‘Maleficent,’ ‘Snow White and the Huntsman,’ and Fairy Tale Villainesses as the New Anti-Heroes
There’s been a lot of debate recently about how to define the Golden Age of television, whether it’s through Vulture’s Drama Derby, which set up a March Madness contest between great shows of the last quarter-century, or conversations between critics like NPR’s Linda Holmes, the Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman, and Time’s James Poniewozik on Twitter. But wherever the conversations are taking place, they keep coming back to a central question. When we’re picking the pool of shows, why does the critical consensus tend to come up with a list that’s, well, awfully dudely?
The best answer anyone seems to have come up with is that there are more male characters of a particular variety that we’ve come to hold up as a gold standard: the middle-aged anti-hero. There are a number of answers as to why that’s the case: the number of middle-aged men who have been given the opportunities to make their dream shows; the fact that female characters are still under pressure to be perfect in every area of their lives, much less downright evil or morally depraved in one of them; or the fact that women, even as Christopher Hitchens said we aren’t funny, have found a great deal of creative life in comedy rather than in drama. Addressing all of these elements are important, and I’ll have some thoughts on them in weeks to come.
