How Nice Should They Be?

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

Last Sunday I decided to take a vacation. I stopped in the never-ending task of cleaning the house, let the yard bask unmolested in the July sun and didn't even open my computer. Fortified by left-overs and junk food, I settled on the couch, turned on an oldies re-run channel and binge-watched old 1990s-2000s tv series, mostly crime series, most of which were not as good as I remembered. Still better than the majority of what is on now, but not as good as I remembered.

One thing that struck me was the female-centricity of the shows. The main character is always slim and gorgeous, overabundantly capable of everything and usually has more than a little attitude. The men on the show all have pretty much just one line of dialogue - "Are you all right?" - sometimes mutated into "You okay?" More often than not she is the one who rescues the male lead or shoots the bad guy. Occasionally she is kidnapped by a varying number of bad guys but always manages to overpower them all and rescue herself. Of course, the male lead always says, "You okay?"

What amazes me about these shows is that all too often these women do things without thought that would get them reprimanded if not outright arrested - and all without consequence. The queen of this is Brenda Lee Johnson on The Closer. Besides having a hideous mouth and the worst fake Southern accent I've ever heard, that character gets up to antics that would have her fired before the first episode was over. Or arrested.

What sparked this sour little screed of mine, though, was an episode of Crossing Jordan, a series about a doctor in the Medical Examiners' office of Boston, Mass. Jordan is a lovely young woman with the personality of a dyspeptic porcupine. She is moody, harsh, argumentative and cajoling. She disregards departmental policy and the law with equal glee. In this particular episode there was a huge plane crash in which another ME from the office was killed. This ME (whose name I can't remember) was also a lovely young woman, but there all resemblance ended. This character was happy, cheerful, funny and friendly; she was also just as courageous and feisty as Jordan, but on the whole operated within departmental and legal rules.

This started me thinking and I wondered why the main character of the show was the moody, rule-breaking one. The show could have been just as exciting, just as informative, just as suspenseful with the cheerful woman as the lead as with the edgy, abrasive Jordan. It might have been a much better show, too. After all, whoever said that being a strong woman meant ignoring the simple rules of good manners and good citizenship?

Now to drag this back to writing, perhaps we should examine our own leading characters. We're always exhorted to make them real, give them genuine personalities, create them as individual human beings. I don't see why for so many shows and books and movies the 'realness' has to come from argumentativeness or disregard for societal rules. Strong does not have to mean rude. Interesting does not have to mean ill-mannered. Honest, law-abiding, well-behaved people can be just as if not more interesting and strong as their disrespectful and moody counterpoints. Perhaps even more so.

This does not mean our characters should be saccharinely-sweet, cloying or brainless pushovers; that would be going too far the other way. Just as a real person can be law-abiding until pushed to the very brink where only a piece of illegality can save the day, so can our characters. And probably be the more real for it.