Antiheroine Chic

ENLARGE PHOTO+

Holly Hunter in the television show Saving Grace.

Frank Ockenfels / TNT

• Share

(2 of 2)

Characters like Patty and Grace, however, wouldn't work if their writers simply took male antiheroes and dressed them up in power suits or heels. Patty Hewes, for instance, bears the marks of becoming a successful, feared litigator in a man's profession; she doesn't rely on no-you're-out-of-order outbursts but uses charm, wit and sly threats. "I have a temper too," Patty tells her young female protégé. "But I have learned when to use it." Of course, she has--and a male litigator would very likely never have had to. "It's more problematic for a woman," says Close. "There's no word for balls, for women. But you have to have them."

Of course, Close, from Fatal Attraction to Dangerous Liaisons, is no stranger to problematic women. The key to her performances is that they are informed by, but not overwhelmed by, how gender has shaped the characters' lives. "In order to portray someone, you have to find a common humanity with them," she says. "The Marquise de Merteuil [in Liaisons] invented herself to survive in a world where women were used and discarded on a daily basis." Even in The Closer, a cop show strongly driven by the crime of the week, Brenda's loyalty and drive for justice are intangibly, but decisively, female--"a mother with her cubs," as Sedgwick puts it.

But what makes the best of these shows effective is that they are no more about being female than The Sopranos was about being male. That is, they are about that, thoroughly, organically, but not exclusively. (The shows befit the era of Hillary Clinton, who has enough political and personal backstory that--if she were a drama lead--her being the potential first woman President would be only her B or C plot.) Their women, like most women, like most people, have other things to worry about.

In Weeds (which returns in August), Parker's pot-mama Nancy Botwin runs up against the expectations of suburban moms, but the show is as much about race and family and money. Damages is first of all a damned compelling legal mystery, and Patty a magnetic presence. And Saving Grace is finally about faith (and its absence), loss (the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing) and redemption, as well as how we fight it. In an early scene, Grace's angel proves his powers by showing her a vision, and Grace --while disbelieving and resisting the miracle--is seduced and disoriented by it. Hunter makes Grace simultaneously resistant, aroused and a little drunk. In the moment, she's neither a fallen woman nor a female role model. She's just human, a sinful mortal in thrall, and so are we.