Scenes from two of television’s most intriguing new shows:
– A high-powered litigator tells her newest female employee not to have children, because it’ll ruin her ambition.
– After a drunken cop leaves a bar, her Porsche skids out of control and she runs over a man.
Here’s the kicker:
These women are not the villains of their respective shows, but the lead characters.
On “Damages,” which premieres on FX 9 p.m. Tuesday, Glenn Close gives a bravura performance as tough New York City lawyer Patty Hewes. On “Saving Grace,” which debuts on TNT 9 p.m. Monday, another Oscar winner, Holly Hunter, plays the boozy, fierce Oklahoma City cop Grace Hanadarko.
These women give intricate, charismatic performances in programs that are compelling, smart and well made. “Saving Grace” treats its Midwestern setting and Grace’s spiritual awakening with matter-of-fact respect and even humor, and the phenomenal “Damages,” which also has Ted Danson and Tate Donovan doing the best work of their careers, is an extraordinarily intelligent and suspenseful legal thriller.
Despite all that, is television ready for lead female characters who are every bit as flawed as Gregory House of “House,” Vic Mackey of “The Shield” or Andy Sipowicz of “NYPD Blue”?
For years now, especially on cable, charismatic male characters have transfixed viewers of quality television, not despite their flaws but because of them. But even cable executives began to feel as if the trend exemplified by Tony Soprano had gone too far.
John Landgraf, president of the edgy FX network, said he wondered, “Are we the white, male, anti-hero network?”
Though broadcast television has given compelling roles to Sally Field of “Brothers and Sisters,” Connie Britton of “Friday Night Lights” and a number of other women in recent seasons, only cable was ready to delve into the realm of morally ambiguous female characters, ones who are capable of jaw-dropping actions (just wait until you see the closing moments of the first episode of “Damages”).
“I wonder if there’s a whole generation of female executives that have come up, that want to see more stories about women their own age,” Laura San Giacomo, who plays Grace’s best friend on “Saving Grace,” said at a recent press event for the show.
“I think the landscape is shifting,” added Lorraine Toussaint, who joins the “Saving Grace” cast in the third episode. “Like Laura [San Giacomo], I’m a new mom, so I sat out a couple of years intentionally and by design. But in those two years, I had one foot still in the water, and that water got really, really cold, because there was a sort of mandate that came down that [there would be] no actresses over 35 in lead roles. I think that is shifting and has shifted in the last year or two.”
Indeed, in the last few years, interesting female characters have been at the forefront of “The Closer,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Deadwood,” “The Sopranos” and “The Riches.” But aside from “The Closer,” where one female character is the unmistakable centerpiece of the show, most of those other programs are ensemble works. “Saving Grace” and “Damages,” on the other hand, put flawed women right smack in the center of morally ambiguous universes.
“I think a big part of that [willingness to explore complex women] is the explosion of cable,” said Daniel Zelman, who co-created “Damages” with Todd A. Kessler, a veteran of “The Sopranos,” and Glenn Kessler. “On the networks, the characters have to not offend a large swath of America. There’s a reluctance to have any character’s behavior go too far, but especially a woman’s.”
What’s especially interesting is that women over 40 — Hunter is 49 and Close is 60 — seem to be getting so many of the plum TV roles of late. But it makes sense: Just when they reach the apex of their skills in their 40s and 50s, movie roles become scarce. It’s only logical that they’d turn to TV, where the scripts are as compelling — if not more so — as what’s available in the vast majority of films.
“If you’re going to explore a woman’s life in a way that hasn’t been done before, that’s where you want to go, with the woman who has life experience, who has scars,” Zelman said. “We’ve seen the young, pretty woman so many times. It’s not that there aren’t interesting stories to be told there, but they’re told again and again. The newer uncharted territory is older women who have life experience.”
“I kind of still hold to that European sensibility. … I think older women are really sexy,” Mary-Louise Parker, the star of Showtime’s “Weeds,” said at a recent press event for her show.
Grace Hanadarko is certainly sexy, and enjoys reveling in that aspect of her life. A lot.
There are frequent sex scenes between Hanadarko and her married police partner, Ham Dewey (Kenneth Johnson), and she isn’t above flashing a neighbor just for kicks. The hard-living detective is rarely out of reaching distance from a bottle of the hard stuff, and it’ll probably come as no surprise that she’s prone to decking people who make her angry. Next to Hanadarko, sweets-addicted Brenda Leigh Johnson of “The Closer” is a saint.
“Grace’s sex life is a very big part of who she is, and we’re not going to run away from anything that’s about this woman,” creator Nancy Miller said at the press event for the show.
Hunter, who said she doesn’t actually watch much TV, said it was a no-brainer to take on the role.
When she was on the sixth page of the script, she said in a recent phone interview, she called her agent and said, “By the time I get to page 52, if it’s still this good, I’m saying yes. That’s what happened.
“I’m thrilled with the challenge of being somebody who’s so seduced by the world,” Hunter added. “I feel like she has 18,000 different faces. I can’t say that about so many characters I’ve seen, about characters I’ve played.”
Troubled personalities
Indeed, Hanadarko is a complicated creation. One line in the first episode implies that she was molested as a child by a Catholic priest, and Hunter confirms that Hanadarko did have that experience. In light of that traumatizing history and other tragedies in her life, Grace has rejected God and turned away from organized religion.
Then on the night she crashes her Porsche, Earl turns up. Earl is an angel.
There’s no doubt that the shorthand description of this show — “a troubled cop is visited by an angel” — sounds nauseating. And given the wrong execution, it could be an unwatchable, treacly mess.
The good news is that the smartly written “Saving Grace” is not a mess. In fact, it’s one of the most distinctive new shows of the year, because its central mysteries aren’t really about the dead bodies Hanadarko comes across on the job, but about the salvation of one charismatic woman’s very troubled soul.
But Grace’s encounters with Earl don’t exactly follow a predictable trajectory.
“Why me?” she asks him at one point.
“Well, I know sometimes God goes alphabetically,” Earl replies.
When asked if she thought the show or the character might offend religious people, Hunter said that didn’t really factor into her thinking when she took the job.
“I wanted to play Grace, and I didn’t want any one else to play Grace — it was that much of a private attraction that I had for the character. That doesn’t happen to me often, and I felt kind of privileged to feel it,” she said. Watching the show will take “an open mind,” she added.
“I kind of think that anyone who has struggled in their lives could relate to Grace,” said Hunter, who is also a producer on the show.
Patty Hewes struggles, Close said, but most of the people in her life never see that. Hewes may think that she’s a bad mother, but she also deeply loves her teenage son.
There’s a moment in the second episode in which she has a difficult conversation with her husband about the young man. As she puts down the phone, you can tell Hewes’ heart is pierced to its core.
“She’s not just this woman who’s achieved a great deal of success and come to this position of power, but she’s a mother,” Close says. “And I feel if you’re a career woman and you have a child, you’re immediately cut in half for the rest of your life. You’re cut in half, because you’re seduced by your work and you need your work, but your child … I love that line of Patty’s, ‘Children are like clients: They want all of you all the time.'”
Focus groups
If FX had any concerns about how the hard-charging Hewes would be regarded by potential viewers, they were laid to rest by the focus groups and testing that the network did for the show.
In Landgraf’s experience, the only other character to score as positively as Hewes was Josiah Bartlet, the character played by Martin Sheen on “The West Wing,” which Landgraf worked on during his time at NBC.
“It was fascinating to watch people talk about it after” watching the “Damages” pilot, Landgraf said. “They were really interested in this idea of what people would do for power.”
Power, sex, motherhood, careers and God: It looks as though the television industry has finally noticed that women are just as deeply entangled in those subjects as men.
“At any time in my career this is a great role,” Close said. “TV was always in some ways considered ‘lesser than.’ I’m not sure I agree with that. It’s about storytelling, it’s about great writing, it’s about a potential audience that will actually see the work. I think television is a very exciting place to be.”
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moryan@tribune.com
