Small Screen Goddesses

Jodie Comer with her Emmys (Agencies)

It began at the Fringe festival in 2013, where Fleabag was a one-woman act. Waller-Bridge’s triumph marks a watershed moment for the small screen. Women, in all their imperfections, quirks and idiosyncratic selves are finally having there long-due moment where mainstream storytelling is concerned. Here there is a woman, who is messy, doesn’t fit into the said conventions of society, and is initially quite unlikeable. But by the time Season 2 rolled out, Fleabag was a household name and the bond that the audience formed with her, as she broke the fourth wall, was sacrosanct. “I feel people have been scared to write characters like these. But I think, now, especially women, are so relieved to have this new template. And aren’t we all a bit of everything? The morning can start out with us being a chaste princess, and by the afternoon we can be the Gremlin whore. We are all very different things in the same day, and at the same time. I feel, weirdly, that it felt less brave to not do that now. It’s been pouring out of me, this need to project multi-dimensional women as we are. We can be celebrated, and at the same time, do things that are potentially unforgivable. Then we let the audience decide,” Waller-Bridge had said in an interview to The Indian Express earlier this year.

Fleabag, and by proxy, Waller-Bridge, displaced Julia-Louis Dreyfus, who, with her stellar performance and six consecutive Primetime Emmy Award wins for Veep, had blazed the trail for women in comedy. And well, no other woman on screen can abuse the way Dreyfus did. Her profanity, combined with her lack of a maternal instinct, was uncharted territory, yet it struck gold for comedy.

Killing Eve, another offering from the Waller-Bridge stable was nominated in five categories, and walked off with the award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, which was won by Jodie Comer. Comer essays Villanelle, a psychopathic assassin. Five years ago, one couldn’t have imagined that the character of a female assassin would have been written with such empathy and would garner such appreciation, much less rake in prestigious awards. Alex Borstein, who won the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her portrayal of Susie Myerson, too, broke the mould. Her abrasive, blunt and off-handish character, replete with the newspaper hat and suspenders is a complete juxtaposition to the job at hand — being Mrs Maisel’s manager.

In all likelihood, one would have seen all the nominated shows for this year’s award season, but don’t lose hope. We’ll be looking out for Russian Doll, which should arrive full force by next year’s award season. And if you are really missing the antics of Waller-Bridge, search for Crashing, her earlier work.