UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES is this going to be the return of ‘jiggle.’ These aren’t just girls who look good; they have actual personalities.” Tony Shepherd, vice president of talent for Aaron Spelling Productions, puts his full weight behind each word, as if careful enunciation might finally convince the remaining skeptics in the Hollywood press corps. Thankfully, most of the reporters assembled at the Fox Television Center for the announcement of the network’s new television series, “Angels ’88,” see things Shepherd’s way; they reach across the buffet table’s mountain of pastries to shake his hand. “Great work, Tony,” says one of the guys from the tabloids, his mouth full of croissant. “Great work selecting the girls.”
This May morning in 1988 is the grand finale of Fox’s two-month quarter-million-dollar nationwide search for the four angels—a quest the company publicists liken to “the great search for Scarlett O’Hara” and “the glamour days of Old Hollywood.” Shepherd has crossed the country four times (“I had to watch Three Men and a Baby five times on the plane”), personally conducted open casting calls in twelve of the forty-four cities, and eyeballed at least six thousand of the sixteen thousand women who stood in half-mile-long lines all day for one-and-a-half-minute interviews. Secretaries and housewives, he says, weathered 25-degree temperatures just to see him; one woman even passed out from hypothermia.
But a few journalists at this event can’t resist asking: Isn’t “Angels ’88” just a reprise of Spelling’s “Charlie’s Angels,” where three jiggle-prone private eyes took orders from invisible boss Charlie and bounced around in bikinis? “No, no, no!” Shepherd, the chain-smoking great-grandson of Louis B. Mayer, exhales a fierce stream of smoke. “They didn’t have distinct characters. They were just beauties.” The characters in “Angels ’88,” he says, are more “advanced,” independent women who won’t even necessarily be fashion plates. That’s why the network interviewed so many real women for the leading roles. These new angels “might not have perfect hair and be the perfect model types,” he says. “In Angels ‘88,’ you’re going to find these girls sometimes wearing no makeup at all. Particularly, you know, when they are running around on the beach.”
Just then, a Fox publicist takes the stage to announce the angels’ imminent debut. No interviews, he warns the media, until the photographers finish their “beauty shots.” The angels file on stage and the cameramen begin shouting, “Girls, over here, over here!” “Oh, young ladies, right here!” The angels turn this way and that, well-coiffed hair swinging around flawlessly made-up faces. The idle reporters leaf through their press kits, which offer large photographs and brief biographies of each star—Tea Leoni, “the 5’7″ blonde beauty;” Karen Kopins, “the 5’8″ brunette beauty;” and so on. Of the four, only Leoni was actually picked from the nationwide casting call. The others are models with minor acting backgrounds.
The angels spend a carefully timed five minutes with the press before they are whisked off for a lengthy photo session for Time. The stage mike is turned over to Aaron Spelling, creator of some of the most lucrative programs in television history, a list ranging from “Love Boat” to “Fantasy Island.” “How’s this show going to be different from ‘Charlie’s Angels’?” a reporter asks. “These young ladies are on their own; they do not report to any men,” Spelling says. “It’s an entire ladies’ show without guidance. It’s a young ladies’ buddy-buddy show is what it is.” He turns a beseeching face on his audience. “Why, why,” he wants to know, would anyone think that he wants to bring back “the beautiful bimbos”? He shakes his head. “It’s going to be a show of today’s young ladies of today [sic], and we’ll go into their personal lives, we’ll treat today’s issues, we’ll treat the problems of their dating and sex and safe sex and sex of our time. It’s going to be a very attractive show.”
Later that same day in Santa Monica, screenwriter Brad Markowitz rolls his eyes as he hears the details of the press conference. A few months earlier, Spelling had hired Markowitz and his writing partner to script the series pilot. “Spelling made all these fine speeches to us about how ‘the girls’ would be more real,” Markowitz recalls. “He talked a good game about how the show would be more representative of how women really are, as opposed to that idealized, frosted look.” But when it came down to drafting a script, Markowitz says, Spelling instructed the screenwriters to open the episode with scantily clad angels wriggling to a rock video. Spelling was unhappy with their first draft, Markowitz recalls, because “we didn’t have enough girls in bikinis;” he ordered them to add more bathing-beauty scenes. Spelling also insisted that the thirty-two-year-old police academy—trained detectives (their original status in “Charlie’s Angels”) be demoted to unemployed actresses in their early twenties who just fall into police work and bungle the job. Spelling, who later denies demanding these changes—“the script just wasn’t good enough is all I know”—defended the alterations this way: “That’s what makes the show funny—that they are supposed to be doing it by themselves and they can’t! They are incompetent!”
After various delays and script battles, “Angels ’88” was put on hold, then reformatted as a “telefilm,” in which, Spelling says, the women will be even younger college “coeds.” Meanwhile, for the 1988–89 season, Spelling applied his “young ladies’ buddy-buddy show” concept to “Nightingales,” an NBC prime-time series about five jiggly student nurses who prance around the locker room in their underwear. While they aren’t independent, their boss is a woman, Spelling says proudly—as if a female head nurse represents nontraditional casting.
Anyway, as Spelling pointed out at the “Angels” press conference, at least his shows have women in lead roles. “Go and look at television today. Tell me how many shows outside of a few comedies are dominated by women. You’ll find the answer is very few.”
True enough. In the 1987–88 season, the backlash’s high watermark on TV, only three of twenty-two new prime-time dramas featured female leads—and only two of them were adults. One was a sorority girl and another a nubile private eye who spent much of her time posing and complaining about the dating scene. (The title of that show, “Leg Work,” speaks for itself.) In a sharp dropoff from previous seasons, 60 percent of the shows launched as series in this season had either no regular female characters or included women only as minor background figures; 20 percent had no women at all. And women over the age of consent were especially hard to find.
Women were also losing ground in the one television genre they had always called their own: situation comedy. In a resurgence of the old “Odd Couple” format, bachelor buddies took up house together without adult women in one out of five new sitcoms, a list that included “Everything’s Relative,” “My Two Dads,” “Trial and Error,” and “Full House.” In the single-parent household sitcoms that took over prime time that year, two-thirds of the children lived with dad or a male guardian—compared with 11 percent in the real world. “This season it’s especially clear that TV writers are uncomfortable with the concept of working mothers,” New York Woman observed. The magazine offered a quiz that starkly documented this discomfort; the “Moms at Work” puzzle invited readers to match each new prime-time show with the current status of the working-mother character. The correct answers: “A Year in the Life”—dead. “Full House”—dead. “I Married Dora”—dead. “My Two Dads”—dead. “Valerie’s Family”—dead. “Thirtysomething”—quits work to become a housewife. “Everything’s Relative”—show canceled. “Mama’s Boy”—show canceled.
Women’s disappearance from prime-time television in the late ’80s repeats a programming pattern from the last backlash when, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, single dads ruled the TV roosts and female characters were suddenly erased from the set. By the 1960 season, only two of the top ten rated shows had regular female characters—“Gunsmoke” and “Real McCoys”—and by 1962 the one woman on “Real McCoys” had been killed off, too. The vanishing act eventually spread to domestic dramas, where the single father took charge of the household on “Bachelor Father,” “My Three Sons,” “Family Affair,” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”
In the ’80s, women began to shrink and dwindle in the 1985-86 season, as a new breed of action-adventure series that included women only as victimized girls began crowding out more balanced fare. In this new crop of programs, as uneasy critics commented at the time, the viciousness of the assaults on the young female characters rivaled slasher films. On “Lady Blue,” for example, teenage boys armed with scalpels eviscerate their female prey; on “Our Family Honor,” a seventeen-year-old girl is slashed to death with a coat hanger. And that season, female characters who weren’t under attack were likely to be muzzled or missing from action: An analysis of prime-time TV in 1987 found 66 percent of the 882 speaking characters were male—about the same proportion as in the ’50s.
While the new male villains were busy pulverizing women, male heroes on continuing series were toughening their act. The “return of the hard-boiled male,” New York Times television writer Peter Boyer dubbed it in an article on the phenomenon. In “St. Elsewhere,” the affable Dr. Caldwell was recast as an unapologetic womanizer. In “Moonlighting,” the immature hireling of the elegantly confident Maddie Hayes now overshadowed his boss lady—and cut her down to size. Network executives even instructed Tom Selleck to get more masculine on “Magnum, P.I.” And the networks continued to boost their macho output; of the ten new dramas unveiled in the fall of 1989, five were about male cops or cowboys, with such self-explanatory titles as “Nasty Boys” and “Hardball.” The latter show’s premiere made it clear who would be on the receiving—and losing—end of this game. In the debut episode, a homicidal and evil female cop is beaten into submission by the male hero—a scene that reenacts the climactic confrontation in Fatal Attraction. (He holds her head under water in the bathroom and tries to drown her.)
If TV programmers had their reasons for bringing on the he-men, popular demand wasn’t among them. In audience surveys, TV viewers show the least interest in police dramas and westerns. Nonetheless, Brandon Tartikoff, president of entertainment at NBC, asserted in the New York Times that the TV men were turning brutish because “the audience” was sick of male “wimps” and “Alan Alda-esque heroes who wore their sensitivity on their shirtsleeves;” as proof, he pointed not to real people but to the outpouring of macho movies—yet another case of the makers of one cultural medium invoking another’s handiwork to reinforce the backlash. Glenn Gordon Caron, producer of “Moonlighting,” admitted to more personal motives in an interview in the New York Times: “I very much wanted to see a man on television.” He complained that the last decade of social change had elbowed his sex off the screen. “[For] a long time, men just sort of went away,” he grumbled; one could only tell the gender of these ineffectual guys “because their voices were lower and their chests were flatter.” Glen Charles, coproducer of “Cheers,” was even blunter: he turned his show’s bartender Sam into a chauvinistic womanizer because “he’s a spokesman for a large group of people who thought that [the women’s movement] was a bunch of bull and look with disdain upon people who don’t think it was.”
The backlash on television would to a degree follow the film industry’s lead. Fatal Attraction became ABC’s “Obsessive Love” a year later; Baby Boom became a television series of the same name; Working Girl, Parenthood, and Look Who’s Talking all resurfaced as TV series; the western returned to the big screen and the small set. (And in keeping with the single-dad theme, bachelor cowboy Ethan Allen, the hero of TV’s “Paradise,” gets saddled with four orphans.) The same backlash trends were recycled: single women panicked by the man shortage dashed into the arms of a maniac on “Addicted to His Love.” (The ABC TV movie even cited the Harvard-Yale marriage study’s 20 percent odds for college-educated single women over thirty.) Career women swooned with baby fever and infertility on shows like “Babies.” (“My biological clock is beginning to sound like Big Ben!” cries one of the empty-vessel heroines.) Even the “epidemic” of sex abuse at day care centers was turned into ratings fodder: In “Do You Know the Muffin Man?” a divorced working mother discovers her four-year-old son has been raped and contracted gonorrhea at nursery school.
But TV’s counterassault on women’s liberation would be, by necessity, more restrained than Hollywood’s. Women have more influence in front of their sets than they do at the movies; women represent not only the majority of viewers but, more important, they represent the viewers that advertisers most want to reach. When the TV programmers tried to force-feed its cast of overweening guys and wilting gals in the 1987—88 season, a devastating proportion of the female audience simply shut off their sets. None of the twenty-five new prime-time shows made it into the top twenty except for “A Different World,” which was a spinoff of the “Cosby” show (and one of the rare new shows with a female lead). By December, the networks’ prime-time ratings had plunged a spectacular nine points from a year earlier, an average loss of 3.5 million households a night and the lowest rated TV season ever. While the dropoff can be partly attributed to the phasing in of the “people meter,” a more finely tuned measure of viewership, that technological change doesn’t explain why the audience flight was so disproportionately female. Nor does it explain why, in subsequent backlash seasons, when the people meter was no longer at issue, a lopsidedly female exodus kept recurring. Moreover, the people meters were reputed to favor younger viewers more than the old “diary” methods of audience measurement had. But while younger men increased their weekly viewing time by more than two hours in the fall of 1987 over the previous year, younger women decreased their viewing time by almost an hour in the same period.
By the following season, the programmers backed off a bit to admit a couple of strong female leads to the prime-time scene. “Roseanne” and “Murphy Brown,” both featuring outspoken women—and both, not coincidentally, created by women—became instant and massive hits: “Roseanne” was one of the most successful series launched in television history and held the number-one ratings slot season after season. But two strong women were seen as two too many. Independent women were “seizing control of prime time,” Newsweek griped in a 1989 cover story. “The video pendulum has swung too far from the blissfully domestic supermoms who once warmed the electronic hearth.” Behind the scenes, the network tried to make changes that amounted to “taking all the stuffing out of Murphy,” the show’s creator Diane English observed. The tart-tongued Roseanne Barr especially became a lightning rod for that rancor. While her penchant for mooning crowds and singing the national anthem off-key clearly warrants no Miss Congeniality prizes, the level of bile and hysteria directed at this comic seemed peculiarly out of proportion with her offenses. The media declared her, just like the Fatal Attraction temptress, “the most hated woman in America;” television executives savaged her in print; her former executive producer even took out a full-page ad in Daily Variety to deride the comedian; and, despite critical acclaim and spectacular ratings, “Roseanne” was shut out of the Emmys year after year after year. Outside the network suites, a chorus of male voices joined the Barr-bashing crusade. Sportswriters, baseball players, and news columnists damned her in print as a “bitch” and a “dog.” Even George Bush felt compelled to issue a condemnatory statement; he called her “disgraceful.” (And later he told the troops in the Middle East that he would like to make her a secret weapon again Iraq.) Businessman James Rees, the son of the former congressman, launched a nationwide “Bar Roseanne Club,” soliciting members in the classifieds sections of Rolling Stone and The National. (“Hate Roseanne Barr?” the ad copy inquired. “Join the club.”) In a few weeks, he had more than six hundred responses, almost all from men who thoroughly agreed with Rees’s assessment of “old lard butt.” She’s “a nasty filthy ugly Jell-O-Bodied tasteless monster from the black lagoon,” wrote one man. Another proposed, “Let’s shish-Kebab [her].”
By the following season, prime time reverted to traditional feminine icons, as the new series filled the screen with teenage models, home-makers, a nun and—that peculiar prototype of the last TV backlash—the good suburban housekeeper witch. An updated version of the tamed genie of “Bewitched” reappeared in the ironically named “Free Spirit.” By the next season, women were shut out of so many new shows that even comic Jay Leno joked about it at the Emmys. TV critic Joyce Millman, observing that the new offerings were “overloaded with adolescent boys and motherless households,” asked, “Whatever happened to TV’s ‘Year of the Woman’? . . . [I]t’s back to ‘Boys’ Night Out’ for the upcoming fall season.” Only two of thirty-three new shows were about women with jobs; on the rest they were housewives, little girls, or invisible.
The lurching quality of television’s backlash against independent women is the product of the industry’s own deeply ambivalent affair with its female audience. TV prime-time programmers are both more dependent on women’s approval than filmmakers and, because of their dependence, more resentful. To serve a female master is not why the TV men came west to Hollywood. (And most are men; more than 90 percent of television writers, for example, are white males.) They say they want shows that draw a large audience, but when those shows feature autonomous women, they try to cancel them. “Designing Women” and “Kate and Allie,” both tremendously popular series, have fought back repeated network attempts to chase them off the set.
The modern network programmers find themselves in a situation roughly analogous to that of the late Victorian clergymen. Like those leaders of the last century’s backlash, TV executives watch anxiously as their female congregation abandons the pews—in the daytime for work and in the evening for other forms of electronic entertainment that offer more control and real choices. Women are turning to VCRs and cable offerings. In 1987, as the networks took their free fall in the ratings, prime-time cable viewership increased 35 percent and the proportion of TV households that owned VCRs rose from 19 to 60 percent in one year. The networks’ audience shrank by more than 25 percent in the decade—and women contributed most to that shrinkage. By 1990, Nielsen was reporting that the percentage of decline in female prime-time viewers was two to three times steeper than male’s. Women’s desertion was more than an insult; it represented a massive financial loss. (A mere one-point drop in prime-time ratings equals a loss of more than $90 million in the network’s revenue in one season.)
Not only do some programming executives personally want to expel the independent women from the American set; their advertisers, who still view the housewife as the ideal shopper, demand it. This puts TV programmers in an impossible bind: the message advertisers want the networks to promote appeals least to modern women. Female viewers consistently give their highest ratings to nontraditional female characters such as leaders, heroines, and comedians. But TV’s biggest advertisers, packaged-foods and household-goods manufacturers, want traditional “family” shows that fit a sales pitch virtually unchanged in two decades. Advertisers prefer to reflect the housewife viewer because she is perceived as a more passive and willing consumer, because she is likely to have more children, and because they are simply used to this arrangement. Since its inception, television has been marketed as a family-gathering experience—the modern-day flickering hearth—where merchandisers’ commercial messages can hit the whole clan at once.
As the ’80s television backlash against independent women proceeded in fits and starts from season to season, a few shows managed to survive its periodic surges—“L.A. Law,” “Designing Women,” and “The Golden Girls” are some examples. But overall, it succeeded in depopulating TV of its healthy independent women and replacing them with nostalgia-glazed portraits of apolitical “family” women. This process worked its way through television entertainment in two stages. First in the early ’80s, it banished feminist issues. Then, in the mid-’80s, it reconstructed a “traditional” female hierarchy, placing suburban home-makers on the top, career women on the lower rungs, and single women at the very bottom.
For a brief period in the mid-’70s, prime-time television’s domestic series tackled political issues—and with them, a whole range of feminist subjects. They weren’t just restricted to single “issue” episodes; discussions about women’s rights were woven into the series’ weekly fabric. The Bunkers argued about women’s liberation constantly in “All in the Family,” Maude openly discussed abortion and, on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Lou Grant’s wife, Edie, went to consciousness-raising sessions and eventually left her husband.
By 1978, these programs had all been canceled; and the few programmers who tried to sell the networks on programs with feminist themes encountered fierce resistance. In 1980 Esther Shapiro, ABC’s vice president for miniseries (one of the few women ever to attain such a post), tried to interest her male colleagues in a script based on Marilyn French’s novel The Women’s Room. The script’s author had come to Shapiro after CBS had turned her down. “It was terrific,” Shapiro recalls. “And I thought, this is something we have to get on television.” It also seemed like a guaranteed hit. The book was a huge best-seller; women had loved the story of the liberated housewife who leaves home.
But convincing the network turned into what Shapiro recalls as “the most grueling experience” of her career. The men were monolithic in their opposition. No matter what argument she used, “all I got back was an absolute no,” she says. Not only would they personally stonewall the idea, they assured her, no advertiser would touch the feminist-tainted subject matter either. Shapiro launched a campaign on the show’s behalf, sending telegrams to the most recalcitrant executives, even hanging signs on the men’s bathroom door that read WOMEN’S ROOM. But the men just responded with the ratings argument: “They said it wouldn’t get more than an eleven share,” she says. “They treated it like its audience was a minority, which seemed strange to me. I mean, women are fifty-four percent of the population.”
Finally, she persuaded the network’s executives to run “The Women’s Room” simply to set off another show that they were very eager to air, a stock sexploitation number called Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. The network men agreed but instructed her to shrink “The Women’s Room” from a miniseries to a one-night special. And the network’s Standards and Practices division insisted it air only with a disclaimer assuring viewers the show was set in the past and not meant to be relevant to current times. When such right-wing groups as Reverend Donald Wildmon’s National Federation of Decency heard that ABC would be dramatizing this women’s liberation drama, they inundated the network with boycott threats, and advertisers canceled all but four minutes of the fourteen minutes’ worth of commercial spots. Nonetheless, “The Women’s Room” finally aired, and it received a huge 45 share (the highest rated movie on TV that week), prompted a raft of positive mail, and won an Emmy.
caught in the first waves of the backlash, too. They figured they had an original concept when they first drafted “Cagney and Lacey”: two strong, mature, and fully formed female characters, one single, one married, who are partners on the police force. “The original script was kind of an outrageous boisterous comedy; we even had a ring of male prostitutes,” Corday recalls. “What we were trying to do was turn everything around to a feminist point of view.” But even after Corday toned down the script and brought on her husband, influential producer Barney Rosenzweig, to pitch it, “Cagney and Lacey” took six years to sell. They were turned down everywhere: movie studios, independent production companies, the networks.
Rosenzweig recalls hearing the same complaint wherever he went: “These women aren’t soft enough. These women aren’t feminine enough.” The Hollywood executives were even upset that the women used “dirty words,” even though it was nothing more than a few damns and hells. As he struck out again and again, Rosenzweig recalls, “[Barbara] Corday said to me, ‘The women’s movement is going to pass me by [before the show gets sold].’” She wasn’t far wrong.
CBS executives finally decided to air “Cagney and Lacey” as a television movie in 1981. When it received a smash-hit 42 share, the network agreed to produce the series. Rosenzweig cast Meg Foster to play the single woman. After two episodes, CBS executives canceled the show, claiming bad ratings. Rosenzweig convinced them to give the show another try—but they complained that the women were “too tough” and Foster, especially, wasn’t sufficiently genteel and would have to go. “I said I can’t review the show unless we have a casting change,” Harvey Shephard, then senior vice president of programming, recalls. “Meg Foster came across in this role as being masculine,” CBS vice president Arnold Becker explains later. “Mind you, they were policemen, and the notion of women policemen is not easily acceptable.” Rosenzweig replaced her with the blond Sharon Gless.
Still the network programmers weren’t satisfied. CBS executives were obsessed with the single-woman character, pestering the show’s writers with endless demands to enhance her femininity, soften her rhetoric and appearance, make her more respectably “high class.” An additional $15,000 was budgeted for “classier clothes,” her feminism muted, and a genteel Westchester County upbringing added to her family background.
The CBS executives were especially distressed by the character’s varied romantic encounters. “Cagney’s sexual habits were constantly under scrutiny, not only by the network but by the head of programming,” Rosenzweig says. “I would say, ‘You don’t mind when Magnum P.I. has sex,’ and he would say, ‘That’s different.’ That Cagney slept with some-one cheapened her, he thought.” Shephard, CBS’s programming chief, says he was worried that she would “come off as promiscuous,” which would be a problem because then she wouldn’t be “a positive role model.” CBS executive Becker explains the anxiety and interference over Cagney’s behavior this way: “Well [Lacey], she was married, and so they did have occasion to show her in her home being tender. But [Cagney] was single so that opportunity was not there, so it became more difficult to portray her as being vulnerable.” And why did she need to be portrayed as vulnerable? “Because that’s the way the vast majority of Americans feel women should be. . . . I wonder how many men there are in the U.S. today who’d be anxious to marry a hard boiled female cop.” Becker then notes, somewhat sheepishly, that “my daughter might kill me for saying that.” She is a lawyer, he says, and such an “extreme feminist” that she actually corrects him when he refers to grown women as “girls.”
The network really clamped down on episodes that centered on feminist issues. On one segment that dealt with the ERA, Rosenzweig wanted to ask feminist leader Gloria Steinem to play a bit role. As appalled as if the show’s creators had selected Son of Sam for a cameo, executives in the network’s Standards and Practices division barred her appearance. Then several affiliates pulled the whole episode anyway, a few hours before air time, contending that the women’s rights subject matter would offend female viewers.
An even greater furor erupted over an episode in which Cagney was to become pregnant and consider whether to have an abortion. The script provided that she would miscarry in the closing scene so she would never actually have to make the decision, but this was still too unsavory for CBS programming executives. Finally, the show’s writers reworked the script to duck the whole issue. In the final version, titled “Choices,” Cagney only mistakenly thinks she is pregnant. Lacey chastises her for not behaving more responsibly—and tells her that if she had been pregnant she should have gotten married. Abortion is never offered as a choice.
In a later episode, about the bombing of an abortion clinic, the network’s broadcast standards officials sent Rosenzweig a three-page single-spaced memo “filled with thou-shalt-nots,” he recalls. They were especially upset that both women on the show were supporting a woman’s right to an abortion. Rosenzweig pointed out, to no avail, that the script was simply reflecting working women’s views in the real world, where 70 percent are pro-choice. Meanwhile outside the network, as soon as word leaked out about the upcoming episode, anti-abortion protesters mobilized and picketed local affiliates around the country. The controversy wound up on national talk shows and radio programs.
The network’s executives said they were meddling with the show’s content only out of concern for female viewers, who might feel “intimidated” by working women like Cagney and Lacey. Rosenzweig told them: “ ‘I’ve got four thousand fan letters on my desk from women who don’t seem intimidated. What’s your research?’ They didn’t have any.” (In fact, the evidence in Becker’s own living room pointed in the other direction. His wife, a home-maker of thirty-five years, was a “big fan” of the show, he admits.) It was the CBS male programmers, not female viewers, who were uncomfortable with the two strong women of “Cagney and Lacey.” Becker complained at the time that the show’s women were “inordinately abrasive, loud, and lacking warmth.” An-other CBS executive told TV Guide that the heroines “were too harshly women’s lib. . . . These women on ‘Cagney and Lacey’ seemed more in-tent on fighting the system than doing police work. We perceived them as dykes.”
Ultimately, the show’s staff tried to save the show by disavowing its own politics. For public consumption, they began denying that the show had any feminist content—even though the show regularly took feminist positions on employment discrimination, sexual harassment, domestic violence, women’s health, and prostitution. “Cagney and Lacey” producer April Smith assured the press that the show’s crew had “no desire to turn it into a women’s lib vehicle.” On a talk show, the show’s co-star, Sharon Gless, asserted that “Cagney and Lacey” was not a “feminist” show because that label was too “limiting.” When a women’s studies scholar wrote in with some questions about the show’s stance on women, she received a chilly letter from the show’s appreciation club director, informing her, “We do not wish to be involved in discussing our views on feminism.”
Recantation, however, wasn’t enough to appease the network. In 1983, CBS canceled “Cagney and Lacey.” After tens of thousands of letters poured in from loyal viewers (an avalanche out-stripping the last leading fan-mail recall campaign, for “Lou Grant,” by ten to one), after Tyne Daly (Lacey) won the Emmy for best dramatic actress, and after the show scored number one in the ratings during summer reruns, the network backed off and put the show back on the air. The program went on to win five more Emmys, including best dramatic series. Nonetheless, in the fall of 1987, CBS pulled “Cagney and Lacey” from its regular time and reassigned it to a doomed time slot. By the following season, “Cagney and Lacey” was gone for good.
“Nesting will be a crucial theme this year for returning shows,” TV Guide announced at the start of the 1988 fall season, an observation that turned out to be something of an understatement. On prime-time series from “Cheers” to “Beauty and the Beast,” “Designing Women” to “Newhart,” “L.A. Law” to “Night Court,” dozens of female characters succumbed to “baby craving,” charged off to infertility clinics, and even gave birth on air. One show fed off another’s fever. “Thirtysomething” devoted an entire episode to a delivery. Then, on the season premiere of “L.A. Law,” the expectant mother discussed this “thirtysomething” birth sequence in her Lamaze class. That same night, on “Cheers,” another mom went into labor. And that same week, on the “Cosby” show, the men fantasized that they were pregnant.
The birthing festival itself was benign enough, if a little monotonous. But the networks weren’t just bringing on the babies; they were bringing back regressive fantasies about motherhood and marriage. TV programmers began recycling their childhood memories of ’50s television; before long, “retroprogramming,” as it was dubbed, ruled the airwaves. The networks brought back ’50s television quite literally, with a deluge of reruns and “new” fare like “The New Leave It to Beaver,” “The New Newlywed Game,” and “The New Dating Game,” none of which exactly offered progressive views of womanhood. At the same time, the networks revived the ’50s family shows more subtly, inside a modern shell. On a few of the programs, the mothers ostensibly have jobs, but their employment is in title only. The wife in “Family Ties” has a “career,” but regular viewers would be hard pressed to name it. (She’s an architect.) The wife in the “Cosby” show may be the first attorney to hold down a full-time job without leaving home; when she does ply her trade, it’s only to litigate domestic disputes in the family living room. These women are the same old TV housewives with their housecoats doffed, their “careers” a hollow nod to the profound changes in women’s lives.
The “Cosby” show may present a black family, but it was the show’s presentation of the nuclear family more than its racial makeup that network executives—and Ronald Reagan, one of its most loyal fans—found so appealing. “Bill Cosby brought masculinity back to sitcoms,” NBC entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff told the press. In episode after episode, Cosby’s Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable—who is, appropriately, an obstetrician—reasserts his role as family potentate, quelling all insubordination with his genial but authoritarian voice. Political concerns are absent; teaching children to obey dad is the show’s primary mission. Some typical “issues” examined in this upper-middle-class family: a daughter’s reluctance to change out of a party dress and a son’s five-minute tardiness from basketball practice. “I do believe in control,” Cosby told Time. He also believed in a “traditional” division of domestic duties, judging by the advice he dispensed to men in his ’80s best-seller, Fatherhood. “You see, the wives pretend to turn over the child-raising job to us fathers, but they don’t really mean it,” Cosby assured male readers.
Other TV programs didn’t even bother with these shallow acknowledgments of working women. Some of the mid-’80s shows were so packed with suburban moms tending cheaper-by-the-dozen broods, they seemed like reruns. “I’m becoming June Cleaver,” sighs one woman in “Full House,” accurately enough. Some shows literally were set in the past, like “The Wonder Years,” where it’s okay to show mom slaving over a hot stove because the era is the prefeminist ’60s.
Other nesting shows escaped the world of working women by retreating to fantasy countrysides. In shows like “Blue Skies” and “Just the Ten of Us,” dad packs the family in the station wagon and heads for a “better” life in rural America—where mom can stay home with a full litter of children and dad can return to sole-earner status. More than one of these TV families heads to Amish country, where women don’t work outside the home. Here, the bad city women learn “old-world” values. On “Aaron’s Way,” for example, an Amish aunt gives a pregnant girl a stern lecture on the virtues of female sacrifice; the reluctant teenager finally faces up to her “responsibilities” and agrees to have the baby. The men on these shows, meanwhile, regain their brawn: they are showcased chopping wood, renovating old water mills, and joining other strapping country fellows for old-fashioned barn raisings.
The pastoral retreat might be interpreted as a mild rebellion against the capitalist rat race—though the characters’ homes are cluttered with enough consumer goods to assure advertisers that the revolt is not serious. But the march to the country is more forcefully a repudiation of American women’s changed standing in the work force. And typically in the nesting shows, it’s the housewife who serves as mouthpiece for the programs’ periodic anti—career women tirades. Like late-’80s filmmakers, prime-time programmers resurrected the catfight. In “Just the Ten of Us,” the stay-at-home wife blasts “a rabble-rousing feminist.” She proves that she’s more of a woman for having stayed home, even if it does mean her poorly paid husband, a gym teacher at a Catholic school, must serve as solitary breadwinner for the overflowing household. A similar homage to the housewife at the career woman’s expense occurs in “Family Man.” A nasty female lawyer asks the home-making heroine how she can bear to stay home all day; that evening in bed with her husband, the housewife dramatizes the sort of tongue-lashing she’d like to give that career woman: “You are an idiot! You are a jerk! You big, fat yuppie phony!” Then she bursts into tears and, gazing up at her husband’s benevolent visage, whimpers, “You don’t care that I’m just a housewife?” He beams back. “I love it, I love it,” he assures her.
At the same time that ’80s TV was busy saluting the domestic angels of ’50s TV, it was maligning mothers who dared step outside the family circle. The quest of the liberated wife who leaves home in “Raising Miranda” is reduced to a pathetic joke. Mom ran away after attending a “self-improvement workshop,” snickers Miranda, the superior daughter, an adolescent who becomes the dutiful surrogate mom to her macho blue-collar father. Her abundant housekeeping skills serve as a not-so-subtle rebuke of delinquent mom who, Miranda tells us disparagingly, “couldn’t do a load of laundry.” On “Blossom,” another deserted daughter is similarly disgusted with her indulgent mother. “She’s supposed to be in the kitchen, waiting for me after school,” she decrees, not “on the road, fulfilling her needs.” The rare shows that included working mothers tended to present them as incompetent, miserable, or neglectful. In “Who’s the Boss?” the mother is so selfishly self-absorbed by her professional ambitions that her muscular male housekeeper has to take charge of her kids.
Even shows with a supposedly more enlightened mission couldn’t resist slamming the working mother. When television producer Gary David Goldberg unveiled “Day by Day,” a series about a family-based child care center, he said the show would offer a rarity—a positive view of day care on prime-time television. Yet the show was unrelievedly contemptuous of its working mothers. Neurotic and inept, the show’s career moms bumble into the center each morning, thrusting their tots into the arms of its holier-than-thou directors—a husband and wife team who congratulate each other every five minutes for sacrificing their Wall Street careers to tend to these negligent mothers’ offspring.
“Single-woman leads don’t work on hour-long dramatic television,” Scott Siegler, CBS vice president for drama development, informed sociologist Todd Gitlin in the early ’80s. By the end of the decade, the TV listings would suggest that the networks hardly believed single-woman leads worked at all.
The eviction of TV’s single women repeats a pattern established in television’s last backlash. Early television actually offered quite a number of single-woman shows, although most featured hapless schoolmarms, maids, and typists in such fare as “Private Secretary,” “Ella Miss,” “My Friend Irma,” “Our Miss Brooks,” and “Meet Millie.” By the mid-1950s, however, every program with a single woman in the lead had been canceled. And the unwed heroine would remain out of sight throughout the early and mid-1960s, appearing only as an incidental character, a reminder to female viewers of the woes of unwed life. On “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” single Sally Rogers served to throw into relief the good fortunes and greater femininity of Van Dyke’s doted-upon housewife—played by Mary Tyler Moore. In the many doctor and hospital shows of the ’60s, single women surfaced only as patients, their illnesses typically caused by some “selfish” act—getting an abortion, having an affair or, most popular, disobeying a doctor’s orders.
But in 1970, Mary Tyler Moore traded in the Van Dyke dollhouse for her own apartment and show. Moore’s Mary Richards was not only unwed, she was more than thirty years old. Marriage panic did not afflict her. She had real male and female friends, enjoyed a healthy sex life, turned down men who didn’t appeal to her, and even took the pill—without winding up on a hospital bed in the final scene. (She was, however, still the subordinated pseudo-schoolgirl to her boss; while her officemates called their chief “Lou,” she always said “Mr. Grant.”) Female viewers adored her. The program maintained top ratings for its entire run, won twenty-five Emmys, and it spun off two other successful sitcoms with independent female leads. Meanwhile, other programmers got the message and drafted their own shows about strong and independent unmarried women, from the realistic in “One Day at a Time” to the superhuman in “The Bionic Woman.”
In 1986, a decade after her previous triumph, the networks returned Mary Tyler Moore to prime time—as a burned-out scowling divorcee whose career is only an object of derision. In “Mary,” she writes the consumer Help Line column for a trashy tabloid. She has no confidantes on or off the job, a fact that heightens an already bleakly drawn existence. Next door, her earthy best friend Rhoda is replaced by a narcissistic single career woman, an ad executive who is desperate for a ring from any man. In one episode, the neighbor meets a mobster—and announces her engagement the same day.
Moore’s neighbor was not the only single television woman willing to lower her expectations in the quest for a marriage license. Under pressure from the network, the creators of “Kate and Allie” married off divorced mother Allie to a colorless suitor she had known only a short while. That same season on “Moonlighting,” a pregnant Maddie Hayes got hitched to a dishwater-dull accountant right after they met on a train. Cybill Shepherd, who played Maddie, was adamantly opposed to this plot twist, and viewers were similarly disgusted. The show, in fact, was swamped with so many outraged letters that the producers finally had to annul the marriage.
Maddie’s coerced matrimony was only the latest development in a long-running campaign to cow this independent female figure. David Addison, a carefree bachelor and Maddie’s employee, ultimately tames his “queen bee” boss the old-fashioned way; he slaps her, and she surrenders to his advances. Still not satisfied, the series’ producers later have her grovel before the preening David, literally on her knees. The shaming of Maddie Hayes was no idle writing exercise. It mirrored a behind-the-scenes campaign, conducted by both executive producer Glenn Caron and actor Bruce Willis (who played David), to curb the single Shepherd’s “aggressive” personality. They told the press they didn’t like how she was always voicing her opinion when she disagreed with the show’s direction. At Caron’s behest, the network sent Shepherd a disciplinary letter. The memo ordered her, on penalty of suit or the show’s cancellation, to follow the director’s orders, submit to timed breaks, and ask for permission before leaving the set. “I felt ill when I received it,” Shepherd said at the time. “It was like reform school.”
While TV generally presented single women’s stampede to the altar as their “choice,” the story lines sometimes revealed their underlying agenda—to serve as wish fulfillment for single men. The show “Murder, She Wrote” (which, despite its name, had no female writers, producers, or directors in 1987) offered one such transparent tale in a 1988 episode about the marital redemption of a single professional woman. Jilted by a female careerist, boyfriend Grady takes to the bar. Well, maybe it’s for the best, he decides. “I want a traditional girl.” A fellow drinker pipes up: “Is she a career woman?” When Grady nods, the guy gives him a knowing look: “Yeah, you give ’em a briefcase and they take your pants.” By the end of the episode, the career woman (an accountant) recants and comes running to Grady for absolution. “I don’t want to be an accountant,” she cries. “I just want to be your wife.” A pleased Grady concludes, “I think everything’s going to work out just fine.”
The matrimonial imperative was not limited to prime time; on daytime soap operas, where wedding bells always rang frequently, the marriage rate climbed still higher, and the divorce rate fell. “Ten years ago, we might have broken them up,” Mary Alice Dwyer-Dobbin, ABC’s vice president of daytime programming, says of soap opera’s warring unmarried couples. “Now the writers have been challenged to come up with new and inventive story lines that create conflict but don’t break the core characters apart.” Why? “Women are returning to the home,” she says. “It’s all part of the pendulum swinging back from the Super-woman era.”
Like the bedridden single patients of ’60s doctor shows, women on the ’80s soaps who resisted wedding marches risked death. In the real world in 1988, 8 percent of AIDS victims were women. In daytime TV—101 percent. On “The Young and the Restless,” AIDS fells a former prostitute who abandons her child to follow her “profession”—the ultimate in careerism. (She winds up infecting her daughter, too.) In “All My Children,” AIDS strikes a divorcee and, her femininity apparently resuscitated on the sickbed, she decides to marry again. Is safe sex exercised in the nuptial bower? This “socially responsible” soap doesn’t say.
With the exception of “Murphy Brown,” the ’80s prime-time lineup offered almost no shows centered on a single woman in the working world, much less one deriving pleasure or pride from her vocation. The occasional series that were about single women actively involved in their careers, like the lawyer of “Sara,” were typically yanked after less than a season. The networks only seemed willing to support single-women shows when the heroines were confined to the home in non-threatening roles in a strictly all-female world—like the elderly widows in “The Golden Girls” or the home-based interior decorators of “Designing Women.”
Most of the single women who remained on television in this era were secondary and cautionary characters; like Sally Rogers on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” their grim circumstances only underscored the good fortune of the leading wife. Relegated to incidental roles, the single women reverted to two stock types: the coldly calculating careerist or the deeply depressed spinster. Either she had no emotions or she was an emotional wreck. The single careerist belonged to the lowest order of females. She had traded in her humanity for a paycheck, and spurned not only men but children. The mere sight of a baby could make her already frigid body temperature descend to arctic range. “Oh, babies,” the single stockbroker on “Day by Day” gags as one trundles into her gunsights. “Unappetizing and at the same time unappealing.” The tear-stained spinster, on the other hand, rated a bit higher on TV’s backlash hierarchy of women. She was less intimidating than her professionally ambitious sister; she was too busy weeping to pursue that promotion. She deserved our pity, the shows suggested—though not our respect.
The mental collapse of the single woman preoccupied even higher quality shows, like “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” where the thirty-four-year-old divorced heroine has lost not only her husband but countless jobs, boyfriends, her neighboring female friend, and even her therapist. It takes only six episodes for her to suffer a nervous breakdown.
NBC Entertainment’s senior vice president Warren Littlefield told the press that the network’s “goal” in commissioning “Molly Dodd” was to do a show “that talks about the real life of a single woman.” But in the imagination of late-’80s programmers, the only “real” single woman is the one who cracks up. In the case of Molly, mental illness is her personality. “I made her neurotic,” executive producer Jay Tarses explains, “because I didn’t want her to be bland.” Tarses could have drawn on other traits to spice her character: after all, he managed to fashion a quirky personality on “The Bob Newhart Show,” where the male psychotherapist is memorable without losing his mind.
Of course, single women like Molly exist in the real world, and her character would have been unobjectionable in a more healthily diverse universe of female television characters—one that included single women with different problems, and maybe the occasional one whose admirable attributes outweighed her defects. But as one of the few single women to have her own show on late ’80s TV, morose Molly wound up serving as an archetype—and bolstering the stereotypes the rest of the backlash was pushing. And perhaps that was even her creator’s intent. “She’s every woman to me,” Tarses says of Molly. “Her biological clock is ticking. . . . ‘Molly Dodd’ is 180 degrees from ‘Mary Tyler Moore.’”
Molly was also as silent about women’s rights as Mary had been out-spoken. “I think a lot of women ask themselves, What have we gotten out of [feminism]?” Tarses says. “Have we really gained anything? That’s Molly Dodd’s view.” If the show were to flash back on Molly in the early ’70s, he says, viewers would meet a woman who “probably would have pretended to be a radical feminist but secretly would have hoped for a more traditional life.” Why? “Because that’s how I feel about it,” Tarses says. “I never did get what the women’s movement was all about. . . . Every move a man made could be misconstrued by feminists. I didn’t see why I had to walk on eggs. I still don’t understand what the big problem is. No doors ever seemed to be closed to me.”
If all the ’80s trend stories about women were collated and fed into a television script machine, the result might be “thirtysomething,” ABC’s celebrated “realistic contemporary drama” about upwardly mobile baby boomers. The topics addressed in this prime-time program, introduced in the fall of ’87 to intense media attention, include cocooning, the mommy track, the man shortage, and the biological clock. There’s even an episode on the downside of no-fault divorce that could be straight out of Lenore Weitzman’s The Divorce Revolution. In this segment, a nasty lawyer urges the estranged husband to use the new law to sell the house from under his wife and kids. The heartless attorney is, of course, a single career woman.
The creators of “thirtysomething” marketed the show as a thinking person’s TV series. But, like the typical trend story, the show’s scripts avoided any social or political analysis and pumped moralism into the vacuum. The cautionary tales were, in keeping with the media’s trend tradition, aimed exclusively at women. The good mother, Hope Steadman, was bathed in a heavenly light as she floated about the kitchen, rapturous over breast-feeding. Meanwhile, the bad spinsters clutched their barren wombs and circuited miserably around the happy Steadman homestead; like the single women of the New York Times article, they were “coping with a void.” The scripts concealed their weekly sermons with progressive-sounding but hollow dialogue and an ironic stance that denied responsibility for its message. The characters mounted a feeble mock struggle against the domestic images of ’50s television, then gladly surrendered to them. “Just don’t tell me I’m turning into June Cleaver,” Hope, the happy housewife, says rhetorically. She calls Michael “Ward” (the patriarch on “Leave It to Beaver”), and he plays his part, too. “So is this the part where I say, ‘Wally, step into my study’?” he asks.
While the press greeted “Roseanne” with suspicion and fat jokes, it gave “thirtysomething” the red-carpet treatment. Talk shows even recruited Mel Harris, the actress who played the good wife, Hope, to instruct its viewers on mothering. Therapists hailed “thirtysomething” in the media and pestered the network for videotaped episodes that they could “prescribe” to patients. The American Psychological Association gave the show its annual award for endorsing “the notion of inner thinking.” (Their enthusiastic response made good business sense. As a professor reported in Redbook, a survey that he conducted showed that after viewers watch “thirtysomething,” they are more “inclined to try therapy.”) Clergymen used the show to counsel singles at weekend retreats. Dating services offered “thirtysomething” matchmaking events and “The New Dating Game” promised male contestants with a “real clean-cut ‘thirtysomething’ look.” Even George Bush referred to the show in a campaign speech.
All this excitement was over a show that never ranked higher than twenty-fifth in the ratings—and slipped steadily in the charts its first season. But in this case, even advertisers didn’t mind. They were willing to look the other way because the show rated high in “quality demo-graphics”—the term used by the television industry for upper-income viewers and the strategy the industry deployed for concealing a shrinking market share. The majority of “thirtysomething” viewers had household incomes that topped $60,000 a year—and, better yet, more than half had a child under the age of three. So businesses that stood to profit from the backlash jumped on the “thirtysomething” bandwagon. Jif peanut butter and Kool-Aid even presented ads with a “ ‘thirtysomething’ feel.” The creators of a Canada Dry commercial featuring cocooning couples justified their message by citing the show. How did the ad agency know it was a “trend” that Americans were retreating to the home? “Watching that show ‘thirtysomething,’” Marcia Grace, the ad’s creative director at Wells Rich Greene, explains, “that was real key.”
In “thirtysomething,” a complete pantheon of backlash women is on display—from blissful homebound mother to neurotic spinster to ball-busting single career woman. The show even takes a direct shot at the women’s movement: the most unsympathetic character is a feminist.
At the top of the “thirtysomething” female ladder, Hope enjoys the view. “Hope is so hard to write for because she just exists in this glow,” Ann Hamilton, one of the show’s writers, says. “She never does anything, really.” When the show’s producers, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, drafted the original pilot, they drew up mini-biographies of each character. For the men they wrote down career goals, hobbies, and convictions. For Hope Steadman they wrote: “Hope is married to Michael.”
“I feel guilty,” Hope sighs to her single friends, “because my life is so full.” Her biggest problem: She discovers her house has a “borderline” case of radon contamination. Her darkest moment: Michael misplaces their dinner reservation and the movie they wanted to see is sold out. “Michael,” she tells him, “last night was the worst Saturday night of my life!”
A former “overachiever,” according to her biography, Hope has surrendered ambition in exchange for a happy family life. This was the right choice, the series hammers home on one episode after another. When Michael, an advertising executive, is having minor money troubles, Hope wonders if she should return to work. “I earn the money now,” her husband assures her—and anyway, what of their two-year-old daughter, Janey? “You love her. You don’t want to go back to work now.” Apparently, it’s not possible to work and still love your children.
Hope reconfirms her cocooning choice in a key episode, entitled “Weaning,” in which she returns part-time to her job as a magazine researcher. She’s overwhelmed by the onerous burdens of part-time fact checking; we see her working until three A.M. every night. Her husband groans, “We used to be madly in love.” She apologizes, “It won’t always be like this,” and he tells her, “Yeah, it will probably be worse.” Hope suspects he’s right. And she tells a friend, “The only thing I’ve accomplished is being totally exhausted.”
On the job, Hope meets a grasping single career woman—in fact, she’s grasping after Hope’s job. Hope asks her if she wants to have kids. “Oh, I don’t know,” snaps the woman, “I’d kind of like to get my game plan going first. . . . I mean I don’t even have time for a relationship right now.” That does it; Hope flies from the office and into the arms of husband Michael. She can’t do it anymore, she tells him tearfully. “I’m supposed to be able to do both. That’s all I hear about.” With a sly smile, Michael confesses that, although he knows it’s “unliberated,” he’d rather have her home, too. Permission granted, Hope hurries homeward, sweeps baby Janey in her arms and whirls around the nursery. Van Morrison croons “She’s an angel” as the credits roll.
• • •
LIBERTY GODSHALL wrote the “Weaning” episode; she is the wife of the show’s co-creator, Ed Zwick. A former actress with bit parts on television shows, including “Charlie’s Angels,” Godshall grew frustrated with always having to play “the blond bimbo girlfriend” and switched to journalism. Then she had a baby and, like Hope, quit work.
In writing “Weaning,” Godshall says she indeed intended to urge women to stay home while their children were very young. In fact, Godshall says, the episode wound up making the point less strongly than she would have liked. “I think I probably wanted it to be more a celebration of staying home.” One day in the “thirtysomething” production offices in Studio City, she and her husband explain the development of that episode:
GODSHALL:“I wanted to tell women, don’t try it—unless, one, you really need to, or you really, really want to. Because, while the successes are there, the failures and the guilt are there, too.”
ZWICK:“What I loved about the episode was it was very deeply written
from the inside. . . . It was hormonally written. The feelings had this rawness to them that pleased me. . . . This is a generation of women who, upon their adolescence, suddenly encountered Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan and they were told, ‘No, no, wrong, wrong. This way. Take a left turn.’ ‘Oh, okay,’ they said, and they did. And what they are discovering upon having the kid itself is there are some extraordinarily strong biological, and not just biological, attachments or bonding that supersede politics and rhetoric.”
GODSHALL:“Raising a child is the most difficult thing in the world.”
ZWICK:“The days I’ve spent an entire day with my son . . .”
GODSHALL (SHOOTING HIM A LOOK):“Not too many.”
ZWICK:“Well, more like taking a four-hour block of time so she could go out.”
GODSHALL:“Fifty-fifty, I remember that concept. It was before I had my son. It doesn’t seem to be a viable thing anymore. . . . I call him [Zwick] Ward. It’s like instant sex roles.”
• • •
For Melissa, the single and struggling free-lance photographer in “thirtysomething,” no instant roles exist—only neurosis and the constant reminder that, as she puts it, “my biological clock [is] going off.” Melissa is the tear-stained version of the ’80s spinster—more pitiable, and so more likable, than her careerist single sister.
“Poor Melissa,” her married friends sigh all the time. “If you were any closer to your feelings, you’d be molesting them,” says the single bachelor Gary, who is of course free of such afflictions himself. Stood up by a blind date on a Saturday night, Melissa tearfully takes a midnight oath by the full moon: “I swear I will not idolize married people such as Hope and Michael who have their own problems even though I don’t know what they are and want to kill them when they complain, especially Hope.”
Mostly Melissa mourns her barren womb. “I want this baby,” Melissa moans when in the presence of baby Janey. “How am I ever going to have a baby?” Soon after, she falls for a gynecologist, but he already has a child and won’t have another, so she leaves him. “Well, I guess me and my eggs will be moving on,” she says. Later, she unsuccessfully recruits the carefree single Gary to play stud. In between, she has a nightmare in which she’s trapped on a “biological clock” game show.
Incredibly, the role as originally conceived by the show’s creators was even more extreme. Actress Melanie Mayron, who played Melissa, recalls that when she first auditioned for the role, the producers explained her character this way: “She was just described as ‘man-hungry.’” Mayron asked them what kind of job she had. “No one knew. I mean, a single woman in her thirties ‘man-hungry’? C’mon. That’s what you do in your twenties. By your thirties you’ve got a career, you’ve got bills to pay; you’ve got better things to do than read the personals every day.”
Mayron came up with the photography career and pushed for fuller character development and fewer mental afflictions. “I resent that message of, just because you’re a single woman, you must be miserable,” says Mayron, who is single herself. “That’s not like me or any of my friends.”
At least Melissa gets some sympathy on the show. Ellyn, the hard-as-nails single career woman, gets none. Because she cares about her job as a City Hall official, she must forfeit a love life. In her biography, the show’s creators describe her as “a career woman whose career is ascending at the same rate as her sex life is descending.” Like Melissa, she started out as even more of a caricature, and was tempered only through repeated lobbying by Polly Draper, who played Ellyn. Draper recalls that when she auditioned for the role, the producers “described [Ellyn] as the kind of person who was so irritating you would walk out of the room whenever she walked in. And they wanted her to worship Hope and to want to be exactly like her. And I said, ‘Wait a minute, can’t she be okay in her own right?’”
In the show, Ellyn leads what the character herself describes as “this faked rented existence;” her apartment makes the single woman’s quarters in Fatal Attraction seem downright homey. “Mine is rented,” Ellyn says of her surroundings. “All of it. The couch. The artwork. Even the salt shaker.” Her career leaves little room for shopping—and none for companionship. She hasn’t even had sex in fifteen months. “Between work . . . and this exercise class,” she says, “I don’t even have time to have a relationship.” When a man does come into her life, she can barely stand it. She grumbles, “My work is suffering.” When he tells her “I love you,” she snarls, “I can’t handle that.”
Her work life doesn’t sound too appealing, either. “Man, I’m tired,” Ellyn tells Hope. “I’ve been in the office till ten every night this week. Look at the bags under my eyes.” Serene Hope rocks her baby and asks, “How’s your stomach been?” Ellyn moans: “Terrible. Stress. Total stress.” When Hope’s baby begins to whimper, the unmaternal Ellyn snaps, “Won’t she just stop crying?”
Liberty Godshall had a strong hand in shaping Ellyn’s unattractive personality, too. “Yeah, Ellyn’s a mess,” she says, laughing. “In fact, she might get messier. We’ve been playing around with the idea of making her a drug abuser.” She even proposed adopting the pop tune “Addicted” as Ellyn’s theme song. Another fate she and her husband contemplated seriously for the career crone: a total nervous breakdown. Finally, as Zwick explains, “We opted for a much more sophisticated event.” Ellyn develops a bleeding ulcer, collapses, and winds up in the hospital. The boyfriend dumps her soon after, announcing, “I feel sorry for you because you do such selfish, self-destructive things.” In the last scene, Ellyn is back at her family’s house, lying on her girlhood bed, surrounded by stuffed animals. Her womanly side reawakened, she does the right “feminine” thing: she reaches for the phone and dials a psychiatrist.
It’s hard to imagine a less flattering portrait of a single woman, but by the second season “thirtysomething” had, in fact, produced one: Susannah, the humorless feminist. Susannah is a social activist who works full-time in a community-service center in the city’s ghetto, tending to homeless men and battered wives. Despite her selfless work, the show manages to portray her as inhumanly cold, a rigid and snarling ideologue with no friends. Everyone in the Steadman circle dislikes her and makes fun of her “excessive” independence and unhip political commitment. Even the angelic Hope sneers behind Susannah’s back.
Finally, the feminist shrew is tamed by bachelor Gary. When he impregnates her, she is determined to get an abortion. But then, at the clinic, she hears the biological clock ringing. “I’ve always put things off,” she confesses to Gary, tearily. “I just can’t make assumptions about the future anymore.” He is triumphant, and she has the baby.
“When you look at the characters on this show,” “thirtysomething” staff writer Ann Hamilton observes, “you get the sense that all single women are unhappy. You look at these women and you think, ‘God, I wouldn’t want to be single now.’ . . . When I think of how seriously people out there seem to be taking this show, it’s scary.” In production planning meetings, Hamilton argued unsuccessfully against the “Weaning” episode. Pregnant herself at the time, she had no plans to quit work after she had her baby. “It made me feel awful because it was saying, ‘If you go back to work you are a bad mother.’” And it made her angry because it slyly endorsed wifely obedience: “It seemed that Hope made the decision Michael wanted her to make.”
The actresses on “thirtysomething” have been uncomfortable with the show’s treatment of working mothers, too. After all, they have been putting their toddlers in day care so they can star in a program exalting homemakers. (The show’s production company, like every studio but one in Hollywood, has no on-site child care.) Mel Harris, who played Hope, returned to work nine months after having her son. “I think I’m a better mother and a better person because I work,” she says. Patricia Wettig, who played Nancy, the show’s other stay-at-home mother, has a career, marriage, and children. (She’s married to the actor who played Hope’s husband, Michael.) She says, “From my perspective all three things are extremely important and I’m not willing to give up any of them.” In the show, when Nancy makes tentative moves in the direction of a career as a children’s book illustrator, she promptly falls ill with ovarian cancer—becoming, as Wettig put it, “Queen for a Day.”
Even women watching the show were troubled by its attitude. ABC market research vice president Henry Schafer, who surveyed “thirtysomething” viewers, reports that “one of our key findings” was that female viewers didn’t want Hope to stay home. “They said, ‘Move her out of the home, get her into other arenas.’ We tested different ways—having her do volunteer work, having her get a job. And the job won out.”
The show’s female actors and viewers weren’t clamoring for full-time nesters, but the show’s male creators were. They were the ones distressed by the women’s movement and its effect on them. “I think this is a terrible time to be a man, maybe the worst time in history,” “thirty-something” co-creator Marshall Herskovitz complained in a men’s magazine. “Men come into the world with certain biological imperatives,” he said, but they no longer have any “acceptable channels” to express these needs. “Manhood has simply been devalued in recent years and doesn’t carry much weight anymore.”
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WITH SACRIFICE for one’s husband and children once more a woman’s highest calling, perhaps it was only a matter of time before TV makers got around to resurrecting quite literally the 1950s game show “Queen for a Day.” That notorious contest, in which women compete for the title of most martyred housewife, seemed relevant again to Fries Distribution, which announced plans to release the “updated” show in 1988. Like the return of Spelling’s “Angels,” this revival was presented as progress for women. The “All New Queen for a Day” will be “a show that has changed with the times,” Fries’s publicist Janet Katelman announced.
In the ’50s format, each weeping contestant was a Stella Dallas saint. Each described her pitiful self-denying lot and the audience voted on the most hanky-soaking tale. The lucky winner took home a prize—usually a washing machine or a frost-free refrigerator. In the ’80s pilot, the three contestants selected for the new show (which as of this writing has yet to air) are as follows: a burn victim, a woman whose daughter was killed by a street gang, and a woman with no children who turned to adoption. And just like the old program, the women will trot out their tales of woe before a voting audience. How then has the new “Queen for a Day” “changed with the times”? Katelman explains: “Every one of the women will get a prize. There will be no losers.” None, that is, unless you count the millions of female viewers—faced with yet another distorted image of themselves in the backlash TV mirror.