At first, I was hesitant to watch "Kamikaze" because of the depressing premise: An eighteen-year-old girl named Julie gets a text from her dad telling her that his plane is crashing and advising her to "do what you want." Also on that airplane is her mother and twenty-two-year-old brother, her only sibling. After the crash, she is so distraught she doesn't get out of bed for three days. When she does get out of bed, she has one goal which is to die too so she can be with them. She decides to fly on a different commercial flight every day until one of the flights crashes. But after a close call, the relieved man sitting next to her tells her that based on statistics, a person would have to fly every single day for twenty-nine years to die in a plane crash. So she abandons that plan and decides to focus on having fun instead. She continues to live her life recklessly and still has a death wish because she hasn't changed her mind about wanting to die and rejoin her family. She travels to different countries, setting her eyes on particular guys she wants to have sex with. She breaks some hearts but who can judge her when she has just endured the unfathomable grief of losing her entire family? I lost my father as a teenager so I imagine I felt one third of the type of pain she feels, and I also remember some months of not fearing death and of living recklessly. Spoiler Alert: At the end of the series, Julie discovers she is pregnant. She doesn't know which guy out of a possible four is the father, but she ends her death wish, and I believe this is because when her baby is born, she will regain a part of her precious family back. Julie is portrayed as a daring young woman who decides to take charge of her life. Even though her choices are destructive, she still has the courage to follow her own path. The women who created and wrote for this series were not afraid to portray Julie as a female antihero.
Gypsy on Netflix Favorite Line: "Nothing's certain, except for whatever's happening right here. In this moment."
Jean Holloway is a psychotherapist who lives a cushy life with her husband and nine-year-old daughter in the suburbs. Like Julie in "Kamikaze," she is also living recklessly, but it is not due to having suffered a life-changing loss. Instead, it is because she is depressed at the fact that her lifestyle is not true to her authentic self. As a young woman, Jean shunned committment but reluctantly settled down because she feared living life alone. Her mother put this fear into her head. As a therapist, Jean sets out to help her patients but continually veers off the track as she becomes fascinated by and envious of the people who her patients describe as being toxic in their lives. Her patients seek therapy to break obsessions with these people, but in turn, Jean becomes obsessed by her patients' descriptions of them because she believes these toxic people are living the types of exciting lives that she wants to live. She is bored and needs an escape. She goes on a quest to befriend these people by finding them and introducing herself as Diane Hart, a journalist. Jean is leading a secret, dual life, using an identity she feels is closer to the free spirited woman she used to be.
Jean forms new relationships and friendships as Diane Hart, and learns her new friends' secrets by asking her patients questions about them during their therapy sessions with her. One patient get frustrated, telling Jean he doesn't want to delve deeper into understanding his toxic ex-girlfriend. Instead, he is trying to get over her. Jean manipulates her patients and guides them to make changes in their lives that suit her new connections with the people she has met as Diane Hart. But not everything Jean does is malicious. She also sets out to do good. For one of her patients who is a mom struggling in her relationship with her grown daughter, she rewrites a letter that was given to her from the patient's daughter. Jean thinks the letter is too cold so she changes it, mimicking the daughter's handwriting, writing a warmer letter. When the mom reads the new letter rewritten by Jean, she is comforted and leaves the therapy session happy. Jean also consistently shows love and respect for her own daughter who is misunderstood at school. My favorite part of this series is Jean's relationship with her own mother, played brilliantly by Gwyneth Paltrow's mom, Blythe Danner. Jean and her mom have a very strained relationship. Her mom knows that Jean is manipulative and is destroying other people's lives. But she is also the only person who knows her secrets and the only one who understands her. Although we have trouble liking Jean by the end of the series, seeing her mother's unconditional love for her is heartwarming. "Gypsy" portrays a real and flawed woman who doesn't murder anyone but has a long way to go in working on herself. I think this is true to life. Women are usually portrayed on TV and in movies as having had to endure some type of trauma to make them act maliciously, yet Jean has a loving family behind her and has had no trauma. She is just a human who hurts. She's not a victim, and she's not a martyr. She's a realistic and damaged woman.
Fleabag on Amazon Prime Favorite Line: "You already know what you're going to do."
"Fleabag" is not only created and written by a woman, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but Waller-Bridge also stars in it. "Fleabag" is a comedy, but also sad, as the female lead (only referred to as "Fleabag") is a young woman who feels responsible for the death of her best friend, Boo, who walked into moving traffic to try to get injured so she could get the attention of her philadering boyfriend, but she dies accidentally instead. Fleabag feels responsible because she turns out to be the one who the boyfriend was unfaithful with, yet Boo didn't know it was Fleabag who slept with him. Fleabag misses Boo terribly, as she was the only person she felt close to because Fleabag is unable to form any other lasting relationships, as she just compulsively sleeps with men as an addiction. Even though she's sad and lonely and often clashes with her self-absorbed sister, callous stepmother, and emotionally-absent father, Fleabag finds something funny in every situation. Her sense of humor is her saving grace. Fleabag also has an eye-opening scene with actress, Kristin Scott Thomas, who co-stars in one episode as a career woman who wants to impart some wisdom about the female experience, and she does so to Fleabag when they go out for a drink together. She says that women are born in pain. They have menstrual periods, endure childbirth and sore boobs, and because of this, women have the pain within themselves. But men, on the other hand, have to create their own pain, and they seek it by finding wars to fight and crises to worry about. Men have to create their own guilt whereas women are excellent at carrying their guilt all by themselves without ever having to create it or to go out and seek it.
When Fleabag finally finds love, the man she falls for is a priest. This is something we can all relate to, as my great-grandfather was a priest who left the priesthood to marry my great-grandmother. Of course, I'm just kidding when I say that this is relatable to all people (although it is true what I said about my great-grandparents, so it IS relatable to me), but I do believe every woman can find something to relate to when watching TV series where women do the writing because when we women create female characters and stories about women, we are writing for us.
