Fictional Femmes 2011: The Big Picture

We’ve looked at about 125 characters from network television, cable television, and movies. So, what does it all mean?

I think it means that if we want to see female characters who are decently written, complex and represent a diverse range of age groups and ethnicities, we have to look to cable. The female characters on network TV and movies are still dominated by youthful white women. Cable television not only gave us the most female characters, they also gave us more women who were visibly older and more varied in ethnicity.

Let’s everyone give them cookies!

Tackling it one show at a time like I did made me feel pretty hopeful about the direction things were headed in. More wrinkles! Lower concentrations of white people! Hooray!

HOWEVER….

Looking at our characters all at once shows something different. Here they are, all together:

Sooooooo….maybe things aren’t as great as I thought. That’s still an awful lot of one demographic.

Here are all the women from our network programs:

These are the women from our cable programs:

And here are the women from our movies:

In the big picture, even like this, cable is still doing a better job in terms of diversity than networks and movies. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. The characters themselves, though, I’m mixed about. I feel that progress was made with women in genre entertainment in the 1990s and, in the past several years, it’s been mostly steps backward. I don’t know if it’s due to taking shortcuts in development (i.e., putting a gun in her hand is shorthand for SFC™; having her roll around on the floor screaming “We’re going the wrong way!” is shorthand for emotional depth) or a deeper, more sinister psychosocial thing that’s been happening to us as a people. I do know this, though: we could use some good old fashioned Ellen Ripley and Buffy Summers around here.

Previously:

Fictional Femmes 2001: Networks

Fictional Femmes 2001: Cable

Fictional Femmes 2001: Movies

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