Word: graceful
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...Litigating against a CEO (Ted Danson) in a pump-and-dump stock scandal, she hires--or exploits?--a young lawyer (Rose Byrne) with a personal connection to the case; it's soon an open question which one of them Patty is a greater threat to. In TNT's Saving Grace (Mondays, 10 p.m. E.T.), Holly Hunter is Grace Hanadarko, a tortured, hard-living Oklahoma City cop who sleeps with whom she likes, drinks as much as she likes and will sucker punch anyone she doesn't like. In the first scene, we see her fully naked in bed--with...
Patty and Grace are nobody's damsels in distress, but this is not a "TV discovers strong women" story. TV has had no shortage of female cops and young babes with superpowers (see NBC's Bionic Woman, this fall). Rather, TV has found women leads who are strong but also weak, like Dahlia Malloy (Minnie Driver) of FX's The Riches, a drug addict and ex-con (and current con artist). Or criminal but charming, like Mary-Louise Parker's pot-dealing widow in Showtime's suburban dramedy Weeds. Or sympathetic but scary, like Courteney Cox's rapacious gossip-magazine...
Uplift and empowerment are all well and good--girls kick ass; we get it--but showing that women can be as good as men without showing that they also can be as bad is condescending. And it's boring. As Nancy Miller, Saving Grace's creator, puts it, "Being tough is a male characteristic? Enjoying sex is a male characteristic? Throwing a few back is a male characteristic...
...Prime Suspect's final installment.) Closer creator James Duff never expected Sedgwick to play Brenda--nor, at first, did Sedgwick. Then, she says, "my manager said to me, 'It's a little bit like Prime Suspect.'" These shows give non-ingenues a rare chance to play interesting women. Grace may make iffy choices, but, says Hunter, "she's really just somebody who says yes to a whole lot. She's managed to fashion a life where she can say yes with a whole lot of freedom. She's unashamed and in that way really liberated...
Characters like Patty and Grace, however, wouldn't work if their writers simply took male antiheroes and dressed them up in power suits or heels. Patty Hewes, for instance, bears the marks of becoming a successful, feared litigator in a man's profession; she doesn't rely on no-you're-out-of-order outbursts but uses charm, wit and sly threats. "I have a temper too," Patty tells her young female protégé. "But I have learned when to use it." Of course, she has--and a male litigator would very likely never have had to. "It's more...