Rolling Stone - USA (2019-07)

TV

90 | Rolling Stone | July 2019

In a

League

of Their

Own

SUPER

HEROINES

Jane the

Virgin’s Gina

Rodriguez,

Tuca and

Bertie, Adlon

(top row);

Waller-Bridge,

Abbi

Jacobson,

Ilana Glazer

(middle row);

Konkle and

Erskine,

Lyonne,

Ex-Girlfriend’s

Rachel Bloom

(bottom row)

ILLUSTRATION BY Sean McCabe

In a

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of Their

Own

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/FX

T

HE story of the year in television

so far was told in the closing shot of

Broad City. As Ilana descended into

the subway and out of our lives, the

camera followed a new pair of friends, then

another and another, each of different ethnic-

ities and gender identities, all with a dynamic

similar to Ilana and Abbi’s. The message was

clear: There are so many women’s stories to

be told, and you’ve been watching only two.

With the departures of Broad City, Crazy

Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin and Unbreakable

Kimmy Schmidt, not to mention the ways that

Game of Thrones failed Daenerys, Sansa and

Arya in its own farewell season, 2019 could

have marked a downturn for women on TV.

But most of those shows concluded well. And

they didn’t leave a barren landscape: Nearly

all of this year’s best shows so far have been

about and made by women.

Start with Netflix’s inspired Russian Doll, in

which Natasha Lyonne (who created it with

Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland) plays

Nadia, a coder who keeps dying and being

resurrected around the events of her 36th

birthday. Lyonne is a comic force of nature

throughout. In one episode, Nadia survives

long enough to make it to work, where her

male colleagues scold her for an error. She

points out that one of them made the mistake,

fixes the bug quickly while they stare at her in

puzzlement, then runs off to investigate her

existential quandary. It recalls a line about

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: She did ev-

erything he did, but backward and in heels.

The best and boldest

shows of 2019 so far

have been centered on —

and created by — women

By ALAN SEPINWALL

In Hulu’s Pen15, 31-year-old co-creators

Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play them-

selves at age 13, opposite a cast of actual

middle-schoolers. What starts as a sketch-

comedy idea goes much deeper into the

messy dynamics of best friends experiencing

adolescence at different speeds. It’s also

gut- bustingly raunchy in a way that’s usually

reserved for stories about boys. Female

self-gratification has never seemed as hilari-

ously all-consuming as it does in the episode

where Maya learns how to masturbate.

The year has offered one striking new

female-centric debut after another, including

Netflix’s Tuca & Bertie, an animated buddy

comedy that’s emotionally rich and endear-

ingly silly; HBO’s Gentleman Jack, starring

Suranne Jones as a barely closeted 19th-

century English landowner trying to figure

out how to take a wife; and Hulu’s Shrill, with

Aidy Bryant as a writer struggling to get the

world to look beyond her physique.

Not only that, many of 2019’s best shows

have been returning female-fronted series that

found ways to level up. Starz’s Vida, about two

Mexican American sisters reuniting to save

their late mother’s lesbian bar, returned more

confident than in Season One, when it didn’t

seem to fully grasp how to tell its characters’

stories. As a result, it’s been more satisfying

and intimate. The third season of Pamela Ad-

lon’s great autobiographical FX series, Better

Things — without disgraced co-creator Louis

C.K. — expanded the focus beyond the usual

mother-daughter dynamics while maintaining

the delicate command of tone and sentiment.

And the belated second season of Phoebe

Waller-Bridge’s Amazon series, Fleabag, in

which the title character fell for a hot priest

(Andrew Scott), was a wonder, with remark-

ably keen insight on faith and love.

At one point, Fleabag meets a businesswom-

an (Kristin Scott Thomas) who sums up the

female experience as one driven by suffering:

“Women are born with pain built in,” she says.

“It’s our physical destiny. Period pain, sore

boobs, childbirth. We carry it within our-

selves, throughout our lives. Men don’t. They

have to seek it out.” That’s just one of many

female takes on the world that — despite the

departures of Abbi and Ilana, Kimmy Schmidt

and others — are leaving TV in secure hands.

ESSAY