Alpha Women Act With Authority

For “ER’s” Alex Kingston, the British actress with that authoritative clipped voice emblematic in her portrayal of Dr. Elizabeth Corday, it was one of her character’s defining moments.

Late last season in a plot threaded through several episodes, Corday opted off the surgical team for a less prestigious emergency room internship, after clashing with the irascible, lascivious surgical chief Dr. Romano (Paul McCrane). Overworked and overtired, she nearly kills a patient by giving him an excessive dose of medicine.

When pressed to examine the incident before her colleagues, Corday goes on the attack, condemning the excessive hours medical residents are made to work as the key culprit in her case, and others.

“Out of an appalling mistake, a misjudgment,” Kingston said, “she came through strong.”

As do a lot of other female characters on dramatic series television.

Suddenly alpha women are in vogue, spanning networks as well as cable, with myriad colorations. Indeed, this season, with Corday moving up to associate chief of surgery, the arc of her character assumes a more textured turn as she engages in a romance with Dr. Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards), the NBC series’ ultimate beta male.

Reflecting a post-feminist era, in which women doctors, detectives and judges no longer are anomalies, these television characters are hardly superwomen. They’re just smart, everyday, multidimensional, even flawed, people, going about their professional and personal lives, getting through some days better than others, and not giving up. The trend is infusing prime time with fresh story lines as these women move freely in dramatic playing fields once dominated by men.

Consider just a few of this season’s examples:

“ER” newcomer Michael Michele, as pediatric and emergency room resident Dr. Cleo Finch, butts heads with senior resident Dr. John Carter (Noah Wyle), about the treatment of a 12-year-old diabetic boy.

Andrea Thompson, as androgynous-looking Det. Jill Kirkendall, a divorced mother of two, on ABC’s “NYPD Blue” tackles criminals in the squad room, and criminal defense attorneys in court, with true grit. She’ll be more vulnerable when the series returns in January, as her no-goodnik ex-husband reenters her life in a major way. Still, in a crucial street scene, noted writer-executive producer David Milch, she’ll show “an emotional strength born out of a revelation of her own weakness--which is where most of our strengths come from.”

And on CBS’ “Judging Amy,” this season’s breakout drama with two strong women living under one roof, there’s Amy Brenneman as Hartford Superior Court Judge Amy Gray, herself separated with a 6-year-old daughter, and Tyne Daly as her social worker mother, Maxine Gray. They have authority in the outside world while at home, and though caring deeply for one another, they often do battle.

“Honest to God, there are times when I feel I don’t know you,” Maxine tells her daughter after they quarrel about what to tell Amy’s daughter, Lauren (Karle Warren), about guns.

“You’re just figuring that out?” Amy fires back--a quick flash of guilt on her face registers her instant regret; but her mother had already stormed out of the room.

Brenneman, a Harvard graduate and one of the executive producers on “Judging Amy,” modeled the series after her mother, Hartford Superior Court Judge Frederica Brenneman, which meant Maxine, Daly’s character, was a creative starting point.

“She’s a force of nature,” Brenneman said. “ . . . So I thought, ‘What about two strong women, and what happens when she raises an image of herself” in her daughter?

“Part of the impulse in doing this show was the stuff [of existing] women’s programming. The women I know are not soft. I have a soft side, but let’s have women who have some spine to them and aren’t crying every five minutes, and let’s have a dialogue. I don’t want to just play strong--I want to play multidimensional.”

Neither Lydia Woodward, a writer and an “ER” executive producer, nor “NYPD Blue’s” Milch profess to know what accounts for the resurgence of stronger female characters.

“There’s a sort of ebb and flow to these things,” Milch noted.

“It kind of goes in waves,” said Woodward on a similar note, citing another series she had worked on, ABC’s “China Beach” (1988-’91), which viewed Vietnam through the prism of women in an armed forces hospital in Da Nang. She also pointed to the women of NBC’s “L.A. Law” (1986-’94) and, of course, to CBS’ landmark “Cagney & Lacey” (1982-’88).

Daly--still identified as the tough but compassionate Det. Mary Beth Lacey, combating chauvinism on the job while juggling marriage and children--insisted that television doesn’t lead, it follows.

“When we did ‘Cagney & Lacey,’ we fell into a window of opportunity because [feminism] had already been a hot issue in our society for 10 years,” she said. “We didn’t have to be rescued by a squad of guys rushing in. We did some of the rescuing ourselves, and,” she added, “occasionally we rescued some guys.”

Forceful women characters have to some degree always been on the landscape, Daly added, notably in Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies of the 1940s. As for their reemergence on TV, she offered: “There’s a talent pool that’s so huge that some of these actresses, like the very smart Miss Brenneman, say, ‘Gee, I’d like to tell stories about a woman, and she’d be something like me and have some of the experiences that my mother had, and how can we put that on TV?’ Part of it is the insistence of smart, talented women.

“And the rest is economics. Women have better jobs, better money, and the buying power of women has improved over the last 25 years,” she said, referring to the growing number of professional women who want to see stories about themselves, and advertisers who want to appeal to them.

“NYPD Blue’s” Thompson believes the reason people are responding to these dramatic series, and to the preponderance of newsmagazines--”Dateline,” “60 Minutes,” “20/20”--is that there’s very little out there for adults. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to be watching ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’ ”

Herself a single mother with a 7-year-old son, Thompson considers Kirkendall “a very direct woman. Doesn’t have time to play games, doesn’t have time to fool around. She’s not the kind of person you want to call up and say, ‘Hey you want to hang out?’ Jill doesn’t hang out. She’s got stuff to do. Her life is complicated.”

Both Michele and Kingston readily and rather approvingly talk about their characters’ flaws.

“I don’t want to play someone who’s perfect,” Michele said. “Cleo Finch is strong and opinionated, she knows what she wants to do, and she’s 100% willing to . . . do what she feels is right. Someone else might think she’s a bully.”

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But not Michele, who strove for five years to be on NBC’s “Homicide” and finally landed in its last season.

An athletic woman who used to play on the top-ranked women’s high school basketball team in Indiana, her first scene on “ER” was in shorts and tank top, jogging to work in full sweat.

“She’s driven. Someone tells her to run 10 miles, she’s going to try and run 15. Probably somewhere she’ll trip and fall pretty hard,” Michele said easily.

With similar words, Kingston--who segued to “ER” from the title role in “Moll Flanders” for PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre”--describes her Corday. “She does have her faults. She’s rather strong-willed or hotheaded and maybe doesn’t think her actions through, but that’s perhaps due to the high-stress world she works in. She’s caring, she has great humor, but she can be really tough and ruthless.”

Kingston also talks about Corday’s relationship with Romano, now chief of staff. “He really dishes the dirt to her, but she takes it, she deflects it. It’s like water off a duck’s back.”

In the characters, the actresses say they have found roles that more closely mirror their own life experiences.

“I am assertive and independent, that’s just the way I was raised,” noted Michele, whose father is white, and mother African American. “I don’t want to sound like I’m Gloria Steinem on the podium, [but] I have two brilliant parents--my father is a businessman, my mother works for a large pharmaceutical company,” while her older sister is an international banker and mother.

Thompson, whose mother was a nurse and whose father abandoned the family, notes that she, like others of her generation, “stand on the shoulders of all the women who came before us. My mother, my mother’s mother.”

As she puts it, whether in life or on the small screen: “Feminism is as strong in America as it’s ever been. It’s just that we don’t have to stand on a soapbox anymore.”