The hard-drinking lead in HBO’s Sharp Objects, struggling with deep-rooted issues from the past, climbs into a battered old car and, drunk, drives off at top speed, listening to Led Zeppelin. She is back in her unforgiving working-class home town to find out what happened to two dead girls, a mission aided by water bottles filled with vodka and copious shots at the local bar. Camille Preaker, played with exhausted despair and hard-shell resilience by Amy Adams, is a new addition to the antihero canon: misanthropic, self-destructive, wise-cracking, and pointedly hard to like.
Good TV about men behaving badly is familiar and canonical. Think of “prestige television”, long-form, cinematic and lofty, formerly known as box-set TV, and it’s likely you will think of Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Walter White. Preaker has been heralded as a woman to join the boys’ club, and a sign that the kind of dark, expensive television that’s almost certain to clean up at awards ceremonies can be stories about women, too.
Prime Suspect was, of course, doing this decades ago, and the ghost of tough, troubled, excellent Jane Tennison looms larger than is often acknowledged within modern television. Certainly, the last couple of decades have seen more and more instances of the antiheroine, from the Sex and the City gang to Nurse Jackie to Weeds’ Nancy Botwin to Homeland’s Carrie Mathison, all of whom made great entertainment out of their refusal to toe whatever line they were supposed to.
Even within Mad Men, The Sopranos and The Wire, shows with masculinity in their bones, there were complicated, essential female characters who made the stories so rich and deep. One of the most memorable scenes in the whole of The Wire was, for me, Snoop asking Michael how her hair looked as she resigned herself to her fate. Mad Men would have been half the show without Peggy Olsen; ditto The Sopranos, without Carmella’s wilful moral blindness. Scandi-noir crime dramas from The Killing to The Bridge made it seem as if every woman in authority in Sweden or Denmark had a compulsive inability to to make the right choice.
Elsewhere, the most inventive and intriguing comedies of recent times, from Girls to Fleabag to Broad City to Chewing Gum, have entertained women’s “bad” behaviour in delightfully playful ways. Jessica Jones, Top of the Lake, Orange is the New Black, Happy Valley, UnREAL – all these series go out of their way to reject the idea that their leads have to be likable, and allow viewers the possibility of finding their female leads hard to warm to.
The idea that women can be unlikable is becoming more of a given. As audiences, we are being presented again and again with characters’ amorality. In part, that’s because these need to be entertaining stories; people behaving well rarely lends itself to gripping drama. There is something about the times we live in, though, that seem to encourage these kinds of grey areas. This is an age of moral extremes. Every day we witness elected leaders behaving badly with seeming impunity, while at the same time careers are ended by offensive tweets from the past. A show such as Killing Eve, for example, deals explicitly with characters for whom morality is a curiosity to be explored rather than a rigid code – not unlike Fleabag, with which it shares a writer, Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
In a recent interview with the New Yorker, the author Ottessa Moshfegh made a point about the way some readers reacted to her novel Eileen. “They wanted me to somehow explain to them how I had the audacity to write a disgusting female character,” she said. Gillian Flynn, who wrote both Sharp Objects’s source novel and some of the adaptation, discussed the need for female villains in 2015 (“I’m talking violent, wicked women. Scary women.”). “The point is, women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves – to the point of almost parodic encouragement – we’ve left no room to acknowledge our dark side,” she said.
The most enjoyable character to watch on Game of Thrones is, by a snowy northern mile, Cersei Lannister. She is a picture of amorality, driven by a family code she has drawn up for herself (to include twincest, naturally) to manipulate, lie and murder. She enjoys being terrible; she takes being unlikeable to such extremes that it almost comes full circle to grudging respect. But a television landscape full of Cerseis would be hard to stomach. What is becoming apparent, as more female TV writers are getting breaks, as more female-led stories are proving themselves to be profitable, is that all sorts of female characters are being given space, whether they’re angelic, or evil, or more commonly, some complicated jumble of the two. Ultimately, female characters are being afforded the courtesy of having as much depth of character as male characters have always had.
