Top 25 Overlooked Female TV Characters

In honor of Women’s History Month, TVSquad have come up with a list of the top 100 female TV characters. It’s a list with the expected ranking quibbles and admirable scope—Mary Richards is the Citizen Kane of these lists by now, but it’s nice to see Jessica Fletcher, Jessica Tate, and Snoop from The Wire—but some of the selections obviously made the cut by sheer dint of name-recognition. The blurb for Chrissy Snow argues that she’s a stereotype, but the stereotypiest stereotype there is!, and then we have Bionic Woman and Jill Munroe who mistake masculine ass-kicking for complexity, and to add some color to the proceedings we had to go all the way to the bottom of the barrel to pluck out the tiresome Whitley from A Different World like our options were limited to whatever TBS aired reruns of for the past twenty years.

The Lincoln Lawyer: In cold blood

I felt dirtier walking out of Brad Furman’s The Lincoln Lawyer than its idol The Long Goodbye, and not just because all that hero worship makes us into peeping toms. When Phillip Marlowe starts walking the hard road back to civilization, he’s a changed man. When The Lincoln Lawyer reaches its franchise moment, Matthew McConaughey is playing to type, as slick and carefree as the Hollywood escapism around him. Only I was burdened with the angst the film doesn’t realize it stirred up. Only I felt the consequences.

Of Gods and Men: Putting the static in ecstatic

Can we please talk about the difference between contemplative and just slow? Of Gods and Men is the most recent César winner and France’s submission to the Oscars, beating Assayas' Carlos, Renais’ Wild Grass, and most conspicuously Denis’ White Material. Both White Material and Of Gods and Men are about white people in postcolonial Africa caught between the tidal forces of the established state military and rebel extremists told in an impressionistic montage of moments. But where Denis leaves us wanting more, her film bursting with ambiguities and false dichotomies and resonant geopolitical ideas, Beauvois leaves us wanting much less.

Reference for Reference's Sake: Topicality and meaning

I don’t buy that art has an expiration date, and I can prove it. I ate week-old chili yesterday and look at me now. The problem with pop culture references in sitcoms isn’t that they become dated when future consumers (THINK OF THE CHILDREN!) are so far removed from the era of reference and, less saliently, so confounded by the contemporary worship of hollow, self-serious pretension as greatness that they can’t recall what the War on Terror was in general or the invasion of Iraq in specific, much less Michael Moore, Mission Accomplished, free speech zones, Peanuts, or the Soup Nazi, so they watch Arrested Development with stony-faced revulsion at the America which once embraced and glorified incest, embarrassed that their great-grandparents actually thought this American Oedipus (and then some) was funny. That’s on them, and stepping in on their behalf is the most feckless of concern trolling. When has not understanding something ever given one license to denounce it? I’m not going to ask my grandma her opinion on Islam. I can turn on Glenn Beck for myself, thankyouverymuch.

Heartbeats: Don't you want me, baby?

Heartbeats is like Godard directing the kind of mad love music video the ‘80s were rife with (“Don’t You Want Me,” “Every Breath You Take,” “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” etc.) where the bouncy electronic pop doesn’t come close to obscuring the dark edge that underscores passionate love, and not just because the ‘80s revived ‘60s color blocking and Xavier Dolan rocks androgynous-to-feminine outfits and a sweet Vanilla Ice bouffant (on account of aiming for a James Dean look but without the side length required). I’d be more hesitant to invoke Godard, who saturates the picture like a film school idol, if Dolan weren’t so fully formed; the closest young voice I can think of is Lena Dunham, but Dolan has a much firmer grasp on what he’s doing, at least once the opening’s hyperactive zoom settles down—less pretension and empty experimentation than genuine voice.

Unknown: The ultimate driving machine

It’s a sign of the times that Jaume Collet-Serra’s Unknown is plucked from a sea of shallow, incompetent and/or misogynistic trash and held like a life-preserver as proof that mainstream cinema isn’t dead, just in hibernation. Unknown is hardly a film itself, more like a luxury car commercial demonstrating the versatility of the automobile as a killing machine. Which makes sense, considering the primary inspiration other than the better thrillers it constantly evokes is the BMW short film series, a set of nocturnal European action noirs that surely gave rise to Unknown’s incessant parade of car chases, though, I have to admit, after the seventeenth set-piece wore me out, the eighteenth was the perfect pick-me-up. Unknown hardly lives up to the example of the great pulp thrillers, action entertainments with depth like last winter’s Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer, but it does make, for the first hour and a half, anyway, a surprisingly effective ride.

Country Strong: America hard

Mediocre as cinema, melodrama, and camp spectacle, Country Strong is an offense to country music. Not just in the way Her Royal Gwyneth flashes her vag singing a song called “Shake That Thang” in her triumphant climax like she’s Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn’s idle Kardashian offspring trading on her parents’ name for a chance to further cheapen a perfectly good artform in the name of ephemeral popularity (to which we’re supposed to cheer), but in the way it devours country music history and shits out an artless pastiche composed mostly of contrived repetitions of history and empty name-dropping. Wearing country music mythology on its sleeve like a big, blinding, sequined Texas flag, Country Strong plays Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, slaughtering that which it covets and sewing it into a hideous parody that’s supposed to pass for homage.

Battle: Los Angeles: Blood, sweat, and tears

It’s not enough to say Battle: Los Angeles is derivative, born as it is from some unholy union of the Spielberg-Bay Family Camp for Heroes and Explosions and the Christopher Nolan School of Gritty Urban Realism Because Comically Absurd Sci-Fi Is Serious, Too, Dammit! Like a Greek monster—the head of Black Hawk Down, the ass of District 9, the rusty mechanical cock of Transformers—Battle: Los Angeles wastes the potential of its fantastical High Concept on a dull, lifeless flipbook of images, characters, and plot points ripped wholesale from other, better action blockbusters, which is saying something considering the sperm Roland Emmerich donated.

The Adjustment Bureau: Patriarchy rules

When will people learn? Mystery is greater than resolution. Curiosity lured us from hulking mouth-breathers into torture-rationalizers—but torture-rationalizers who went to the Moon! Answers just remind us that The Adjustment Bureau is a work of poorly planned screenwriting about half-forgotten ideas it picked up from that fascinating pamphlet on the philosophy of The Matrix.

Justin Bieber: Never Say Never: Pinocchio

I probably still would not have seen the best reviewed 2011 wide release if not for a cinematic lull coinciding with my first Justin Bieber song last week on Glee. But I had to see something, and it couldn't possibly be worse than The Eagle, so I donned my purple shirt and monochrome hoodie, prayed to someday complete the ensemble with a studded belt and low-slung skinny jeans, popped my head into one of those ‘50s hair salon bowls, and bought my ticket. In my life, I have been the only audience member for two movies. The first was Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass. The second, the better to fully give myself over to Biebermania, is Jon Chu’s Justin Bieber: Never Say Never.