I Already Kicked That Ass – The Girls on Television Who Molded Me

There really is no end to strong female heroes for the viewer to pick her favorite from these days on TV, and no end in general to all kinds of series enticing folks to bring their money and time over to this or that specific network, in order to spend their leisure time couch-potatoing it and thus becoming part of the modern Netflix/HBO/Fox et cetera -community. I, too spent my childhood, my teens, my early adulthood and, hell, half my life really, glued to the TV, watching the weekly escapades of a wide range of television people, hence molding my world views accordingly.

I was just discussing the endless variety of different kinds of shows available now with my friend H. from work, and we both came to the same conclusion, that nowadays it is so easy to just not watch the next episode if there is even the tiniest smidgen of something wrong with the pilot of a given show. It is a cruel world out there, for the show business, perhaps crueler than ever before, with people’s attention spans narrowing and narrowing, and the shows have harder and harder time trying to really sink their hooks in in the first five minutes, or they lose their ever more restless audience.

It's not like the old days at all, and becoming acquainted with the new eight or ten episode arch in the modern TV series, I, too, have witnessed in myself the beginning of impatience, when I am re-watching a show again after a long hiatus in its what feels now like massive twenty-two episode long seasons. Patience is really becoming a rarity in us, and I for one feel it’s a shame. Just think about what made the old-school shows so attractive to us. The build-up. The slow discovery. The ultimate delivery. Come on, how devastated were we all on Mulder’s behalf, when in the last episode of season five his whole belief system came crashing down in what at the time seemed like an irreversible revelation that the entire aliens from outer space -theory really was just baloney anyway? Or when Buffy finally realizes, coincidentally in the final episode of season five, how death really is her gift, and jumps to her untimely demise, saving Sunnydale, the earth, and Dawn, in the process? Or when Ross and Rachel finally share that first romantic kiss in episode seven of season two, almost in An Officer and A Gentleman -style, though without the obvious recreation of the famous scene as done later in the show?

I’m not saying they don’t know shite about good story-telling on television now, not at all. But I am saying that when my man once said about an old show I love that they were really taking their time thickening the plot here, and I was of course immediately offended by his seeming lack of respect, I secretly had to admit that, used to the modern day tightly packed story archs, I, too, was having a hard time getting with the program. That short exchange of words got me thinking about what it really was that had me hooked in those deliberately dilly-dallying stories in the first place, apart from what I already mentioned above, and in such a way that got me returning again and again to those same damn shows. And here’s what it is. It’s because they are not just TV shows. For me, they were, and in some cases, are, a way of life. As a life-long fan of taking one’s time, I want to pay tribute to some of those shows of yore with the slow-mo, the leisurely pace, the loving and never judgmental company that they once were to me, and to acknowledge how some of the characters depicted in such great detail have acted as my role-models, and, at times, as my bandaid against loneliness.

So, let’s hear it today for the oldies. To narrow it down a tad, I am creating my list with my own you-and-I-sex twist. Here’s my all-time Top Five Woman Ass-Kickers on TV:

6. (I know, I never settle for just the five) Harriet Makepeace in Dempsey and Makepeace. I used to watch this show in the mornings with mother, taped from the previous night, and although I was too young to have any idea what was going on, even I got the palpable sexual tension between the two main characters, and to this day I consider Makepeace’s sophisticated accent and gorgeous platinum blond bob as a sort of culmination point of the female allure in the Mid-Eighties crime fighting scene. Naturally we were all in love with the street smart tough American cop James Dempsey, a lieutenant forced to change scenery, and at collision course with all things British, including his new partner, sergeant Makepeace, and way before anyone fantasizing getting her own Rachel-haircut, we all of course desperately wanted to copy Glynis Barber’s lovely hairstyle.

5. Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks. Perhaps not the most obvious choice on a list like this, but think about it: an incredibly tough and resourceful cookie, and the sharpest of brains beneath her tousled hair. The young woman uses all her womanly wiles in her romantic quest to find out what went down the night Laura Palmer died, in order to impress and charm her crush widely shared with the TV-watching public, Special Agent Dale Cooper. Audrey takes sleuthing to a whole new, dangerous level, going out of her way to become acquainted with the dark side of Twin Peaks, maneuvering herself as the new perfume counter girl and learning the hard way what it actually entails. Bonus points for the exquisite Audrey Horne -wardrobe: the wool knee-length skirts, the tucked-in cashmere sweaters, the black and white schoolgirl loafers, and Badalamenti’s Audrey’s Dance. That’s what I always picture as my entrance music if I have done myself pretty and go meet my guy on a romantic date. Back in my roaring twenties, when I sported more hair and was two sizes smaller, I once even attended a costume party as Audrey, with exaggerated brow-line, dusty rose pink cashmere turtle neck and midnight blue wool skirt. I looked dashingly the part, if I do say so myself.

4. Emily Gilmore in Gilmore Girls. Anyone who’s watched a few episodes of this show knows what I’m talking about. All woman characters in Gilmore Girls take absolutely no crap whatsoever from anyone; from Gypsy to Lane to Trix to Mrs. Kim, in the show’s universe the girls are totally those who rule, they are proud and capable and know who they are. But if I must choose one character above everyone else, the Queen of kicking ass in Stars Hollow and its surroundings, it would have to be Emily. She is, as Lorelai once describes her to Digger, a corporate wife, with the duties and goals of one: to make her husband look good, to further his career and do whatever it takes to make the marriage work. The marriage is her job. So, obviously, when she loses her husband after half a life shared with him, Emily, the iron lady of the Gilmore household, becomes unraveled. Emily’s development in the series, and especially in the revival, is one of true heroism, of overcoming obstacles, of really coming into her own after a devastating loss, of finding once more the strong woman inside her, like opening Russian Dolls. The mammoth decision to sell the house and move to Nantucket, to become a working lady for the first time in her life, the change of heart about her values and her surroundings, is so moving, so life-affirming, we all should only hope we will possess such amazing abilities of rediscovery when and if we reach her age and face some hard choices. Emily rules!

3. Dana Scully in the X-Files. Described in the Nineties as the thinking man’s sex symbol, she truly is one of the truest ass-kickers of all time in her understated, subtle and graceful way. The X-Files was first and foremost Mulder’s journey, but Agent Scully’s heart-rending tale of loss and becoming is the series’ true heartbeat. Her scientific stoicism and unwavering friendship are what keep Mulder afloat, and their love story is one of the most well thought out and mysterious and simultaneously so evident, almost crystal clear from the get-go, of anything I have seen on TV, a story so often copied in later man-woman crime fighter shows, with less nuance and success. Scully was so serious, so meticulous, so oriented, and yet so fragile and vulnerable. One of the entire show’s scariest episodes revolves around Scully losing her beloved father, in season two, episode thirteen, Beyond the Sea. I still get the heebie-jeebies from just thinking about Scully sleeping on the couch and suddenly seeing a vision of her father sitting across from her, trying to say something to her, but she cannot hear him. She is awakened from the dream by a phone call from her mother, telling her that her father has just died. Also, later in the show, in season six’s Three of a Kind, drugged Scully is the most endearing thing I ever saw.

2. Buffy Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, Buffy, Buffy, Buffy. There was a time in my life when I watched this show so intensely I started having vivid dreams about it in which I, too, was able to run and leap and fight like Buffy, in the martial arts kind of way, in tiny halter-necks and leather pants. Buffy was sometimes frightening, often genius, and always so outstandingly funny a show, I just had to order my expensive VHS-collection from the United States, collecting money for the next half a season by selling my old CD’s and some books. The packages took forever to arrive in Finland, so I had ample time to re-watch what I already had, over and over, until I practically knew all the lines by heart. I was recently watching some episodes on DVD, after maybe ten or so years of not so much as cracking the booklet open, and while it was nice to notice I had, eventually, forgotten a lot of the smaller plotlines in the seasons, I was still able to tell beforehand a lot of incidental stuff, for example, yes, the one-liners, but also what everyone was wearing, what kind of expressions the characters had when a given line was uttered, and sing effortlessly along to all the songs in the perhaps single most beautiful, marvelous, unique, and courageous episode in the history of television ever; Once More, With Feeling, episode seven in season six, otherwise the darkest Buffy season of them all.

Buffy is young, she is flawed, she makes mistakes, is impulsive, dies, is breathed back into life, then dies once more. Anything at all could happen, much in the same way that the writers of the X-Files always said that dying in the show was just a formality, a transitional state: after all it was all so supernatural, and although I knew well enough, watching the end of season five, that Buffy The Vampire Slayer was far from being over as a series, I still cried a river.

1. Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. Jessica is the first strong, independent female lead on TV. I believe this to be true, and, I believe because of the style of the show, it may be hard to recognize how fabulous she actually is. So let me help.

First of all, Jessica goes, in the admittedly clumsy hour-and-a-half pilot episode, through the same kind of rediscovery of the self as Emily Gilmore does many years later. A former high school English teacher, living the simple life in her beloved Cabot Cove, Maine, loses her husband after a long, steady, yet childless marriage, and, waiting for the sharpest pains of the grief to pass, she ends up typing a whole whodunit that ends up, through a shamelessly awkward chain of events, in the hands of a publisher who wants her book published and in the bookstores.

So begin the adventures of a fifty-something widow, who creates this completely new and fruitful life for herself in a situation where somebody else might just take a seat in front of the fireplace and never again stop knitting. But Jessica! She is an incredibly productive, and successful, writer, takes loving care of her house and garden, goes fishing with her friend, the town doctor Seth Hazlitt, with whom she also plays the occasional game of chess, makes the elaborate dinner, or casually invites him inside for some morning brew through the side door in the kitchen, a door by which he is dear enough to have permission to enter. She is sassy, natural, takes care of herself, dresses absolutely stunningly especially the first few seasons, is interested in the goings-on of her community, and practically runs the police, having the sheriff in her old-lady back pocket. She runs, she bikes, she has her hair done at the local salon. She tells detectives and private dicks she doesn’t want to pry, then goes right ahead and pries away. When the autopsy’s done, they call her house from the morgue to discuss the matter. She outdoes everyone and anyone foolish enough to take her on, and she does it all without so much as a “crap” uttered from her exceptionally refined, and naturally aged, lips. She recycles, uses concise language, doesn’t care for fame or fortune, seems to write her stories out of pure love for the act of writing itself, and is endlessly kind and helpful to anyone in need of assistance. She is golden, she is invincible. She is the most powerful person in her beautiful seaside town, but also carries herself immaculately and without the tiniest hesitation when she travels.

Jessica Fletcher is the apotheosis of a powerful woman in her own right, who lives her life exactly as she pleases, is the most soft-spoken and kind person one could ever hope to meet, believes in the goodness of man, and wants always the best for everyone. We should all be so lucky as to have a woman like Jessica in our lives, and I for one aspire to be just like her, most times still failing miserably. For one, I swear too much, and sometimes I lose faith in mankind, but hey, I still have time to be immaturely coarse and skeptical; I believe my inner Jessica will kick in in my late fifties.

Not so fast, though. Here are a couple of new-comers I would like to add to my hall of fame as Honorary Mentions, perhaps to enter the list at a later revision:

Eleven in Stranger Things, because she is just so awesome. And not just because we have the same hair. When this show first aired, or however you would put it when it’s on Netflix, it might as well could have had the tagline “This One’s for You, Tuija!” on it.

Phryne Fisher in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. When in the late Twenties’ Australia, the murder weapon turns out to be a faulty, rigged vibrator in the women’s health and spa club, or, when Miss Fisher traps the lethal spider planted in her boudoir under her diaphragm, you know you’ve got something pretty special going on on TV, and in the early afternoon of all timeslots to add, where anyone could just hop on board after an early shift at work, or after school. Stupendous work, really, and so advanced! I love that the quite striking and sensational Miss Fisher, at least for a while, inherited Jessica Fletcher’s old timeslot in Finland. Some giant shoes filled beautifully by another unapologetic, alluring female sleuth. Extra kudos from the fabulous and lovingly created feel of the old times, and especially the female lead’s gorgeous outfits.

Dedicated to all the above mentioned amazing ladies on TV: Glynis Barber, Sherilyn Fenn, Kelly Bishop, Gillian Anderson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Angela Lansbury, Millie Bobby Brown, and Essie Davis.