Too Little, Too Late for TV’s Woman Writer?

Annie Berke considers the figure of the woman writer in the popular TV series “Bridgerton” and “Hacks,” in the latest installment of Screen Shots.

By Annie BerkeAugust 18, 2024

• Television

• Gender & Sexuality

This essay is part of the Screen Shots series, monthly takes from LARB’s own film and TV team.

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THE WOMAN WRITER is always out of time.

Time is a commodity both scarce and disjointed, a fact that caregivers know intimately. Christine Smallwood writes in her 2024 book on La Captive: “I began writing [this] in May 2021 … At that time I had between sixteen and twenty-one hours of childcare a week. Now it is two years later and I have twenty-three hours of childcare a week. Unless they are sick. They are always sick.” Mothers who can’t get it done are patronized, criticized openly or in whispers, while those who do perform their professional duties too ably are treated with suspicion. How do you do it all? Really, how? Where are your children right now?

Of course, insecurities, necessities, or handicaps keep the woman from writing enough or writing at all or writing all that they might. (I think of how many more works Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath had in them that we will never read. I am not the first one to wonder about this.) This is setting aside the numerous societal and commercial pressures that might keep the woman writer from receiving recognition.

To reiterate: The woman writer is always out of time. Her responsibilities may well exist outside waged labor—if she writes on spec, if her dog needs walking, if her kids are screaming for their tablets, all while her imagination takes her away from the present (meditation app be damned) into the plotting of the next idea. The people around her want her writing to be already done, but you know what they say about women’s work.

Two of the buzziest series this spring and summer have looked, closely and (mostly) lovingly, at the woman writer living and working out of time. In Bridgerton, Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) can marry the best friend she has loved since childhood. The catch? She has to give up her other passion, anonymously penning the Lady Whistledown gossip column. In Hacks, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) is up for the job of a lifetime: hosting a network late night talk show. This is a role she has chased, and been denied, since her start as a comedian. With her dedicated writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) at her side, an ambitious, aging star is presented with her last chance at a national platform.

While these shows are wildly different in tone and genre, they circle the shared problems of the woman writer and the historical double bind under which she labors. Penelope wants to be, and in fact already is, a successful writer, but, as her status-obsessed mother reminds her, “ladies do not have dreams. They have husbands.” Meanwhile, in the wake of her career renaissance, Deborah feels both of the moment and out of time, as when she does a show at a college campus and finds herself confronted by students protesting racist jokes she told in the 1980s. At first, she refuses to apologize, but with Ava’s help, she decides to come to a town hall and listen to them speak, only to experience real remorse. This is how it feels for the woman writer to catch up, but the victory is short-lived.

Put another way, Bridgerton’s Penelope is the woman writer “ahead of her time,” the kiss of death for the artist who wants to live. Her talents are undeniable, and yet she is still denied, because the world is not equipped to do any differently. When the woman writer finally, finally, arrives, after generations of being too early, excluded from the canon and the cashbox, as with Deborah in Hacks, she’s suddenly, unforgivably late. We’ve seen this before. It’s familiar, it’s formulaic, it’s book club fiction, it’s (bite your tongue) network television.

“The days are long, but the years are short” is something social media tells young, frazzled mothers when their children won’t eat, sleep, or give them a break. But what about when the days are short too, or when the days and years seem to stretch and shrink, uncooperatively, around creative pursuits and industry metrics? What good is a room of one’s own if there’s no time to spend in it?

Both leading ladies suffer their own indeterminate “happy endings”: that’s serialized television for you. And once you see the woman writer out of time, you find her everywhere, especially on TV, which is where most of us are looking. As an archetype, she is a telling fixture within a narrative form that, until recently, was contained to strict demarcations of time slots and blocks and is now a casualized employee of the streaming age.

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This third season of Netflix’s romance series Bridgerton divides its world into two categories: people who make things and people who don’t. Eldest bachelor brother Benedict (Luke Thompson) is in the latter camp. When a debonair gentleman (and future sex partner) asks him, “Do you write, or draw, or paint?” Benedict stumbles out a half-apologetic “No. I, uh, dance sometimes at parties.” His sister Eloise (Claudia Jessie) dreams of a revolutionary life for herself but hasn’t seen enough of the world to envision meaningful change. Eloise and Benedict fancy themselves the show’s bohemians, but what do they produce? Unlike the matriarchs in the show, including Queen Charlotte, these two don’t even make matches, never mind art.

By contrast, Penelope is a maker, someone who relishes the power she wields with her pen. “Writing was the only way I felt I could have a voice,” she explains, having lived her life as the invisible sister in an otherwise embarrassing family. Her true partner in the Bridgerton universe is not her friend or even her beloved but a circumstantial confidante, Genevieve Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale), whose French accent is fake but whose artisan dressmaking is very real. When Penelope breaks the news to Genevieve that she won’t be writing, or taking credit, for the Lady Whistledown column, the latter gently prods her client to think about what she is losing: “You know, my favorite part of dressmaking is seeing the glow on a woman’s face when she puts the dress on. I can’t imagine ever giving that feeling up.”

Eloise begrudges Penelope for her Lady Whistledown secret but privately admires her friend’s craft. In a moment of tentative reconciliation, she asks Penelope what she has been reading. I imagine Pen citing the following line in reply: “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.” I wish I could attribute it to Mary Wollstonecraft or someone of the period, but these lines in fact come from Betty Friedan (a woman writer whose feminist legacy hasn’t aged well). Sure, technically speaking, Penelope couldn’t be reading The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, but Bridgerton has never had a problem with anachronism.

In fact, out-of-timeness has always been one the show’s chief charms. The anachronistic fantasy of a multicultural Bridgerton, as Patricia A. Matthew argues, is special, though not unprecedented in the Regency oeuvre. But the focus of this season is gender anachronism, played out as a white feminist dream wedding, with its something old and something new. In place of the old, we have the genre’s chaste women, its experienced men, and its anonymous sex workers. In that sense, all Regency romances are anachronisms, treating contemporary anxieties with fairy-tale aesthetics. Sure, there is a problematic bend to imagining a world in which disempowered women experience more desire when freed from the twin burdens of choice and autonomy, the decision fatigue of online dating replaced with sexy shotgun weddings and uncancelable engagements. But Bridgerton finds smart enough ways around this problem, and anyway, I don’t have the time to police people’s turn-ons.

Unlike season one’s Daphne or season two’s Kate, caregivers in their own ways, Penelope has literary dreams that take her away from the domestic sphere and into a something new, a something contemporary. A string quartet plays an instrumental version of Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me,” as girlboss foremother Penelope and arguable blank space Colin lose themselves in one another’s eyes. You must know the song to fill in the gaps, but no self-respecting watcher of Bridgerton would miss the reference.

Ah, Regency romance heroines—they’re just like us! We are just like them too, swooning together, purposely out of time, in a fictional past.

While Penelope hides her ambitions, Colin can crow about his literary ambitions without fear or shame. At season’s start, he has returned home to polish the steamy snippets he penned on his European sex vacation. This Henry Miller wannabe doesn’t know he’s deflowering the most sought-after writer in the county, and, Dear Reader, on the literary front, it is he who is the true virgin. (Penelope, at least, would rightly identify this as narrative irony.)

And, of course, time-centric devices abound: threats of imminent exposure, blackmail attempts tied to specific deadlines, suspenseful close-ups of ticking clocks. Because she is unwilling to sacrifice one dream on the altar of the other, and because temporal play is Bridgerton’s stock in trade, she will perform the feat of being in two places at once: her time and our own. If previous seasons of Bridgerton have focused on the dream of reforming a rake (don’t look up what a rake actually is, ladies) or putting down your inherited trauma and just letting someone love you, this go-round is not about being the rescued or the rescuer. It’s the not-so-niche fantasy of the woman writer, that of finding a man who unites her divided self by declaring, “You have always had one voice.”

In the season finale, Penelope’s sister gives birth to a little girl and purrs, “I think little Philomena will one day become a great writer without any need of a husband.” It’s a reference to Penelope’s success and the final, blatant anachronism of the season. Penelope, happily, has the fulfilling career, the successful love match, and the flattering wardrobe palette. She can have it all: about time. All she needed to do was travel back into a past that never existed and live in a genre bubble containing all the good parts of history (mostly the dresses) and few of the bad.

The episode caps with a Lady Whistledown sign-off, confirming her true identity in print, while offering a simple goodbye. The show has since announced that the framing device of Whistledown, and Julie Andrews’s voice-over presence, will remain in season four, slated for two years from now. In the moment I watched, though, I felt some trepidation at this ambiguous close: was this farewell just the start of maternity leave, or something more lasting? And indeed, even now I wonder how Lady Whistledown will continue as a nom de plume, now that she’s been unmasked.

The means by which the woman writer makes herself—which is to say, by her words—is also what people grab on to as they tear her down.

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Hacks is not a romance, though it does focus, this season, on a kind of love triangle. Deborah Vance is a stand-up comic, once ahead of her time and thus sidelined, floundering in a residency at the Palmetto Casino in Las Vegas. The Palmetto’s owner, who happens to be an old flame, wants to replace her Saturday night shows with a newer act to appeal to a different (younger) demographic; the fact that he only sleeps with Deborah between bouts of marrying a sequence of younger women is the icing on Deborah’s aging-plain-sucks cake. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Ava is a twentysomething writer, a former flavor of the month in the comedy world, now out of favor due to some inappropriate tweets. Her timing is off, and for some comedians—especially ones whose last names aren’t “C. K.”—a redemption arc can be near impossible.

When their shared agent (Paul W. Downs, one of the show’s creators) pairs these two women up as the dream team no one wants, Deborah and Ava discover their incredible rapport is matched only by their mutual dysfunction. Ava occupies the role of Gen-Z Henry Higgins, teaching her boss that certain kinds of behaviors, including slapping your assistant, aren’t acceptable anymore. (Deborah Vance is mostly Joan Rivers, but there’s a dash of Gabor sister in the mix right there.)

Still of Ava in Hacks, courtesy of Max.

In the first season, Ava gains access to the twisted relationship that Deborah has with her daughter, DJ (Kaitlin Olson). Having discovered that DJ takes money from the paparazzi in exchange for access to her mother, Ava feels compelled to let Deborah knows what’s going on. The thing is, Deborah already knows, and anyone who follows the woman writer’s battle with time can guess at why. By letting DJ “sell her out,” she is both giving money to her daughter and continuing to do the work of being a creative professional, even getting some free PR. She is fulfilling the ultimate dream of the—granted, morally flawed—woman writer who doesn’t have enough time to do everything and looks for shortcuts, opportunities to collapse her work and home life into one brilliant fit of multitasking.

What Deborah and Ava have is not just a creative partnership. It is the coupling of artist-muse, of mother-daughter, and, in a dream sequence, of complementary erotic energies; they get all they need from one another, with time to spare. Too bad Ava can’t maintain a healthy relationship with her girlfriend while working for Deborah, and Deborah, whose track record with intimacy is not great, is bound to tear it all down sooner or later. (It’ll be sooner.)

The show’s third season opens with Deborah reckoning with a career renaissance. Turns out that when crowds laugh at your setup, without waiting to hear the punch line, success can feel hollow. Early in the season, Deborah finds herself—finally—accepted by the male comic establishment. She is invited to an exclusive poker game by the one-time Coolest Guys in School, only to find that their small-minded opinions on queer identity (talk about being out of time) clash with her newfound progressive values. They feel marginalized, or on the verge of cancelation, and seem oblivious to the protections their maleness affords. Are they really persecuted, or do they just bristle at no longer being on the cutting edge of comedy?

“You know, I finally get in good with those guys, and I can’t enjoy it because of you!” Deborah gripes to Ava. “You got in my head.” She admits this to her protégée in her kitchen, a room dramatically decorated with her elaborate porcelain collection. This is a hint, perhaps, that Deborah’s growth is fragile, liable to shatter given the right set of circumstances. Those circumstances turn out to be the invocation of her long-delayed dream, one 30-plus years in the making.

When the opportunity to host a network late night show arises, Deborah feels that mixture of adrenaline and hunger she has been missing. She was up for the job long ago, as a young wife and mother. Not getting the gig was not only her gravest professional disappointment but was also, it is implied, the reason her marriage fell apart and her adult daughter struggles with addiction and feelings of neglect. In the most delusional way, to get this job would be to justify all the suffering that Deborah has endured and that which she inflicted on others. Finally, the real, institutional validation she craves … except, except.

Isn’t it fair to say the Golden Age of Late Night is pretty much behind us? That networks don’t really know what they’re doing, now more than ever, torn between investing in these institutions and cutting costs wherever they can? That she’s only able to get into Late Night once it’s almost Too Late Night?

Women can have it all, especially when no one else wants it. The only reason that Deborah is able to jockey, long and loud, for the late night job, is because the network’s first choice, Jack Danby (Luke Cook), turns it down. This unobjectionable boyish charmer with questionable comedic chops has the chance to pursue a serious acting role, and he’s going to take the leap.

Is an Academy Award better than a nightly network gig? In some ways, though it’s less secure. Regardless, it matters who gets to pick what they do and when they do it. It’s not that much better for the younger generation of women writers either. Ava, who, with Deborah’s help, gets back to the top of the heap in Hollywood, is working at a show that one side character quips used to be better. (The real-life corollary, according to some sources, is meant to be Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, but the past-its-prime-ness gibe pinged The Daily Show for me, at least.) And the promise of a promotion at work only comes when Ava’s boss, the show’s (male) head writer, has to resign to treat his sex addiction.

Even at their best, Ava and Deborah still conduct their careers a step or two behind the men in their same roles. By hiring Ava, Deborah unrepentantly pulls her mentee back into the past: a past dynamic, intermittently chummy and toxic, but also a Golden Age of Late Night gone by.

The final episode of the season flips out-of-timeness on its head, a delightful, purposeful dipping into conventions of women’s films of yore. “All About Eve!” Smart told Entertainment Weekly, emphasizing how, in these final moments of the season, it’s clear that Ava has learned a lot from Deborah, and not for the good. Having landed the late night job, the triumphant Deborah demurs when it comes time to hire Ava as her head writer. She decides to keep on the (male) head writer to show the network she’s a team player. Worse, she lies to Ava and says the decision was out of her hands. When Ava discovers the truth, she blackmails Deborah into giving her the head writer regardless, implying she’d leak Deborah’s secret sexual rendezvous with the network chairman.

“You wouldn’t,” Deborah growls.

“I would,” Ava replies, calm and steely. “Wouldn’t you?”

It is iconic, like Las Culturistas reenactment–worthy, match-my-freak–level iconic. They’re two femme fatales duking it out in a noir, like Joan Crawford or Bette Davis (maybe not at the same time); they’re sophisticated dames swapping insults in a backstage musical. Sometimes it’s fun to be out of time, to throw back to previous forms of writing for and by women, even when that means shattering the second-wave fantasy of the intergenerational old girls’ club, letting the “special place in hell for women who don’t help other women” bop go in one ear and out the other.

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The woman writer out of time is not just an old phenomenon but an old narrative too. In their 1979 landmark volume, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar quote poet Anne Finch’s lines that “they tell us”: “To write, or read, or think, or to enquire / Wou’d cloud our beauty, and exaust our time / And interrupt the conquests of our prime.” Leave the writing to the patriarchs, whose attachment to their long, inky pens is about as phallic as it comes. Literary It Girls, put down your penises—I mean pens—and find a husband while you’re still the right kind of hot.

Late last year, a hacker-turned–true crime writer found herself underestimated and overexposed in A Murder at the End of the World, as she fought to uncover a serial killer and live long enough to write about it. Murder, She Wrote (1984–96) is a generic precursor to End of the World, except that detective and novelist Jessica Fletcher is on the older side, invisible for her seniority and not for her youth; her writerly prowess puts her in constant danger too. The “Marvelous” Midge Maisel is constantly battling for her tight five in the spotlight, while industrialist-diarist Gentleman Jack seeks out opportunities to live happily, queerly, “out of time.” Look beyond prestige television, and the woman writer fights for time too: the little-discussed ABC sitcom Not Dead Yet (2023–24) centers on an obituary writer who is visited by the dead people she writes about and who happens to be deciding whether to freeze her eggs.

Even in the lightest of genres, the stakes for the woman writer out of time can be life-and-death, or can feel that way. It might be the fight-or-flight talking.

While men authors are burdened with the anxiety of influence, Gilbert and Gubar write, women writers contend with the absence of that influence and subsequent anxiety of authorship. The latter term calls to mind Penelope fainting dead away at a party when a rival takes credit for writing the Lady Whistledown column. Is Penelope more afraid of being found out or being forgotten? Which worry will win out? (This is in an episode literally titled “Tick Tock.”)

The story of the woman writer out of time can serve as a critique, a prison sentence, or an invitation. It’s fraught, to be sure, but better to be anxious than absurd, like the old man who suggests to the queen that the skillful, literarily gifted Lady Whistledown must be a man; still better to bend time (and people) to one’s corrupt will, as in Hacks, than to watch your jokes wither on the vine.

The only alternative is to let time and inspiration pass you by. To quote a woman writer alluding to another woman writer, within a long, illustrious line of female authorship: “As if.”

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Featured image by Eddy Chen/Max.