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I’m late to the party because this was posted like a week ago, but Vulture spoke to Executive Producer Mike White about Enlightened, the HBO series he created. Despite devoted fandom and impassioned critical support it just doesn’t look like it’s going to see a third season. Here’s what White said about why he thinks that is:

“[This] sounds kind of cynical, but it’s the story of my career. If I have a male protagonist, it’s a studio movie, and if it’s a female protagonist, it’s an indie movie. That’s just how it is…It’s about America and who goes to see movies. Women are interested in men and women, and men aren’t interested in the woman’s story. They just aren’t. There are exceptions, but by and large…unless it’s Angelina Jolie shooting people or Zero Dark Thirty or something that feels like it’s in the male sphere. The devaluation of the traditional female roles or the traditional female approach, it starts to feel like this is what’s wrong with our country. Should I get off my high horse?”

No. Please do not. This is important.  Over the past year and a half there’s been a lot of talk about women’s roles in the entertainment industry, and more specifically about the dearth of movies and television over which they have creative control. Some notable (and not-so-notable) strides have been made to rectify this imbalance, but the real ill (of which the lack of women-helmed work is merely a symptom) is this idea that White raises: that men and women’s stories are not given equal shrift in a larger sense. But no one seems to be talking about that. This could be because we haven’t collectively realized it, or it could be that people are uncomfortable bringing it up. Even a smart, forthright guy like Mike White is worried that raising the issue will seem too strident, and self-deprecates his own argument right out of the conversation.

It’s not simply that there isn’t enough entertainment made by women sheerly in terms of volume. This isn’t about trying to even out a canonical power balance or making it so dudes want to watch Bride Wars. Bride Wars sucks and no one should watch it. What is important is recognizing the tacit message being transmitted to both genders: there are important stories, and then there are women’s stories.

I went to a fairly liberal, progressive elementary school during the early 1990 and there, almost without exception, the books I was assigned to read were books about boys. Boys going to war, boys tilling the land, a boy and his dog, a boy and his wolf that he loves like a dog, a boy going to sea and having adventures, a boy being very poor, a boy behaving foolishly with fireworks and blinding himself forever. The lone exemption I can recall is “The Diary of Anne Frank” in 7^th grade but unfortunately for gender parity, in the midst of her humanizing, relatable recollections, Anne says some weird stuff about her period and thus the male members of the class disgustedly withdrew their interest and the book became “girl stuff”.

I read the assigned books, and they were fine, but left to my own devices I didn’t have a whole lot of interest in stories of the lives of Boys From the Past. They seemed, as Marge Simpson says about music, “none of my business”. Seated comfortably on blankets at the bottom of my family’s linen closet with a giant bag of Doritos I blew through dozens of books about girls—Anne of Green Gables*, Little Women, Harriet the Spy, Eloise, all the “Ramona” and “Anastasia” books. Much as I loved these books and as covered in Caldecott Medals as many of them were, no academic authority figure ever suggested that these were important stories we should all be reading.

There are probably a bunch of reasons for this but the truth is that until relatively recently (the past 150 years) women’s personal stories had what might kindly be called “niche appeal”, but would more aptly be described as “really, really boring”. That’s because for a long time their lives were really, really boring; that’s what happens when you’re only allowed to do like, five things.  Housekeeping, baby-having, loom-weaving, cleaning and preparing raw meat, going to a well, doing laundry in a giant cauldron, trying not to get raped, going to the well again, etc. Such was the daily agenda for most women for most of the time that there’s been a world. Taken against stirring tales of colonial expansion, jungle exploration, starting world wars, hosting orgies, inventing mayonnaise, being (maybe?) the Son of God and discovering the cure for polio, women’s stuff didn’t really pack the same punch. How can we blame men of history for not being enraptured by stories of women’s lives when they have so little to do with men’s own experiences and the many interests they’ve been allowed to cultivate? Still, it is endlessly frustrating and discouraging to be an interested, contributing member of society and yet almost never see your experience mirrored in anything that anyone tells you is important. People of color in America have been saying this for fucking ever.

But things have changed and they are continuing to change.** Women are allowed to do more stuff, go more places and have layered opinions about the world. They can get important jobs, drop out of school, never learn to cook, watch Law & Order for 7 hours, go on vacation alone, have children, not have children, or forget to eat dinner and fall down the stairs drunk. They’re allowed to be interesting and complex  in ways that men have always been allowed to do, and soon the stories told about them won’t just be about boyfriends and periods and corny cliché’s about “wanting to have it all”. Liz Lemon is great, but she’s not the only alternative to Carrie Bradshaw, and besides, two avatars make for a pretty dull spectrum.

 But these things take time. “Hey, you should watch this emotional, character-driven show about a woman, her relationships and the shifting of her self concept!” is not a sentence that’s going to get a reflection-resistant audience of any gender to tune in. Part of the problem isn’t simply a gender bias, it’s that American audiences are kind of dummies. As a nation, we don’t really want to be challenged by our entertainment. We want to look at stuff that tells us what we already think we know. Social progress moves slowly, even in a digital age, and the leveling of a cultural playing field probably won’t manifest itself the next two seasons of a premium cable TV show.  We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there and I remind myself of that sometimes when I get upset about stuff like Kim Kardashian, “Celebrity Swan”, The Westboro Baptist Church and Bump-Its.

“Enlightened”, even if it is cancelled, has already done important work and will take its place beside projects like “My So-Called Life”, “Murphy Brown”, Party Girl, “Freaks and Geeks”, Bridesmaids and, yes, “GIRLS”, as another big push in the slow, shifting of a heavy paradigm.

Later in the interview White says, “I’m afraid this will be the best thing I ever do. I think it will be. That it might be over is sad.” It is sad. Hard working future-thinkers like Mike White are ahead of the curve and it must be disheartening that the world seems unready to consider what they already know: that women’s stories are everyone’s stories.  

*I know about this and it makes me nuts 

**This is about the western world only and more specifically, the United States. I know that in most of the world things are still pretty miserable for women. 

 

 

Even before its premiere last Sunday night, HBO’s “GIRLS” generated such a glut of glowing Internet press that if we printed the pages out and stacked them end-to-end, we could build a cooing paper ladder to the stars. But immediately after the first episode there was hardly enough time to refill a wineglass between the rolling of the show’s credits and the web-backlash. Praise came, of course, along with sighs of satisfaction, but nothing could staunch the flow of amateur sociologizing, which came swiftly, scattering across the blogosphere like so many cupcake crumbs on a bathroom floor.

In the snidest review I’ve seen, Gawker scribe John Cook recaps the show, eschewing any actual names of characters or actresses in favor of using “daughter of—-” as a descriptor, to discredit all four actresses and chalk their cultural presence up to a history of fancy womb-dwelling. Critics have grudgingly acknowledged that Dunham’s haute upbringing (Tribeca! St. Ann’s!) should not prevent her from making art, while at the same time lambasting her for writing a show around the subject of her own life, rather than, say, a documentary about shoe-ing children in a far flung land. “How dare she?” seems to be the cry. How dare Dunham not apologize for—or at least appreciably demonstrate guilt about— her glamorous childhood, or the connections and opportunities that rained upon her at an age when even the most promising young talents are often still struggling to cobble together rent money? The compulsion to rail against the financial details of Hannah’s character may be an effort to staunch the gentle waves of bourgeois white guilt that lapped at many a white lady’s conscience while watching Dunham’s petulant Hannah demand a monthly allowance of $1,100. 

It bears mention that almost no one has given Dunham credit for possibly having a sense of humor about the characters she’s created. “I feel like I’m watching Clueless”, one of the three men featured in the first episode complains, witnessing a particularly solipsistic exchange. Can’t we reasonably expect that Dunham herself  sees some of the humor and absurdity in her own navel-gazing tendencies? It’s a clever bit of misogyny couched in progressive liberalism that tells us that a young woman from a wealthy family, no matter how thoughtful, intelligent or hardworking can have nothing reflexive to say on the subject of her experiences. Interesting too, is the fact that reviewers are extrapolating quite a bit from the first episode of a brand new series. Pilots are acknowledged to be shaky business for any creator, and plenty of groundbreaking shows like Breaking Bad, Seinfeld and the The Wire to name a few, didn’t really hit their stride til the middle of the first season, if not the second, so maybe give it a minute?

Another popular rejoinder following the premiere was “I feel like she only writes male characters who are wimps or jerks”. It’s for-sure true that the three men shown in the pilot were either smug pricks or milksoppy recreants whose desperate love (while preferable certainly to abuse or indifference), is oppressive in it’s own way. But it seems a dull, rote reading of the show to assume that this is how Dunham sees men. More likely, these early (first episode!) impressions are here to show us that these girls, though bright, thoughtful and ambitious, don’t really know exactly what they want. We are attracted to people because of what they represent: Marnie, the buttoned-up, by-the-book girl Hannah lives with has bedded down with a sweet, safe-bet sort of a guy, only to find that his cloying, annoying devotion bores her. Hannah, who fancies herself a bohemian writer type, has taken up with a selfish, insensitive prick of a Brooklyn carpenter, who makes her feel at once terrible and interesting enough to have captured the attentions of someone that she, at a young, dumb age, finds fascinating.  Dunham isn’t creating a cosmogony peopled with bright women and buffoon men, she’s just demonstrating the cluelessness of her protagonists by showing us the stupid shit they think is cool.

Entertainment made by and for women in recent years has, thankfully, been held to a high standard. It’s a credit to the women who make good work and to those who consume it, that we are demanding more than florid rom-coms and post-menopausal love stories. For every development meeting about Nights in Rodanthe 9 or Nicholas Sparks’ The Corset of the Sexually Frustrated Beekeeper’s Daughter, there are scores of women who are wishing for a post millennial answer to films like An Unmarried Woman or Working Girl. This places a significant amount of pressure on creators like Dunham and on movies like Bridesmaids: when you’re already an unwelcome guest in the boys clubhouse, you’re not allowed any false steps. It’s hard when there are so few shows that fairly and respectfully represent women’s experiences because each and every one gets tasked with speaking for the whole. This hope is legitimate if unrealistic, and can help explain the frustrated responses of women of color when they stared at the screen on Sunday night, dismayed that nothing of their own experience was reflected back. Clearly, there need to be more women of color and varied sexual orientation represented in television and film and there need to be more television shows created and run by women of color, period. It’s also worthy of censure that the only two minority characters in the show’s first episode (a graphic-designing Asian girl and a jolly, African-American panhandler) were reductive, cartoonish iterations of the worst sort of stereotypes. Still, this isn’t reason enough to insist that Dunham was negligent in her core casting decisions. It’s not reasonable to expect one show to serve the needs of a wildly diverse populace and retain any truly unique voice; doing that turns everything into a McDonald’s ad where a Korean guy, a girl with dreadlocks, a brawny white Ken-doll type and a lady in a burqa grin at each other over shakable salads. What’s good in a fast-food ad, in a health textbook and as a hiring policy doesn’t necessarily make good television.Casting a woman of color simply to satisfy quotas and cover asses is tokenizing in a far more troubling way, and disallows for opportunities for real conversations about race.

I would never suggest that anyone watch TV that doesn’t interest them and GIRLS is by no means flawless. Characters, situations and dialogue in the first episode were both broad and petty, and there was the plucking of some seriously low-hanging fruit, in jokes about Sex and the City, Facebook, and eating out dudes, LOL. However, Dunham is indisputably a talented writer with a keen observational eye and a gift for developing characters who are both relatable and infuriating. Have faith that smartphone humor and MGMT-scored scenes may give way to something funnier, sadder or more sophisticated than anything this asshole ever wrote.

If not, at least everybody likes Chris Eigeman.