Plot twist
For next season's TV heroines, 40 is where the story begins
When the television networks unveiled their fall schedules last week it was no great surprise to learn that a number of familiar faces will be headlining the new offerings. More surprising was how many of those faces belong to actresses of a certain age.
The last time we saw Brooke Shields on series television, in the sitcom "Suddenly Susan," she was a thirtysomething magazine editor who left her fiance at the altar. Now, a decade later, she's appearing in NBC's "Lipstick Jungle" as an unhappily married, fortysomething movie executive. Over at ABC, "Cashmere Mafia" stars Lucy Liu -- last seen as a thirtysomething lawyer on "Ally McBeal" -- as one of four female executives all played by actresses nearing or just past 40, and "Private Practice," a spinoff of the popular "Grey's Anatomy," stars Kate Walsh, Amy Brenneman, and Merrin Dungey as single, soon-to-turn 40 doctors. Fox, meanwhile, is promoting "The Return of Jezebel James," which features Parker Posey as a single woman struggling with fertility who asks her younger sister to act as a surrogate.
Add these shows up, and it's tempting to think we're on the brink of a significant shift in the cultural landscape -- the moment when television finally allows women to turn 40 and survive. Of course there are already plenty of women over 40 on television. But these characters tend to be too focused on solving crime or curing diseases -- or, in the case of "Desperate Housewives," stealing each other's husbands -- to pay much attention to their birthdays.
As a rule, the shows that have really touched a cultural nerve -- shows like "Ally McBeal" and "Sex and the City" that professed to be about women's lives -- have been preoccupied with a younger set and a conventional story line. For all the hype that surrounded them, these shows were "Mary Tyler Moore" with sex, each offering a variation on the same basic happily-ever-after plot: Ambivalent thirtysomethings balance work and love against the deafening tick of their biological clocks -- hideously personified on "Ally McBeal" by Ally's hallucinations of a dancing baby. These heroines disappeared into the television ether well before their 40th birthdays, if not with men in tow, then with the promise of happily ever after still intact.
So, it is a departure worth noting that among next season's offerings, "Cashmere Mafia" and "Lipstick Jungle" look like "Sex and the City" (indeed, "Sex" producer Darren Star is behind the former and the latter is based on a book by "Sex" author Candace Bushnell), but with older women who no longer have all possibilities ahead of them. Even more significant, "Private Practice" dispenses with the happily-ever-after plot altogether -- halfway through the pilot episode, its heroine is revealed to be infertile.
Watching the protagonists of "Ally McBeal" and "Sex and the City" navigate their lives, you could almost imagine that they had read the now infamous 1986 Newsweek article warning that women over 40 were more likely to be killed by terrorists than to marry, and that underneath their independence and bravado lay the nagging feeling that it might be true. Now, a year after Newsweek revisited, and revised, that conclusion -- suggesting not only that many women do marry after 40, but that in general, women are no longer so preoccupied by their marriage prospects -- television, too, seems to be revising its script.
. . .
ABC's "Private Practice" offers our first real glimpse of the new, post-"Ally" heroine. Thirty-nine-year-old Addison Montgomery (Kate Walsh) is an OB/GYN doctor who leaves an ex-husband and a disappointing lover in Seattle to join a boutique medical practice in LA. In the pilot episode, which aired earlier this month, Addison visits LA, where she speeds down highways in a red sports car and breezily screens sperm donors before learning that it's too late -- she's out of eggs. Despite being kissed by a hot but emotionally unavailable stranger in a stairwell, she remains, lo and behold, out of eggs. Happily ever after is not on the agenda.
Initial reviews of "Private Practice" were lukewarm. Alessandra Stanley of The
And it's true, the show has certainly borrowed a page or two from the "Ally" manual: When Addison and the two other single female characters ogle a shirtless surfer boy, you'd swear that old dancing baby was ready to pounce.
But if the parallels are hard to miss, so is the crucial difference: By establishing Addison's infertility at the outset, the show's creators have turned yesterday's fate-worse-than-death into tomorrow's opening act, guaranteeing that whatever it becomes, this show will not be "Ally McBeal" redux.
The groundwork for Addison's plotline was laid by characters like Samantha of "Sex and the City," the fortysomething siren who seemed immune to other women's concerns. But Samantha's story was always peripheral to Carrie's. By shifting to center stage the idea that there is more than one happily-ever-after plot -- or, more realistically, no such thing as happily ever after -- the new shows promise something different.
This doesn't necessarily mean, of course, that next season's female protagonists will be less needy and sex-starved, or more fully realized than their predecessors -- only that they'll be doing something other than worrying about their biological clocks. We may discover that as women on TV approach the end of their childbearing years (regardless of whether they bear children), they simply become Ally McBeal with botox. And since "Cashmere Mafia" and "Lipstick Jungle" share a "Sex and the City" pedigree, we'll likely find that women on the other side of 40 buy expensive shoes, consume pink drinks, and enjoy casual sex. Who knows, given our cultural preoccupation with fertility and pregnancy, "infertile" may even become the new "single," with IVF and ovulation charts replacing blind dates on the same old road to happily ever after.
And yet, for better or worse, we're also going to see what happens when the biological clock stops ticking. At this point, Addison Montgomery's measured reaction to the news of her infertility has already set her apart from the hysteria-in-a-skirt that is Ally McBeal. Whereas Ally and Carrie never seem completely in control of their own destinies (Carrie Bradshaw is literally rescued by a man who has finally come to his senses), Addison Montgomery seems firmly grounded in the knowledge that she has made her own choices.
Even before she discovers she can't have children, Addison's story doesn't quite fit into the happily-ever-after mold. She's divorced, and she's more interested in vying to become chief of surgery than in settling down. And when she does learn she's infertile, she doesn't wilt into victimhood. Instead, she goes back to work, where (in a made-for-TV twist of fate) she continues to deliver other people's babies.
Addison's job may serve as a reminder of what her life lacks, but she's not broken, at least not yet. By starting where the more familiar story line might have ended, "Private Practice" leaves the moral, and the possibilities, up for grabs.
Jane Rosenzweig teaches in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard. 