Does Boards.ie hate female leads?

Richard Dower

Further to an interesting post/insight posted by a member to the Boardwalk Empire thread:

Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire.....they've all got one thing in common: boards.ie hates all of the female leads.

Very interesting, is there any truth to this?....further you could lump in other shows into this theory, The Good Wife and others.

Speaking personally i do loathe the respective female leads in said show, incl. Dexters sister on said show :rolleyes:

But i wonder if said shows deliberately make these characters loathesome on purpose or if Boards.ie members are unique in their hating....?

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

who is there to hate in GoT?

sansa's kind of annoying, but she's meant to be. the other female leads are pretty great.

breaking bad, boardwalk, walking dead.. the female leads are written pretty terribly. they're one dimensional whining machines. it's only natural to hate them. especially margaret ****ing schroeder

adox

If you want strong well written female leads, Danish TV is the place to go.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

that or science fiction
battlestar galactica, farscape, babylon 5 all with great female characters

Goldstein

adox wrote: »

If you want strong well written female leads, Danish TV is the place to go.

Ya, you can't go wrong with Danes

pixelburp

Is this After Hours, cos that's the kind of thread title I'd see there. I don't see any great hatred towards female characters from the viewership, least of all boardsie - it's a bit of a crass generalisation tbh. Maybe the better question is: why is TV incapable of writing good female characters that the audience doesn't end up hating? The Bechdel Test is always good for this kind of debate and sadly in this day & age, TV (and particularly American TV) continues to consistently write its female characters as one-dimensional stereotypes, even in the most otherwise intelligent, thoughtful productions.

Not exactly thoughtful drama, but the recently-restarted Walking Dead is a perfect example of this. Whilst the male characters get their fair share of drama & development, the writing on the female characters is borderline embarrassing. Almost to a woman they are neurotic, mothering, irrational & general portrayed as weak. Other dramas are no different: Richard you mention Game of Thrones, but nearly all the women in that show are portrayed as manipulators, using their gender to get what they want (either through matriarchal power or through sex) That's not the fault of the audience if they end up hating (for instance) Cersei, she's just written that way.

FloatingVoter

Its not that anybody hates them - that's misogyny. It is that the female leads / supporting leads tend to be so blandly written. There is a gaping hole there for someone to write interesting female leads, but probably because the TV business itself is dominated by overgrown 12 year old boys - its not happening.
Even in Boardwalk Empire - we have Margaret and her plotline inlvolves "wimmins" issues - at the time of prohibition, women were coming into their own in so many departments (watch Ken Burns Prohibition for examples) - did it have to be so obvious ?
In Homeland, Claire Danes has to be unbalanced ? - her character would work just as well without it. A twenty year career in intelligence would lead the sanest of us to start spying on ourselves.
Off the top of my head, the only strong female lead I can think of is Olivia Benson in Law and Order: SVU. All she does is play a strong willed individual woman - the same as I meet every day of the week in the real world. And that isn't a great show, just a great character - so it can be done.

BTW: Skylar is coming into her own in season 5 of BB.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

well in the GoT it is kind of a medieval atmosphere, women wouldn't have had many options other than those two to get what they wanted. I dunno if I'd class that as the fault of the writers, more the fault of.. i dunno, the society of westeros

expectationlost

most of the shows you mentioned, those females aren't the lead leads, and some are meant to hated

Also Starring LeVar Burton

Homeland (Claire Danes)
Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Sarah Michelle Gellar)
Parks & Recreation (Amy Poehler)
30 Rock (Tina Fey)
Once Upon a Time (Jennifer Morrison, Ginnifer Goodwin, Lana Parilla)
Revenge (Emily VanCamp)
Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 (Krysten Ritter, Dreama Walker)
The Big Bang Theory (Kaley Cuoco)
New Girl (Zooey Deschanel)
Bones (Emily Deschanel)
Freaks and Geeks (Linda Cardellini)
Dark Angel (Jessica Alba)
Chuck (Yvonne Strahovski)
Torchwood (Eve Miles)
Popular (Carly Pope, Leslie Bibb)
Married With Children (Katey Sagal)
Xena: Warrior Princess (Lucy Lawless)
Lois & Clark (Teri Hatcher)

What do all of those shows have in common... Female leads I think are fantastic in their roles... And that's just off the top of my head.
Case Closed.

That's it exactly - those women you've mentioned have more or less been written for the explicit purpose of being hated. Nobody hates them for being women, which is essentially what you're making it out to be, Richard.

Have you become the Run_to_the_hills of the TV forum?

pickarooney

All the female leads on Showtime are great.

ixoy

Eureka had strong female characters who were equally as capable as the men.

Skerries

Scandal is another example of a strong female lead

FouxDaFaFa

I think I'm the only person in the world who doesn't hate Skylar in Breaking Bad. It's like I missed a memo or something.

FouxDaFaFa

FouxDaFaFa wrote: »

I think I'm the only person in the world who doesn't hate Skylar in Breaking Bad. It's like I missed a memo or something.

Ooops.

My bad

Roanmore

In Sons of Anarchy I can't stand Gemma at the moment but I think that's the way it is written. Thought she was great in the first 4 series. I'd say the more we hate her the better she is acting.

From what I see, most people hate Margaret in Boardwalk Empire because of her awful accent.

johnny_ultimate

It's an absurd statement, not only because it's like totally impossible for a website to hate all female leads Two of the three are particularly bad examples. HBO isn't known for its decency towards female leads as of late - Game of Thrones and Boardwalk are both a bit embarrassing in their insistence on getting many of the female characters into various states of disrobement or general bitchiness at every possible opportunity - I wouldn't cite either as particularly progressive in their portrayal of gender. Still, even in such environments there are exceptions. Arya and a few others in Game of Thrones are amongst the strongest characters the show has, and after all it is a show where we're actively encouraged to hate 80+% of all the characters, regardless of gender. Breaking Bad's female leads only really suffer from playing second-fiddle to the more prominent male ones - within this restriction, Anna Gunn do a great job.

In wider television, there's a wealth of strong, compelling female leads. I'm working through Parks & Recreations at the moment, where the three female leads - Pohler, Plaza and Jones - are all given a wealth of material (if overshadowed by Ron ****ing Swanson, because he's Ron ****ing Swanson). How about Veronica Mars - one of the most amazing roles any young actress could be gifted with, and tellingly one Kristen Bell has since struggled to top. Forbrydelsen wouldn't be anywhere near as watchable if it wasn't for Sofie Gråbøl's complex, charismatic performance. How about Alison Janney in the West Wing - easily the standout of the ensemble.

There are many, many fantastic female lead performances on television. The three examples cited are random (and even then not devoid of strong female characterisation, except maybe Boardwalk) and not representative of the wider medium.

irish son

FouxDaFaFa wrote: »

I think I'm the only person in the world who doesn't hate Skylar in Breaking Bad. It's like I missed a memo or something.

I thought I was the only one Dont really understand all the negativity towards her, seems unfair to me.

Like she has found out her loving husband is actually a monster

There does seem to be a dislike of a lot of female characters in dramas. I think some of it has to do with the fact that usually its a wife of the main character so their scenes are usually showing the domestic life of the main character which people dont find as interesting as the other parts of their life e.g Breaking Bad, Mad Men.

pickarooney

irish son wrote: »

I thought I was the only one Dont really understand all the negativity towards her, seems unfair to me.

Like she has found out her loving husband is actually a monster

There does seem to be a dislike of a lot of female characters in dramas. I think some of it has to do with the fact that usually its a wife of the main character so their scenes are usually showing the domestic life of the main character which people dont find as interesting as the other parts of their life e.g Breaking Bad, Mad Men.

The female characters in Mad Men, with one glaring exception, are much more likable than the men.

red dave

The Good Wife has excellent female leads. It's one of my favourite shows and would highly recommend to anyone to watch.

irish son

pickarooney wrote: »

The female characters in Mad Men, with one glaring exception, are much more likable than the men.

Yeah your right, I was just using her as an example of a wife of the main character not being liked, its probably not the best example though because there is probably good reason for disliking her. Wont get into that here with spoilers and all that.

CastorTroy

Nikita - Great show and great, strong female characters.
Fringe - Olivia

le la rat

I think mrs Nookie is coming into her own this season on Boardwalk Empire

CastorTroy

CastorTroy wrote: »

Nikita - Great show and great, strong female characters.
Fringe - Olivia

Fringe is a great example of strong female roles. Pretty much all of the main female characters are strong in many ways - Olivia, Astrid and Nina.

Richard Dower

i wasnt hatin on females, i just reposted a comment by another boardsie....to boost add revenue.

RobertFoster

Richard Dower wrote: »

i wasnt hatin on females, i just reposted a comment by another boardsie....to boost add revenue.

Ah, so you were only demonstrating Betteridge's law of headlines then?

700+ views for the ads on this thread. Fair play, Richard. They'll be opening the Richard Dower Wing in Boards HQ in your honour soon enough.

JP Liz V1

red dave wrote: »

The Good Wife has excellent female leads. It's one of my favourite shows and would highly recommend to anyone to watch.

+ 1

Damages is another show with two great powerful female performances