TV shows with strong female relationships

[osprey_archer]

On my last entry, lilysea mentioned that it was difficult to think of TV shows that prominently feature women who are supportive of each other, and listed a few examples:

Supergirl

Good Girls (I haven’t seen this one but it is apparently about three women and a HEIST and you know how much I enjoy heists.)

The Bletchley Circle

And you also know how much I love lists, so naturally I made a list of other TV shows that I’ve watched and liked that meet the same criteria. (I added the “liked” qualifier because otherwise I would have had to include Glee and I couldn’t bear being responsible for anyone watching Glee.)

2 Broke Girls (which has a number of other problems, but the leads are great together)

Call the Midwife

My Little Pony (I know, I know, it's for six-year-olds. I do think the first few seasons work for adults too, though. It's like a magical girls show, but with ponies!)

Sailor Moon (speaking of magical girl shows!)

Orphan Black (props to this one for having all kinds of relationship between women: supportive, antagonistic, we don't get along but we have to work together and actually maybe you're not so bad...)

Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

Sweet Blue Flowers (this is an adorable anime about female friendship & also f/f romance)

Rozen Maiden (anime about living dolls who are supposed to fight to prove who is the best doll)

Kimi ni Todoke (more anime! I don't know if anime is especially good at this or if I'm just good at finding anime that does it)

Gilmore Girls

Lost Girl (Gosh, a lot of these shows have Girl in the title. I guess it’s a way to signal?)


And a few shows with female characters who have a strong relationship, but it's less front and center:

Parks & Rec

The Borgias, surprisingly enough. (There are two shows about the Borgias & I'm talking about the one with Jeremy Irons)

New Girl (but even here they felt they needed to devote an episode to the idea that girls are passive-aggressive and catty and what Jess & Cece really needed to work out their problems was to brawl like men. Even though none of the guys in the show ever actually solve their relationship problems by brawling like men. I am not convinced that brawling like men is actually any kind of relationship panacea anyway.)

Downton Abbey (with the caveat that I quit after the season 2 finale so who knows what happens after that)

Princess Tutu (yet another anime! with dancing and fairytales)

The Good Place

Agent Carter (I had trouble deciding which list to put this on. On the one hand I think that Peggy’s relationships with Angie and especially Dottie are the highlight of the show, but undeniably the show focuses more time on “which man will Peggy end up with?”)

Veronica Mars

Wonderfalls

ETA: Some shows I haven't seen that got recced for good female friendships in Kayleen Schaefer's Text Me When You Get Home:

Broad City
Best Friends Forever
Playing House
Insecure
Big Little Liars

Comments

[the_rck]

I'd add Jane the Virgin and the remake of One Day at a Time. For anime/manga, I'd also add the series that includes Aqua and Aria.

[osprey_archer]

Is Aqua and Aria the series name or are those just characters in it?

[the_rck]

Aqua is the name for one part of the series and Aria for the other. Same characters and setting, no time jump. I think the manga changed publisher in the middle and so had to change name. The anime changes names between seasons. They're slice of life SF following three girls learning to be gondoliers on another planet. All of their teachers are women.

[lilysea]

On my last entry, [personal profile] chantefable mentioned that it was difficult to think of TV shows that prominently feature women who are supportive of each other, and listed a few examples

Um, actually, that was me! ^_^

[osprey_archer]

Good Lord, you're right. I don't think the two of you even have similar icons or anything, so how could I get confused? Well, I've corrected it now!

[missroserose]

Totally agreed about Agent Carter. That was probably my biggest frustration with the second season especially; there was so much to explore in her relationships with her female friends in New York, so clearly we need to uproot her and send her across the country and give her the most hackeneyed romantic triangle to explore. I did appreciate that James D'Arcy followed her; there are so few representations of nonsexual cross-gender friendships, even if they did code him heavily as gay aside from the whole being-married thing. But I literally yelled at the screen when he was giving her advice and said something to the effect of "You can't be in love with two people at the same time"...of course you can! It happens! Love (or really attraction, in this case) is an elemental force for change and has no interest in fitting itself into socially-prescripted heteronormative monogamous boxes! That's not how any of that works!

Of course, actively polyamorous bisexual Agent Carter would probably have been a little much even for Marvel, sigh.

[osprey_archer]

I guess maybe Howard Stark could offer the "well actually you CAN be in love with two people at a time" perspective, but Jarvis seems so courtly and old-fashioned that I would have had difficulty buying it if they had him encouraging Peggy to pursue the two-boyfriend life.

I might buy him figuring that she can't decide between the two because the actual love of her life (Steve) is already dead and all other loves are but pale shadows in comparison. He's so dramatically "I never even look at other women" in love with his own wife that I could totally buy him figuring that this is how love works for everyone.

[missroserose]

Hah, yeah, I definitely wasn't imagining Jarvis advocating Peggy take up polyamory. It was more the way they handled the conversation, and the fact that (to reference our earlier conversation on context) there *weren't* any alternate opinions expressed—given that Jarvis acts as the show's moral center, him saying "you're being silly and leading them on", and especially with nobody (not even Peggy, really) contradicting him, it felt very much like the showrunners Passing Judgment. (Especially since the character most likely to offer an alternate viewpoint is generally treated as a cad and a bounder...not that he doesn't deserve it, but it doesn't exactly provide a stellar example.) But then, I think I reacted to the phrasing as much as anything; I kind of have a trigger about people telling me what I am and am not feeling, and it really seems like a friend would have approached it as asking Peggy what she's feeling, and listening supportively, and perhaps gently suggesting that (assuming she wasn't looking for a consensual triad) the moral thing to do would be to make a choice and not lead the poor other man on. But then, they might not have had time for that in between nuclear-tech crises. :)

[legionseagle]

Lucifer. The current series has been patchy, but supportive relationships between women was very much a feature of series 2 in particular.

[isis]

Halt and Catch Fire, specifically beginning in S2 when Donna and Cameron form a computer company together. Sometimes they are at odds, but their relationship is a main thread of the show, and the fact that they are so different (Donna's a married mom, Cameron is a volatile punk) makes it interesting.

[osprey_archer]

You've posted about this show before, I think! Or someone has posted about it before. At any rate I've heard good things about it.

[tamsin]

There's also Bomb Girls.

[osprey_archer]

I couldn't get into Bomb Girls which I realize means that I am a philistine, but it is indeed a show that exists and other people enjoy!

There's also Land Girls, which is another World War II era show about women that I couldn't get into. I think Cable Girls is something similar but I'm a little afraid to try it after bouncing off the first two.

This is adding a lot more evidence that TV writers like to stick the word Girls in any show that includes lots of women. I suppose this titling choice might be inspired by Golden Girls though.

[tamsin]

Well, not everything's for everyone. That's why there's always room for more shows centered on female relationships.

I'll have to check out Land Girls!

[skygiants]

C/ping my recs from elsewhere for kdramas that center supportive female relationships:

- Avengers Social Club, in which three middle-aged women team up for revenge on their variously terrible oppressors (mostly spouses) and find out that maybe the real revenge was the friendships we made along the way
- Age of Youth/Hello My Twenties, about five college girls who manage to befriend each other despite drastic personality differences, ghosts, stalkers, kidnapping, murder, and the fact that their apartment only has one bathroom
- Capital Scandal, set in 1930s Japan, which prominently features the friendship/mentorship between two women fighting a revolution
- Ms. Perfect, which is ... a thriller about a dynamic between two women that is definitely NOT a friendship, but also has so many scenes in which everyone important in it is a woman over 30! (MOST of them are in fact friends with each other...)

I might also have a jdrama rec to add to this post, but I've only seen the first 3 episodes out of 8 so far so who knows where it's gonna go - it's called Tenchu and at this point it seems to be about a nice grandma and the time-traveling female ninja whom she adopts and then teams up with to get vigilante justice on predatory men.

[osprey_archer]

I have an enormous backlog of shows that I am perpetually behind on, but EVEN SO I feel tempted by this time-traveling female ninja and her nice grandma friend. I'll be keeping an eye on your posts to see if it lives up to its glorious premise!