The Independent Woman The United States of Television: America in Primetime

Television is most certainly here to stay.

This programme contains some strong language

When Americans wonder what it means to be an American,

one of the places they look for answer is primetime television.

Primetime hits are watched by audiences measured

in the tens of millions, and so they've had to reflect

the big social changes that have transformed America

in the television age.

Sometimes, they've even led those changes.

One of the most dramatic shifts has been in the depiction of women,

from the home-making, apple-pie baking domestic queen

of the 1950s, to the independent woman of today,

dealing with the push and pull of having it all.

In the history of the United States of Television,

women's declaration of independence

has been one of the big stories.

She's very in control of herself and she knows what she wants.

It makes her pretty fierce.

She has to be who she is.

She's not an ambiguous person.

There's never really a struggle to find out what she wants.

And she's making money and providing food and a roof.

I don't know if, you know, we could define independence

ourselves. I think it's different for every person.

An independent woman is someone who has control of her life.

It's not about marriage, children, work or what you're going to do

or wear, it's about being able to decide for yourself.

'There is nothing wrong with your television set.

'Do not attempt to adjust the picture.

'We are controlling transmission.'

I think television kind of trained

and brainwashed a whole generation of women.

Society has always put a lot of pressure on women to present

a perfect image of themselves, physically.

The perfect wife. The perfect mom.

You always keep a nice house and I'm proud to bring my friends over.

Well, thank you! I'm always glad to have them.

For me, I grew up knowing that I would never be

a successful wife and mother the way that it had been portrayed on TV.

-DAD:

-Well, what's this?

Apple juice, dear. For that tired, ache all over feeling.

I think those images from television of these model women

still make us feel bad somewhere deep inside,

that somehow we're not living up to this ideal of womanhood

and motherhood and wife...ness.

Those women are so great. Donna Reed is so beautiful and Mrs Cleaver

is such a great mom, and I will be a failure.

That image of perfection was false.

I don't think anything's deliberate or conscious.

It was a less complicated time,

and...there was more...

It was more idealised and aspirational

when they portrayed the family.

The kids are bathed and in their pyjamas, the father walks home,

puts his briefcase down, gets a martini,

everybody speaks to each other very respectfully,

and the roles are defined, and everybody goes to bed.

-WOMAN:

-Good night.

'Often in separate beds.'

-MAN:

-Goodnight, dear.

ALARM CLOCK

On television in my childhood,

it was still there where it showed the mother

covering up everything to make the father

feel like he was the man, or what ever that means.

I want you to know that your father's a wonderful father,

and I couldn't have asked for a better husband.

-But he's still a male.

-Well, naturally!

And a male likes to feel that he thinks up all the ideas.

So the tactful wife, by various, er, justifiably devious methods,

plants the idea in his mind and then lets him go ahead

and think it up, and everyone's happy.

The only way that a woman at that time

can assert that kind of independent power is often through

manipulation and lying and scheming.

BAND PLAYS

And then, along came Lucy.

Lucy is just, you know, she's got that irrepressible way.

She won't give up.

I think that that's the great thing about Lucy as an independent woman -

that she refuses to take no as an answer for anything.

Honey, you know how I feel about this.

-I don't want my wife in show business.

-Why not?

Oh, Lucy, we've been over this 10,000 times.

I want wife who is just a wife.

MIDTEMPO MAMBO SONG

I Love Lucy showed the nuts and bolts

and sort of the underside of marriage and the frustrations

and the eternal struggle between men and women.

What she was, and at that time,

she would just be fearless with what she did.

Cos she was so broad but subtle at the same time.

Nobody's quite done the same thing.

Nobody's funnier than Lucille Ball.

Probably the greatest television comic.

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

She showed all the longing for fame and money,

being in Ricky's band and the ego stuff,

and then she always got knocked down.

Now look, Lucy, we're not going to go all over this again.

You cannot be in the show.

Give me one good reason.

You have no talent.

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

Give me another good reason.

There's a simplicity to Lucy.

She was a star-struck young woman who wanted some

excitement in her life.

Lucy was a housewife,

trying to constantly break out and do different things.

-Lucy?

-Yes?

-No!

Oh, Ricky.

And if she did anything crazy, Ricky would go crazy.

Lucy, if you're going to act like a child

-I'm going to have to treat you like one.

-Meaning what?

Meaning, I'll put you over my knees and...

You wouldn't dare!

-Oh, I wouldn't?

-No, you wouldn't!

It did freak me out that Ricky would go, "Lucy..."

-Ahh!

-Are you going to do what I say?

-Yes!

"I don't want to get spanked!" It's just so freaky.

She keeps slamming herself up against that wall.

What ever the limitations of being a woman at that time are,

or being Ricky's wife, or whatever they might be,

and yet she develops a dream and cannot help herself.

Must chase it. Has to.

She was, in a way, leading a charge.

Behind the scenes, Lucy's charge

had already brought significant victories.

In 1962, she took over the running of Desilu studios

from her now ex-husband, Desi Arnaz.

She became one of the most powerful executives in American television,

green-lighting primetime classics

from Mission Impossible to Star Trek.

To the public, she would always be the ditzy red-head,

but industry insiders knew a different Lucy.

The truth about Lucy is incredibly subversive. She was an empire.

Desilu. Desi doesn't have anything without Lucy.

She was a force to be reckoned with.

Totally subversive.

She was our landlady, you know. She owned the studio

and I said, "There's dust on the rafters, Lucy.

"You've got to get somebody up there and clean this place up."

She was the first comedienne who was beautiful and sexy

and funny at the same time.

She didn't lose her femininity by being broad.

And it worked for her so great.

And then along came Mary.

Finding Mary was the tough thing.

I saw about 60 girls. Really! 60 girls.

I had had one failure after another.

I would go in and read for something and think it went well,

and then I wouldn't get the part.

I said, "Sheldon, I don't know what I'm looking for."

He said, "You will when you see it."

And I got this phone call from my agent saying, "Carl Reiner",

and my heart started pounding.

And she walked in my office one day and read two lines.

And he got this look in his eyes like I have never seen before.

And I grabbed the top of her head, and I said, "Come with me!"

She got scared, she thought I was going to accost her!

I walked her into Sheldon's office

and I said, "You were right. "We found her. We found our lady."

-I'm just a housewife!

-Come on!

Atta girl!

We wanted her because she had a style about her,

and she was a very modern lady in those days. She wore capris.

Someone from the network called up and said,

"They cup under a little bit too much.

"You're going to have to let them out."

They said I was shocking people.

AUDIENCE APPLAUSE

I had been an actress who did very small parts on dramatic shows.

I had no comedy background.

SHE SCREAMS

All I could think of when I first got to work with that raft,

was, "What would Lucy do?"

Lucy was the queen!

Laura's thrust in the show was to be the independent woman,

which was starting to happen at that time.

He said right from the beginning,

"You are not going to be the kind of wife who says,

'Here's the cream and sugar, darling, and how was your day?'"

Not only did Mary play an incredibly forceful character,

but she had a true presence and identity, and she just wasn't

the beautiful wife, which she could've so easily been.

-Hi, Honey!

-Wow!

There were some of the shows where she wanted to go out and dance

and be a dancer again, and at the end she decides,

"Oh, I want to just be a mother."

And I wondered if I could take the strain of the daily classes

and the rehearsals and the exercise. And now I know.

I can't.

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

-You can't?

-No, Rob!

There isn't a bone in my body that isn't screaming,

"For heaven's sake, lie down in a hot tub!"

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

When we look at that now, I feel remiss about that.

That was not exactly what I would say is a forward-looking thing.

She could've done both.

There was still that hangover of, "Oh, well, the husband works,

"and the wife stays at home, and that's the way it is."

My wife worked at home,

but there were more aspects to a woman than just being a housewife,

which is good enough.

If you can bring up kids and send non-toxic human beings

into the world, that's about the best thing you can do, actually.

But a lot of people don't feel fulfilled,

and if they don't feel fulfilled they should be able to

fulfil themselves however they want.

The Dick Van Dyke Show ended in 1966.

That same year, Betty Friedan and other leading feminists

set up the National Organisation for Women.

It is a terrible thing we're doing to American women

in the name of femininity.

We are preventing them from reaching their full growth as human beings.

Women have caught on to the game. We don't know it completely yet,

we haven't really discovered the total anatomy of our oppression

and of what they've been doing to us,

but we do know that it's happening.

Well, women, of course, are delightful persons,

and I hear a strange and strident voice

that I think is attempting, really, to stop some of this progress

being made on behalf of women.

That's the bra-less bubblehead, I call that person, you know.

It took primetime a while to catch up,

but in 1970 Mary Tyler Moore returned to the TV screens

with a character who embodied the aspirations and the anxieties

of a new generation of liberated women.

Mary Richards was no Gloria Steinem, but when this single,

independent career woman tossed her woolly hat into the air

in the opening credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show,

mainstream America was put on notice that things were changing fast.

-Divorced?

-No.

-Never married?

-No.

-Why?

-Why?

Do you type?

Mr Grant, there's no simple answer to that question.

Yes, there is. How about, "No, I can't type," or "Yes, I can."

There's no simple answer to why a person isn't married.

-How many different reasons can there be?

-65.

We were very fortunate in our timing, you know.

The concept we came up with, the show we came up with,

the idea of a career woman, started just as, you know,

the woman's revolution was kicking in.

And it gave us lots of stories.

It seems that you've been asking a lot of very personal questions

that don't have a thing to do with my qualifications for this job.

You know what?

You've got spunk.

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

-Well...

-I HATE spunk!

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

The original idea that Jim and Allan had

was that I was a recently divorced woman,

and CBS said, "No."

"You can't have her divorced,

"because everyone will think she's divorced from Dick Van Dyke."

They said, "There are three things you can't do a show about,

"Jews, people with moustaches and divorced people."

Jim and Allan wanted to write a show about a woman who was working

in a newsroom, who was newly on her own, independent but terrified.

It was not about women's lib.

LOU: Mary, get in here!

Part of her character was that it was very tough for her

to stand up for herself. That she was a pushover.

That she seemed a pushover.

Mary, come in here!

Come into my office.

Mary, come into my office.

We did 300 scenes that started with, "Mary come into my office."

The batting average was amazing because of that quality

she had when she was called on the carpet.

SHE SIGHS

Did I ring?

I think Mary Tyler Moore influences everybody.

She was the first woman who we really saw in the workplace,

I feel like, who was single and wasn't interested

in not being single was and was pursuing her career.

It was very, very exciting, actually.

We had a daring joke at the time,

where her mother says to her father...

Don't forget to take your pill.

Mary and her father answer...

-BOTH:

-I won't!

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

That she was on birth control was a daring joke at the time.

It's all a big joke to you, isn't it?

Well, a woman doesn't have to have a baby if she doesn't want to.

Well, I say a man's entitled to have a baby if he wants to.

SHE LAUGHS

Well! Mr Grant, on behalf of women everywhere, let me say

we'd sure like to be there when he has it.

AUDIENCE APPLAUSE

So many people wanted us to step on a soapbox with that show.

It was important that we burned all the soapboxes.

We were there to do a good comedy show.

But our heroine existed at a very interested time for women

and that got into the show.

I was pretty much born married.

I married when I was 18.

Three months after the end of that divorce,

I met my second husband, Grant Tinker.

And when we'd separated,

going to New York, for me, was terrifying,

cos I'd never been on my own.

The only real sure thing I had inside me that said,

"You know what you're doing, you can do this,"

was Mary Richards, really.

I remember thinking, "What would Mary do?"

Women would say to me,

"Ah, I watch that show, and I so identify with you."

To this day, I get people that I meet, strangers, saying,

"You know, I became a writer because of you.

"I became a producer because of you."

And when they say "you" they mean that whole wonderful production.

It's a very lightweight mantle. I'm grateful for it.

The women's movement really helped shine a light

on those old stereotypes.

Women were reading Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique and they were

grappling with what she called "the problem with no name".

You were sent to college and prepared for something great,

then weren't allowed to pursue it and had to worry about yellow

waxy build up on your floors.

And what came out of that, ultimately,

was an opportunity to create a character

who flew in the face of all that.

You want to know something? I've been in over my head

since the day I invited Joel Shaw to my junior prom.

He was 35 at the time.

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

You can't always play by the rules, Miles.

Taking risks is how I got here.

To play Murphy was just so much fun. It was so liberating,

and it sort of freed my inner pest.

Getting along with other people is a reflection of getting along with yourself.

I've got your reflection right here, pal!

Murphy Brown, investigative journalist,

news anchor, single mother

was a Conservative's worst nightmare,

leaving a trail of broken taboos in her wake.

But what gave her an edge were her inner demons.

I remember reading the pilot of Murphy Brown and I thought that

was the coolest thing in the world, that she just got out of rehab.

And during the pitch, that kind of stopped everybody in their tracks.

I didn't really open with that.

Frank, I haven't had a drink in over a month.

I haven't had a cigarette...

And the reaction was, "That's not really a very attractive trait

"in a woman, somebody who's had problems with alcohol."

She got to be Lou Grant. That was a big deal,

and I think executives in television, the buttons got pushed

because those were traditionally male traits.

You know, Sam Malone on Cheers

had come into the bar as a recovering alcoholic.

Why can't the same thing apply to a woman?

What CBS said was that they would like,

instead of her being a 40-year-old

who was just coming out of Betty Ford,

couldn't she be a 30-year-old who had just come back from a spa?

Diane said, "No. That's not the point."

It was so exciting to see woman character be starchy.

I'm beginning to find your attitude extremely offensive.

Perch and rotate.

People - they want interesting, they don't want likeable.

Murphy became that person we all wish we were.

You know, all the things you should have said

or you wish you could have said - well, she said them.

She never felt that she had to please anyone or be polite,

and that was such a break for women to see that.

We do spend a lot of time trying to be liked and wanting to be liked.

At least at that time, you know,

it was unusual to see somebody who really didn't care about that.

She's a housewife from Denver, Colorado, who started appearing

in a local nightclub called The Comedy Works in Denver

about three or four years ago.

She moved to Hollywood, where she's been working at The Comedy Store,

and this is her very first appearance on national television.

Would you welcome, Roseanne Barr.

APPLAUSE

So, I'm fat. I thought I'd point that out.

LAUGHTER

The same autumn season that brought Murphy Brown to CBS

saw another female character make her debut on rival network, ABC.

She couldn't have been more different in terms of class,

appearance and lifestyle, but she turned out to be

an even greater challenge to the conventions of primetime woman.

I was raised in Salt Lake City, Utah,

and I was a Jewish girl and from a poor family.

So, everywhere I went, I was the opposite of everybody.

I didn't have a waist and I was fat and I just talked like I talk.

And I was funny, and that was really frowned on -

to be a smart, funny girl in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I was always constantly corrected by everyone who came in my path.

They would say, "You should do this."

"Well, don't do that."

"This is not the way a young lady..." Blah, blah.

But I realised really early that I would never have anybody's approval.

Maybe that helped give me a layer of protection against the constant

onslaught of correction and humiliation that fat girls

get in schools, where everybody's thin and blonde and capitulating.

It's a note from my history teacher, Ms Crane.

-You've got to meet with her at 3:15.

-Today?

-Uh-huh.

Why do you always wait to the last minute to tell me these things?

I've got a life, too, you know. It's not like I don't have nothing to do.

I'm sorry! What do you want me to do? Throw myself off a bridge?

Yeah, and take your brother and sister with you.

LAUGHTER

When I first was a young mother

and would just sit home watching television with my kids,

and I was just appalled at television.

I had the fantasy, like a lot of people do,

"Man, if I ever got a chance to get on there, here's what I'd do.

"Here's how I'd say it's all BS."

There was never any woman like me on there,

or my grandma or my mom or my aunts.

There was just nothing like that.

So I always wanted to kind of get inside the stereotype

and punch the walls out of it.

We're going to be at the bowling alley, and...

Chip's going to be at the bowling alley...

-SOUTHERN DRAWL:

-We're bound to run into one another.

LAUGHTER

Please, don't embarrass me. Please!

Oh, honey, there's no way we'd embarrass you!

LAUGHTER

The first network we took it to rejected it.

They said, "Who would want to watch...that?

"Who would want to watch her?

"Who would want to watch a show about this? No."

It was the first realistic representation of a mother

I had ever seen on television.

It was a woman who couldn't necessarily hold on to a job.

And, physically, Roseanne was relatable.

She was just this sort of big, shrill, mid-western housewife.

Everybody knows that women run the family.

That was never on TV. That's the thing that I liked.

The story of a real mother on television.

I thought it was just so important.

Every detail of that set, spoke volumes about how hard it was

to have enough money, to put food on the table.

This is a character who's paid by the hour, it's a character who

is not getting enough health care benefits,

who's struggling, and trying to balance the needs of being

a good mom with the needs of bringing home a paycheck.

You're over-worked, you're underpaid, you're overweight.

And to be laughing at that? Making edgy jokes about that?

That was new. That was different.

I think in the same way that Roseanne was always

fearless in her stand-up act,

she seemed fearless about what her own personal issues might be.

What do you mean, going and getting ploughed? What is your problem?

You poo-poo everything in my life.

Yeah, and you go right for your addictive behaviour.

Cos you cannot handle conflict.

And my character said to Roseanne...

Well, have another shot of pancake, Roseanne.

LAUGHTER

You've got to have a pair

to be able to allow, you know,

another character to say that to your character,

knowing full well that you are your character.

I don't know who else was getting down and dirty like that.

All this time you told me if I worked hard

and got good grades and everything I could make something of myself.

And you still can.

Yeah, going to night school, working at the Buy 'N Bag?

-I'm going to wind up just like you!

-Hey!

-Hey!

-Dan.

-You apologize for that.

-No!

I really wanted the edge on that show.

And it was a battle, every single day.

Because these people who make television just...

They don't have any...

They're like aliens or something.

They don't have any real life experience or any values or anything.

Becky, I'm working two jobs here...

I was working class enough myself to, you know,

do the things that working class people do when you come in front of

elitist people, which is a lot of outrageous things, when I look back.

But it worked. It worked for me.

She was pissed off and she meant everything she said.

She lived that life and then she became this big star.

But in her heart she still was the person struggling with her life.

I can't believe you let her talk to you like that.

Dan, the fact that she doesn't want to end up like me

just proves that she's been paying attention around here...

All of it was real life.

Things that I tried to make sense of by making it funny on television.

There are so many red flags, you know, for a network,

when you put somebody like that on TV, who's so raw

and interesting and, you know, not eye candy for male viewers.

I can't think of a show that pulled off something that impossible.

I really wanted to show, hey, you can be different and OK.

You can be fat and OK.

Your husband can be fat. You can be unemployed.

Your kids are brats. You're still OK.

As long as you have honesty and integrity

and some measure of intelligence, it's all OK.

What isn't OK is to be OK with how bad things are.

Just to throw some mud in the eye of the beast was fun.

But, like it or loathe it,

the beast has to be fed on a high protein diet of advertising dollars.

I got to admit one thing Ralph,

television sure is great for selling things.

You can say that again.

Today, almost half the time you're watching,

you're watching a commercial.

The 30 minute television show is down to 22 minutes and 20 minutes.

They've been sneaking them up on us.

It is a business and it is a business that we

are there to, on broadcast television,

to sell products to America.

Stop, you're both right!

A lot of the executives in regular network television,

they are tied to advertisers, there's a lot of fear.

SCREAMING

The whole deal was really to sell products.

So the shows that you made were things that wouldn't disturb you

too much or make you think too much, or even pay attention that much.

Pay cable is not worried about that. They want interesting.

Once you can stop worrying about

getting 20 million people to watch your show,

then you have a lot more flexibility.

When it came to the depiction of women,

dependence on advertising acted as its own glass ceiling.

Network and cable channels that got their revenue from ad breaks

had to be sensitive to the feelings of advertisers,

as well as their viewers.

So it would be on subscription-only channels, like HBO,

that the barriers would be broken and the lives of women shown

with a frankness never seen before in primetime.

Compared to the reach of the networks,

the ratings for these shows were small,

but their cultural impact would be enormous.

The gods are punishing me for having casual sex.

There are definitely constraints on broadcast

that cable doesn't have, that we fight against.

If you're getting 85% of your revenue from subscriber fees,

you're not concerned about what advertising you're selling.

You're not concerned about your ratings.

The thing about cable that really helped the television business

is it does represent freedom.

There's an understanding that in cable there's less restriction.

But I don't think that that makes great programming necessarily.

We understand that we're not here to serve the mass.

We'll do the best we can to give something that's sort of more pure,

and let's hope that people come and find it.

We can't compete with that.

I had come from doing a lot of network television,

and felt like I wanted to do the network TV equivalent

of the independent film.

And it was going to look at sex and relationships in a way

that no television comedy had ever looked at them

and would never be able to look at them.

We didn't have to answer to advertising dollars,

and we didn't have to respond to Nielsen ratings and worry about that.

Oh, God! Oh, Kurt!

The challenge of creating a character like Carrie

was having a sexually independent woman,

who was having sex with a number of different men unapologetically,

and you wouldn't think she was a bitch.

Ah, righty. My turn.

Oh, sorry. I have to go back to work.

|Mary Tyler Moore shook up television in the 70s.

Carrie was going to be sort of a Mary Tyler Moore

for, you know, the new millennium.

She's one of the ultimate independent women.

Living in New York when that show was in its heyday -

I mean, that was our bible.

This is first time in the history of Manhattan

that women have had as much money and power as men,

plus the equal luxury of treating men like sex objects.

I was so surprised how many people stopped me,

women, on the street and said, "This is my life.

"This is how I communicate with my girlfriends.

"This is how I share my life with my women friends."

To me, what is most exciting about Sex And The City -

which I love, by the way - is the focus on the friendships,

and the strength of the friendships.

The relationship between those four women is always paramount,

regardless of what's happening around them.

A simple "You're so hard" is often quite effective.

-Sometimes men just need to hear a little encouragement.

-Such as?

You know, "Yeah, stud, that's right, uh-huh, don't stop, just like that,

"come on, fucker, don't stop."

Seeing those women sit around a table and talk frankly

about relationships, that to me felt really revolutionary.

In the past a lot of male shows objectified women,

and in this case we were always objectifying the men.

They didn't even have names. They were Mr This or Mr That.

They came and went and they were very disposable.

I always felt bad for the men who came on.

"Wow, you know, they really don't get to say much!"

There's a brief introduction, and then their trousers are off.

If I were to do a show about a bunch of guys, you know,

sort of talking smack about women in an explicit way,

it just would not be funny.

We never considered the show to be political.

We never... We weren't that subversive.

I think it was subversive because we weren't trying to be.

We weren't necessarily thinking about making a social statement.

We were thinking about what was going to be funny.

Into the breach opened up by the big-city cable girls

stepped the network suburbanites.

ABC's Desperate Housewives carried the trend

for explicit frankness into the heartland of mainstream America.

I was influenced when I created the show by Sex And The City,

but those women told each other everything.

And my experience with women is that, you know, a lot of them

will share a lot, but they don't give away everything.

If these women are going to be desperate,

it's because they can't share everything about their lives.

I wanted a very pretty universe, so that the kind of dirty, dark,

wicked goings on would have a lovely pastel background.

You never know what's happening behind closed doors.

You never know what is really going on with your neighbours.

A couple of months before I came up with the idea of Desperate Housewives,

I went to a reunion.

One of my friends asked this gal we all knew,

"So, do you just love being a mom?"

And she said, "No."

And I was kind of stunned,

because I didn't know women could say that out loud.

What I liked about Lynette, is it gave voice to what I felt

were the difficulties and challenges of motherhood.

How about you?

Four at home, two on the way.

Oh, big family! You're so blessed!

SHE LAUGHS

I just can't imagine anything better than being a mommy.

My experience when my children were little is there wasn't

a whole lot of room for, "Wow, I hate this."

What happened to the old me?"

And I am not one of those women

that went into motherhood with equanimity and grace.

I kind of went in going, "Oh, my God! This is so hard."

Lynette hates being a mother. She doesn't enjoy it.

And has a breakdown on a soccer field.

Susan and Brie go out to comfort her,

and they confess to her that they understand.

They've been through it, too.

And that's when Lynette turns to them and says,

"Why doesn't anyone talk about this?"

Cos part of the pain is the shame of it.

When you think back to Leave It To Beaver

or any of those women,

the whole idea was that you had to be perfect.

In the same way that women were fighting against the icon of the perfect wife,

in the '50s and the '60s that led to women's lib,

the new icon is motherhood, the perfection of motherhood.

When people say, "Oh, she's just a mother",

I'm like, do you know how hard that is?

It's a lot easier for me to get up in the morning and go to work,

when someone offers me a cup of coffee.

When I decided to start writing the show, the first thing I came up with

was the title, Desperate Housewives.

The woman who was running the testing group said,

"A lot of women aren't going to like that."

And that became interesting because it became clear to me

they didn't really respect women who just stayed in the home.

Now you have to go be the female CEO of a Fortune 500 company

for us to respect you and care about you.

I find any woman who wants to be a wife and mother

and devote her life to creating a home,

I find there's something quietly and beautifully heroic about that,

and I'm attracted to write about that.

By now, primetime women were having it all -

independence, a career, a family, a sex-life,

not to mention adultery, addictions, complications,

breakdowns and suicides.

As a famous cigarette advertisement once put it,

"You've come a long way, baby."

There are many women out there, you know,

who are very successful, independent women.

For whom love has always been elusive.

You know that they're dying to connect.

And I think that's what we all are. We're just dying to connect.

Grey's Anatomy was a show that I pitched as being about

strong, competitive women who worked in a workplace

where on a bad day, you actually killed somebody.

The entire show, really, by the way,

is a love story between Meredith and Cristina.

They're two women who completely bond

over the fact that they are cut-throat and competitive

and love surgery almost more than anything else.

-Which is it, surgery or love?

-I want both.

-That's what I said.

-No, you can't have both.

-Why the hell not?

I definitely wanted to play Cristina.

Doing the procedure is the only thing that matters.

Like, if you don't get to do it, you'll die.

-That's what you have to give up.

-For what?

ALL: Love.

She's competitive, mean, nasty,

but she has this intense calling.

It's almost secondary that she's helping people!

Part of what makes the show interesting and complex for me

to write is that I'm constantly exploring how these women

are dealing with what they're doing in their work life,

and how that's going to mesh with having a personal life.

Can I have both?

Can I be a great surgeon and have a life?

Because there is this man who just asked me to marry him,

and I know you tried to have both, but you split up with Meredith's dad.

-I know this is none of my business.

-It is none of your business.

And I didn't try hard enough.

Sometimes we find ourselves caught between, how do we balance?

How can we have a successful, meaningful personal life,

work life, and find room for a loving relationship?

The idea that we're all supposed to want this thing,

which is, you know, marriage and babies

and a husband who, you know, rides a white horse...

I know everybody wants the fairytale,

but the fairytale doesn't necessarily exist for these women.

So many women that I knew,

and myself included, were struggling with finding balance.

To be sexy, to look young, to make a living.

How do you deal with not having childcare?

How do you deal with bringing your baby to work?

How do you deal with the fact that your husband's not happy

with how much time you're spending or not spending with your child?

You know, there is no resolution to that problem of finding balance,

unless you're willing to say balance is really overrated.

There's no way you can succeed at that all the time.

In bits and pieces, I suppose.

We've moved past that moment in which you're supposed to be able

to have it all, or that having it all is real

or, frankly, even satisfying, cos if you have it all,

isn't it that your only doing everything half way?

And that's the thing that's most interesting to me.

Choices of another kind

are explored in the suburban black comedy Weeds.

Nancy Botwin breaks the final taboo and embraces a life of crime.

I get real enjoyment out of playing people

who are kind of wildly intolerable to themselves or to other people.

I don't think I'd be interested in playing somebody

who was just sort of consistently ingratiating and perfect.

Due to circumstances beyond her control -

namely, her husband dropping dead -

Nancy Botwin needs to make big money so she can maintain her lifestyle.

And the way to do that fast in America is to sell drugs.

You are a drug dealer.

Yes, Shane.

I grow and sell marijuana.

It's organic.

It's therapeutic.

It's of the earth.

Like...tomatoes.

There's a lot of juggling that has to be done to live a life.

You pay attention to one part and the other part suffers.

You pay attention to that part and you go broke

and you lose your house or whatever it is.

I think it's about the problem in front of her, how does she solve it?

And I think things in the periphery,

I think her children are in the periphery,

and, you know, morality is in the periphery.

I'm sorry.

-Why?

-Because you got hurt.

-I'm OK.

-Shane, you got shot.

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

No, it's not supposed to happen at all.

It's not. "When is he going to get shot?"

It's not something that crosses your mind when you're pretending to be the tooth fairy.

She's done damage to her children,

she's done damage to her relationships,

she's done damage to herself.

And that's the collateral damage of life.

I think if she took the time to really sit down

and assess the damage she's done,

it would be enormously painful and possibly immobilizing.

And she's got to keep moving.

This was not what I had in mind.

-Then it's a sign.

-Sign?

That it's time to move on.

That you don't belong here.

I don't think she can ever go back.

She's been offered that, in a way, by other relationships

she's had through the show and she's refused it.

She wants to stay in the gangster life.

Count.

One, two...

(..three.)

Why do women have to be these pristine figures

of comfort and morality?

They're not. They're complex human beings.

She can be neurotic. She can be a drug dealer.

There's no sense of having this woman

be tipping her head to feminism,

tipping her head to anything other than her need to find herself.

She can be addicted to pills.

It's just we've sort of stretched our threshold a little farther.

You never hear someone say,

"Oh, he's a party guy, you don't want to marry him."

But you hear them always say, "Oh, she's a party girl.

"Fun for a laugh but not the kind of girl you want to marry."

You can play with the bad girls, but you marry a good girl, you know.

It starts with an image.

A man on the stage - a politician - who has just gone through scandal,

and we think he's going to be the star of our show.

And then, as he's speaking,

we back out and see this woman standing beside him just mortified.

With the love of God, the forgiveness of my family,

I know I can rebuild their trust.

All you see is this sort of hollowed out, exhausted woman.

But she's still going to get the lint off his sleeve.

We kept seeing that one image, over and over,

that press conference of the disgraced politician,

or preacher or whomever,

with that wife standing by his side.

I'm not sitting here some little woman,

standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.

One just kept wondering, "What is going through her mind?"

And the reality hits her of what she was just put through,

and the humiliation.

It's that feeling of

you allowed me to become that small and unimportant.

And in that moment, when she slaps him,

it's her wake up.

It's not just about, "You bastard, how could you have done this to me?"

It's her wake up to, "What have I been doing?"

From that moment on, everything that is involved

in that relationship is open for questioning.

The Good Wife is Alicia Florrick, forced back into the workplace

following a sex and corruption scandal

that has put her high-flier husband behind bars.

So, Will speaks highly of you.

He says you graduated top of your class at Georgetown. When was this?

-15 years ago.

-Uh-huh.

-And you spent two years at...?

-Crozier, Abrams and Abbot.

Good firm.

Will says you clocked the highest billable hours there.

Why did you leave?

-Well, the kids and Peter's career.

-Hm.

Women are asked, we're asked a lot of ourselves.

Just from us, I'm not blaming anyone but us.

Just as a mother myself, and a wife, and someone who loves to work,

the constant struggle of trying to be great at both is exhausting.

And there is this tremendous pressure that I think

working women mothers put on themselves to be everything.

And you can't. You just can't.

In contrast to Alicia is Kalinda Sharma,

played by British actress Archie Panjabi.

She's an in-house investigator who lives by a different moral code.

Alicia's the good wife, Kalinda's definitely the bad chick.

The type of woman who would do things

that Alicia would probably never do.

I guess I could just be confused.

She's, you know, very blunt about the fact

that she'll flirt with people to get work done.

It may not be right, but for her it's the way the world works.

What's fun about her character is there is no sense that

any rules are being broken - that's just who she is.

Kalinda is always trying to explain that to Alicia,

that if you don't realise the way the world works,

you're going to be left behind.

I'm so new to television, but what I am learning is

how challenging playing a character on television is.

With a film, you have a script and you have it for three months,

and you put all your effort into that character.

But with television, you really have no idea

where that character's going to go.

When I was told the first season was nine months,

I found that quite worrying.

What am I going to do? How will I plant the seeds of what will happen to her?

Have you got a character breakdown, what's going to happen in the next few episodes?

No, this doesn't work like that.

You just have to allow your character to grow.

I guess I kind of sat back and thought,

"Well, that's how real life is, isn't it?"

People evolve and change and it depends on the situations

and the people they interact with.

And so I've kind of just let her do what she wants,

and see what happens.

We don't just identify with being mothers and wives any more.

We don't just identify with being career women.

But who are we?

All colours of what a women can be are open to her.

And she's trying to find her identity.

She's finally figuring out

that playing the good girl all the time hasn't gotten her very far.

I hear it's always the first one called in -

they're the one who gets fired.

I really didn't need to know that.

There's always this thing within Alicia of...

what's the right thing and should I be doing the right thing?

She goes to Eli Gold.

That's not what she would have done two years before.

I'm in competition with another junior associate.

And?

You're worried you're going to get laid off.

-OK, I can hire the guy away and then, dump him.

-No, no.

Alicia really is consistently trying to do the right thing

and it's just difficult because so much is being thrown at her.

I'm not this person.

Mrs Florrick?

If I know one thing in life it's that everybody is that person.

While she's not become unethical,

I think she's perhaps a little more comfortable in the grey area

than she was when she walked in.

So there's nothing I can say?

That's right.

Showing her flaws...

..is actually a lot more comfortable...

Damn it!

..than pretending she doesn't have any.

Are you OK?

What do you think?

I mean, she's a drug addict, she cheats on her husband,

she breaks the law sometimes

with some choices she makes as a nurse, but she is...

Deep down, she is so good.

Linda and I had both been sober for a long time

so we both understand addiction, and we thought,

"You know, that's a great thing to give a main character,"

sort of an undertow,

always pulling them toward some level of destruction.

She really does think this is what she has to do

to get through the day.

We loved the idea that she was this single woman,

you thought, at work,

with a boyfriend who was a pharmacist.

She comes home and there's two kids...

Hey, babe!

..and a husband.

She wants to honour the commitments that she's made to her patients.

She wants to honour the commitments

that she's made as a mother, as a wife.

Can't talk, love you.

But she's stretched herself so thin

that now the cracks are starting to show.

You know, you have this one life, and what a high wire act it is.

Now, she's like juggling knives on the high wire.

And now, she's going to start spinning plates and juggling knives on the high wire.

This woman has so many things pulling at her,

and I think people can relate to that.

And I think women, especially, can relate to that.

In order to get drugs from Eddie...

Thank you.

..Jackie takes her ring off when she goes to the hospital.

There was an episode where Jackie can't get her wedding ring off

and she just panics.

BUZZING

OK, for the record, I'm officially questioning your judgement.

Duly noted.

She can't go home with a broken wedding ring.

So, what do you do?

SHE MOANS

I understand, at least on some visceral sort of level,

what it feels like for her.

I really appreciate this.

It's what I do.

She has a lot of good intentions

and really, ultimately, wants to be a good person

and to help other people.

But she is thwarted by her, you know, her inner chaos.

And I think that's why people relate to Jackie, is because she is flawed.

Everybody...everybody has secrets. Everybody has darkness.

And, as a writer, it's so exciting

to really just tell the truth with this stuff.

She doesn't care if you like her.

She doesn't care if she looks good.

She doesn't care how she looks in those horrible pants from the...

You know, she's just kind of, "Yep, here I am."

I so look forward to her sobriety.

If she can free herself from this addiction,

what's underneath I think is a pretty spectacular person.

We tell pretty intimate stories.

There's no cataclysmic events going on, it's little earthquakes,

slowly but surely destabilizing the ground that she walks on

and the world that she inhabits.

And that's how drama is in real life.

Make me good, God...

..but not yet.

Oh, Master, you are sure you would not mind if I went alone?

Women don't have to be any one thing on television any more.

They can be anything.

And I think that what makes that interesting for us

is that we no longer have to turn on the television

and see an image that feels like, "No woman would behave like that."

What is off limits at this point? It doesn't seem like...

If it's within the realm of experience that I've had,

that people I know have had,

that the writers have had or known people,

then it's all game.

Women, by and large, over the ages, have needed to be liked

and approved, because that's all they had.

They weren't offered jobs.

It was, "Hey, am I cute enough for you, darling?"

The women on television now are in pursuit of other things.

And, yes, it would be nice if people liked them.

But it's not their ultimate goal.

We're so lucky as actors

that television has embraced women so fully.

There's so much more freedom

to really be all the things that are human,

even the ones that are sort of ugly.

You can find somebody who reflects you on television right now.

That hasn't always been the case.

Not only is that more liberating, but it's way more creative

and way more fun to play as an artist.

I think the key to making great TV is to reflect,

to really reflect real human behaviour.

Our hopes and dreams and struggles.

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