella believes it's not necessarily an irreversible
change.
"This season, (shows about women) are very strong," he says. "Next season, who knows?"
Joanne Weintraub writes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Copyright © 2000 Scripps Howard News Service. All rights reserved.
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