TV Finds It’s Prime Time for Women

Wild Women!

They’re the big new species in prime time this season, on more than a dozen new network series.

They’re self-motivated single dames, like Annie Potts’ intrepid urban teacher on “Dangerous Minds” and Rhea Perlman’s resolute returning student on “Pearl.”

They’re boisterous moms who won’t let kids slow ‘em down on family sitcoms like “Life’s Work” and “Love & Marriage.”

They’re party-hearty twentysomethings on “Party Girl” and “Townies” and take-charge teens in the TGIF shows “Clueless” and “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”--not to mention “golden” girls brisk enough to hang with granddaughter Brooke Shields on “Suddenly Susan.”

They’re spies and artists and cops and lawyers who don’t need men, who won’t play supporting roles, who aren’t even tamed by motherhood. They’re rock ‘n’ roll souls who like their music loud, their opinions frank and their options open. On the raucous trail blazed by “Roseanne,” “Absolutely Fabulous” and “Cybill,” and in this year of the so-called “women’s Olympics,” they’re writing their own rules and taking no prisoners.

Actor Michael O’Keefe got it right at the TV critics’ recent fall season press tour when he assessed about the female stars of both his old show, “Roseanne,” and his new ABC family sitcom, “Life’s Work,” with comic Lisa Ann Walter: “I think they’re both their own man.”

That’s a compliment, folks. It means they’ve got the gumption to grab for the gusto like the guys, no matter who says otherwise, just ‘cause they want to.

Take Brooke Shields, who’s taking the sitcom world by storm next month in “Suddenly Susan.” She won NBC’s prime post-”Seinfeld” slot this fall with her daring turn on that post-Super Bowl “Friends” hour as an adamant fan of actor Joey’s who wouldn’t take no for an answer. This onetime pretty face of Bob Hope specials arrives on weekly TV as a woman of wild comic abandon, whose physical clowning in the “Susan” pilot was one of the critics’ more pleasant surprises at their recent press tour in Pasadena.

“It was liberating,” Shields said, precisely because its fearless mood demonstrated her journalist character’s commitment to fully explore and expand her identity. “She feels as if she’s either been a daughter or a girlfriend her entire life.”

TV, too, has some breaking through to do.

Contrast Susan’s straightforward self-will with the complaisant female characters TV has showcased through most of its history, characters who subdued their own desires and did whatever dad (“That Girl”) or Darrin (“Bewitched”) told them to. Even the tube’s two biggest all-time heroines, on “I Love Lucy” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” were best known for asking permission of husband Ricky or boss Mr. Grant to do something, and then crying or quaking if either male showed the slightest displeasure.

Every now and then you’d see a take-charge lady like Beatrice Arthur’s ‘70s grande dame “Maude,” but her opinionated sitcom succeeded mostly because she was such an out-sized exception to the rule.

It wasn’t till the late ‘80s--after that nasty “jiggle” era of “Charlie’s Angels”--that TV women finally started being the primary voice and force in their own existence. “Cagney & Lacey” became a major hit with two female leads who took their cop careers as seriously as their personal lives. Then “Roseanne” led the sitcom way with her forthright female view of a working-class household, while “Murphy Brown” showed white-collar women could be just as ambitious, cantankerous and funny as their male colleagues.

The latest comic-turned-sitcom-mom, Lisa Ann Walter--a frank and unrepentant crank-it-up child of the rock era--said at the press tour that she saw Roseanne as a role model, because “she was funny on purpose. Nobody won over her. She was aggressively funny. I always wanted to do a show in that style.”

For every self-starting “Roseanne” or “Grace Under Fire,” however, there have normally been lots more TV women limited to the role of understanding helpmate. Even animated entries like “Dinosaurs” and “The Simpsons” have played to gender stereotypes: The dads and brothers got into all the wacky escapades, while the wives and sisters were left to console and moralize. While guy characters could follow their hearts, getting goofy and wild, the women would hold down the home front, as on “Home Improvement,” where wife Jill is the ever-responsible counterpoint to husband Tim’s outrageous schemes.

While some might insist that Jill’s the smarter one, and she’s clearly performing an admirable and socially necessary function, others could argue her role isn’t nearly as dynamic or fun. Ditto for the familiar loyal-pal role, which women fill on “Seinfeld” or “Drew Carey,” or the secondary-member-of-ensemble gig, on an “ER” or a “Homicide,” where male cast members are customarily first among “equals.”

This year’s women confound those expectations. In a season that announces its celebration of defiant disregard in the very title of the NBC sitcom “Men Behaving Badly,” males aren’t the only ones acting on their impulses--not even in this show: Its two piggy and oblivious roommates are joined by one’s girlfriend (Justine Bateman), an earthy nurse who grouses about her patients: “Sometimes I wish they’d just die already.”

Girls who just wanna have fun don’t have to be polite anymore.

“I think in 1996 we’re hoping that women behaving badly will be just as accepted as men behaving badly,” says Yvette Lee Bowser, producer of the girl-gang comedy “Living Single,” who has created an even wilder sitcom in Fox’s new “Lush Life.” Real-life best friends Lori Petty (“Tank Girl”) and Karyn Parsons (“Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”) co-star as gal pals newly out on their own together in search of their identities--and their next martinis.

“We’re just having a good time, and we’re hoping to break some conventions and not be politically correct,” says Petty, whose skinny aspiring-artist character earns her living at Hooters. Sure, it’s known for its waitresses’ endowments, she tells an incredulous observer in the pilot, but “I put ‘em on when I get there.”

“Lush Life” depicts its women in primary colors--none of those gentle pastels, either in its bold visual design or its scabrous humor. Petty likes “the fearlessness” of her character. “Like she’ll do anything. Like you would always hope that you could do in your life, but you can’t.”

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It isn’t just those wild types in Venice getting gonzo either, or the “downtown” crowd in “Lush Life’s” companion half hour on Fox, the N.Y.C.-set movie spinoff “Party Girl.” There’s also ABC’s “Townies,” which follows three working-class girls in Gloucester, Mass. Led by Molly Ringwald, they not only fret in the pilot episode about the possibilities of marriage among their crew, but also storm the guys’ bathroom at a ball game and “borrow” the bullhorn from an unlocked police car. Like a lot of this season’s post-collegiate femmes, they live life assertively, they pull pranks, they party hard.

This is a kind of freedom and exploration women haven’t always been allowed in prime time--unless, like “Roseanne’s” Jackie, they pay for it by waking up the next morning to find a Tom Arnold in their bed. Women now get to chart their own life’s course instead of demurely following society’s notion of the rules they ought to live by.

That’s true even for teenagers this fall in ABC’s youth-aimed “TGIF” sitcom block, where girls usually appear as the object of male affections (“Boy Meets World”) or of male-delivered lessons (“Full House”). This fall’s two new “TGIF” series have girl characters at their center. In both the trend-obsessed movie spinoff “Clueless” and the comic-book comedy “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,” girls take charge of their own lives with distinctively assertive attitudes.

And Sabrina lives with what ABC-speak describes as “her two eccentric aunts.” Likewise, in “Suddenly Susan,” Shields hangs with her feisty grandma (Barbara Barrie of “Barney Miller”) as well as with her peers. Prime time is showing more women enjoying the same generational ties TV has spotlighted for men since “Bonanza.” They’re also engaged in the sort of buddy bonding that has been celebrated in male shows from “Miami Vice” to “Perfect Strangers” but only rarely allowed women in a medium that has more often preferred the “Dynasty” cat fight concept.

Female friendships this season follow the deeper and more intimate Mary-and-Rhoda model of friends who’ve shared major life experiences. They aren’t just bonded by boy talk and a good cry, though, or by the somewhat wimpy next-door-neighbor sorority of last season’s “Caroline in the City” or “Can’t Hurry Love.” This season’s dames have experienced crazed antics, drunken nights and intense personal dilemmas you could never tell your parents about.

On NBC’s new drama “Profiler,” best friends Ally Walker and Erica Gimpel share even deadly jeopardy: Because Walker’s forensic psychologist character is being stalked by the serial killer who murdered her husband, she’s forced to uproot both her daughter and housemate Gimpel, creating fresh tension between them.

Though Walker (“Kazaam”) is white and Gimpel (TV’s “Fame”) is African American, their racial difference is neither a big deal nor awkward. That’s something women seem to be able to accomplish on TV that men can’t. On “Dangerous Minds,” as well, Annie Potts’ teacher character gets beneath the ethnic surface and into her students’ hearts.

Her own heart is more complex than in many previous female dramas. Echoing the Michelle Pfeiffer movie of the same name, Potts plays a bold ex-Marine, but the TV pilot hints at other dark, enigmatic experiences that will clarify why she undertook this rigorous teaching assignment. As a petite woman, she thinks nothing of facing down violent male students nearly a foot larger than she. And they think nothing of backing down. Because she carries it off.

Maybe the key is, as “Profiler” star Walker says, portraying “a woman who’s faced with a series of things as a human being, as opposed to being a stereotypical woman.” Series creator Cynthia Saunders elaborates: “I wanted to create somebody that I wanted to hang out with--interesting, smart, somebody you would know in your own life,” yet who is “exposed to extraordinarily difficult circumstances.”

But relatable ones. This year’s women live in the real world, unlike Charlie’s Angels or some babe with bionic parts. These dames also insist in living in the world, not some little corner of it circumscribed by their gender. They won’t be “put in their place.” They won’t be intimidated. They won’t be told to “behave.” And that makes ‘em wild.

Yet they don’t give up their feminine side. Like their ancestor Mary Beth Lacey, and like Cybill and Grace and Roseanne, many are mothers, equally interested in achieving family growth alongside professional and personal fulfillment. Walter says it’s the maturation of a new generation of women onscreen.

“It’s a generation that grew up being told we had to do it all,” says the 30-something comic, who insisted her “Life’s Work” mother character be “ambitious, that she wanted to achieve a goal.” (She’s a law-school graduate entering practice.) “It always seemed to me that, historically, when women are strong and funny,” networks tend to “balance out what they feel America might think is inherently threatening by giving them a job that’s not a career.”

But no longer does the dragon-lady career-woman stereotype apply. USA’s new New Orleans-set drama, “The Big Easy,” offers up a newly arrived prosecutor (Susan Walters) whose professional dedication is lessened not one iota by her off-hours seduction by the city’s steamy night life and one virile cop (Tony Crane) who embodies it.

“She’s very intelligent and very moral,” Walters says, “and then also has a lot of passion. As she’s starting to get into that New Orleans thing, it’s the conflict of seeing all that and not wanting to go there, and then going there, and then going back.”

This new wild streak extends to the most unlikely places--even to CBS’ fall reunion movie of its ‘80s serial hit “Dallas.” Linda Gray insisted her onetime doormat Sue Ellen character now be “a little bit stronger, more of a peer to J.R.” And she becomes, in fact, an active antagonist who grabs half of her ol’ hubby’s oil bizness. “It was great to stand eye-to-eye with the big guy,” says Gray, who also deliciously delivered the movie’s juiciest “gotcha” line--advising J.R., “I’m looking forward to discussing all those gushers and dry holes.”

Still, nobody here is cutting loose like those British “AbFab” prima donnas, drowning their cartoon sorrows in drink and drugs, pompous grandstanding and unallayed impudence. But at least America’s TV women have loosened up to the point where, like those “Cybill” divas female viewers took so quickly to their hearts, they don’t have to apologize for the sort of egotism and misbehavior that male characters have been allowed for years.