Prestige TV Hates Women. And So Does Its Audience.

The lack of female leads and contempt for the women we do have in the prestige TV drama landscape leaves me wanting better from the genre. Or, how Shiv Roy has never done anything wrong in her life.

By Alexis Puthussery

Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy on Succession season 4 / photo: HBO

Sarah Snook is going to win the Emmy award for Lead Actress in a Drama for her work as Shiv Roy on HBO’s Succession. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think this and it’s rightfully so. Snook’s performance, in my opinion, has been overlooked for the past couple years and this year, there isn’t another performance in the category that comes close to what she did on every episode of Succession this season. Her category (because it very much is hers) doesn’t have the same contention and buzz surrounding it that the Lead Actor in a Drama category does. Will Bob Odenkirk get a long overdue award for his performance as Saul Goodman? What about Pedro Pascal, whose popularity this past year has been near impossible to avoid? Then there are Succession’s CE-Bros portrayed by Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin, who both gave career defining performances on television’s biggest show of the year. There isn’t a consensus over this category because there are so many great performances to choose from. This is a repeated pattern. Most years, when the Television Academy announces their Emmy nominees, the Lead Actress in a Drama category almost always has just one, maybe two, clear winners, while the Lead Actor category is often filled to the brim. The Emmys, while not always representative of who in television truly deserves accolades, does highlight a problem in TV at large: the prestige drama hates leading women.

All of television’s most celebrated dramas— the Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Succession, Better Call Saul, the Wire— have a tortured, morally dubious, doomed-by-the-narrative man at their center. The beauty of television, specifically the TV drama, is that you get to spend hours on end with the same characters, living with them as they grapple with problems inaccessible to most of us. The workings of the mob, the dangers of the drug cartel, or the political maneuvers of a media conglomerate are certainly foreign to me, but the very human characters at the center of these stories never fail to evoke my empathy, pity, horror, and at times self-recognition. As you spend time with these wretched figures, you can’t help but warm up to them or at the very least, enjoy watching them flail in their own moral trappings. It’s so satisfying to watch an already interesting character be fleshed out over 40, 60, or even nearly 100 hours of story. I myself have gushed over Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions, Don Draper’s brooding office confrontations, and Kendall Roy’s boardroom breakdowns. The prestige television drama has always scratched a story-telling itch for me and I know I’ll always return to my favorite morally decrepit anti-heroes.

For all my love for the genre, I can’t ignore its glaring issue: there have been no female protagonists in the echelon of TV drama royalty (I won’t even get into the fact that prestige TV is also an overwhelmingly white landscape— that’s a whole other article in itself). Prestige television’s iconic female characters like Shiv Roy, Carmela Soprano, or Peggy Olson have always played supporting roles to their show’s male leads. Though these women are complex and well-written characters in themselves, at the end of the day, the show is never truly about them. There has yet to be a landmark television series which features at the top of every “Best TV of All Time” list that centers on the struggles of a morally dubious woman.

It’s no secret to me why this is so. Bad women elicit a much stronger, and often more visceral response than do bad men. Even within the constraints of their supporting roles, the women of prestige TV have already shown this to us. The hatred for Skyler White, Walter White’s (rightfully) disgruntled wife on Breaking Bad is perhaps the most extreme example of this. On a show full of characters who represent evil in its purest form, Skyler was somehow the character that received the most vitriol from viewers. The creator of the show felt the hatred Skyler got from fans was troubling as the character had done nothing to deserve such hostility. In other words, fans were simply being misogynistic. Put in an impossible situation, Skyler often made questionable decisions and experienced extreme emotions— but no more so than any other well-written character on TV. And certainly no more than her crazy drug lord husband.

Anna Gunn as Skyler White / photo: AMC

One could argue that Skyler White is an outdated example from a time where casual misogyny was much more normalized. But to that, I’d bring up Succession’s Shiv Roy. Shiv is widely regarded as the most despicable Roy sibling, the most irredeemable and ruthless child of Logan Roy. She’s constantly called heartless, cold, and a bitch by people online, and after the series finale in which she snags the CEO position away from her brother Kendall, fans have only doubled down on their sentiments towards her. The fact that she probably has to be less outwardly emotional and more calculating than her brothers because she is a woman in a male-dominated family and profession does not seem to register for many viewers. It’s disturbing that the suffocating misogyny of the business world that Succession aims to highlight goes straight over the audience’s head and bounces back onto its only fleshed out female character. Shiv, like her father, brothers, husband, and co-workers is a horrible person with sympathetic qualities, but she receives by far the most scrutiny from viewers. She’s put in an even more difficult position than Skyler White in that unlike Skyler, Shiv is genuinely just as bad as her male counterparts.

Shiv is constantly demeaned by her brothers and underestimated by her father on account of her being a woman, so she wields her power where she can— in her marriage. Unlike the other prestige TV women, Shiv kind of plays the traditionally “male” role in her marriage to the silly, yet slimy, Tom Wambsgans. Like Don Draper and Tony Soprano, she is the one who cheats. She gaslights like them and wields a power in the home like them. However, at the end of the day, unlike Don and Tony, Shiv is not a man. Audiences don’t seem to care that her brothers are constantly pushing her out of the company, that her father patronizes her, that she’s often at the receiving end of gender-fueled insults, that it is very clear there are reasons for the way she behaves in her marriage. Even within her marriage, the fact that Tom tracks her period cycles or is very explicitly with her for her power and money don’t seem to bother viewers. Tom and Shiv are interesting together because they are a match made in Hell, two devils pricking each other with pitchforks poisoned in spite and ambition. But to a lot of people, Shiv is Satan and Tom is a helpless cherub with Mr. Darcy doe-eyes. She doesn't get to be a tortured figure like Tony, Don, or even Walter White. She’s just a bitch. Nuance is suddenly lost when the woman is bad too.

The coddling of Tom’s character by audiences brings up a recent trend within fans of this genre. The “babygirlification” or “teenage-girlification” of characters such as Kendall and Roman Roy, Tom Wambsgans, Tony Soprano, Christopher Moltisanti, Don Draper, Pete Campbell, and Jesse Pinkman, while funny, is also a signifier of the genre’s woman problem. I understand that much of this trend is rooted in irony and I too as a 21 year old woman often say “He’s just like me” when referring to the aforementioned characters. But language trends are often revealing and given the lack of leading women in this genre, I think it reveals a lot. I find it ironic that people are more than ready to use “female language” for these characters when highlighting how sympathetic they are, but don’t lend that same sympathy toward their actual female counterparts. There’s clearly an understanding that being those things— a teenage girl, a babygirl, a girl in general— is hard and can cause a lot of pain, but somehow this understanding doesn’t translate onto the women on screen who actually go through this.

photo: HBO

The ending of Succession in which Shiv betrays Kendall at the last minute is completely logical to me. She had locked down the CEO position by allying herself with tech mogul Lukas Mattson, outplaying her brothers after they had spent the entire season pushing her out. But in the end, she is discarded because Mattson can’t stomach being viewed as being controlled by a woman. It’s her gender that betrays her and she’s supposed to let her brother, who on paper is far more flawed than she is, get the top spot? Why is Kendall more deserving of the symbol of their father’s love and respect when he’s spent a majority of the last four seasons messing up? When he’s literally killed someone? It’s not hard to see why Shiv wouldn’t let Kendall have it, right? Well, for many people, it really was and it’s because Kendall— babygirl that he is— was hurt by it. The ending only works as well as it does because you can genuinely understand Kendall and Shiv’s frustration. It’s tragic because in the end, both were victims of their father and they couldn’t see that.

A woman is supposed to be impossibly good. She is meant to be your doting daughter, your loving wife, and your nurturing mother. When she falls out of line from any one of these things, she’s a bitch. A man could kill someone (this could be referring to a plethora of our beloved prestige TV male protagonists) and he’d still receive sympathy from viewers. For some reason (the reason is quite obvious) when women are morally grey, subtlety is completely lost.

Like I said before, television is so unique as a storytelling technique because of the sheer amount of time you get to spend watching a story unfold. But, a show only gets renewed and spends those hours fleshing out story when audiences want to spend time with its characters. And from what I’ve seen, audiences generally can’t stomach a bad woman and networks don’t like putting them at the forefront. Sarah Snook will rightfully win the Emmy for Lead Actress in a Drama, but she’s not even the true lead of her show. Many have noted that there is a gap in the TV landscape with the likes of Succession, Better Call Saul, and Barry having come to a close. This is the perfect time to put a wretched woman forward. I want to see a successful prestige TV drama in which a woman is placed directly at its center. I want to see a female character make horrible decisions, grappling with the failings of her own ethics. I want to see her slippery moral slope celebrated as a feat of writing and not a failure of integrity as if she were a real person who has actually hurt the audience. I want to see that woman given the empathy and consideration, the think-pieces and Mitski fancams, the iconic series ending frames that we give our mob bosses, drug lords, ad men, corrupt lawyers, and would-be-CEOs. I just don’t know if anyone else wants it too.