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.
