I mentioned becoming a new fan of The Good Wife to a guy friend recently, who responded that it didn’t sound like it was a show meant for his demographic. Though it could have easily been a joke, the comment was made in a serious tone. In the predictable words of the Queen when someone inevitably shows her a photo of Kim Kardashian’s shiny posterior, I was shocked.
While it made outward sense to me that a cisgendered, heterosexual male might be averse to something for its overtly female-related subject matter, I didn’t think that anything could be so easily dismissed for that reason. Add “girl,” “woman,” or “wife” to any title, though, and apparently you might have a marketing problem with a key masculine slice of the TV-watching population. Your show is relegated to becoming—gasp with me now—a woman’s show.
Any art form that is commodified is going to run into issues with its target demographic, especially if there’s a female character in the lead role or a woman’s name on the front cover (there’s a strategy behind transforming Jo Rowling into J.K., after all).
I was surprised to read an interview with young adult fiction mother hen S.E. Hinton (see a pattern?), wherein she suggests writing with a male audience in mind, because girls are more likely to buy books geared toward boys than vice versa. Though young adult fiction might be a world away from network television, Hinton’s comment admits an unfortunate reality of creating art in a man’s world, where men’s stories are considered normative and women’s stories considered trivial. It’s all about socially constructed preconceptions, man.
The irony, of course, is that The Good Wife bucks both against that trivialization and the thematic import of its own name. It even takes that concept of image control and turns it on its head, making the difference between public appearances and private lives a central focus.
The show’s eponymous wife, Alicia Florrick, presents a demure and likable face to the world, while quietly pursuing her own agenda and steadily climbing the rungs of power. She may stay in a marriage that’s lost all semblance of legitimacy, but she does it to serve her own political goals and fights to exert control over every element of that process.
The inherent contradictions of Florrick’s double act, of course, are what make the show so interesting to watch. The opening scene of the latest episode features Alicia’s campaign team cutting clips of interviews with her, choosing which ones should comprise a campaign video poised to go viral and thus aid her bid for State Attorney. There’s even a clip with her jackass husband, Peter, churning out glowing sound bites about his wife on air while asking what exactly he’s supposed to say between takes.
Meanwhile, a bewildered Alicia sits back in the cutting room, watching it all and making ignored protests, as her campaign team takes the reigns on her own public presentation. Though they might be the experts, she’s lost the control she so highly prizes. Her opinions are brushed aside and her image has fallen into hands not her own. It’s a situation in which most political candidates, both male and female, have likely found themselves. However, considering the history of who holds power in most situations, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that more women than men have found themselves in that position.
Fame often becomes the catalyst for that powerlessness, as a celebrity’s image becomes a commodity to be consumed and imitated. In the Internet age, however, even middle schoolers market themselves. There’s more power invested in image than ever before, and not just for women. The difference is that there’s a whole village controlling the levers behind a celebrity’s presentation. The issue is refusing to get hypnotized by the spectacle because, odds are, there’s a whole lot of smoke and mirrors involved. There’s power in that awareness, too.
