Showtime has ordered a pilot for Frankie Shaw’s “SMILF,” Deadline reports. The series is based on her short of the same name that won the Short Film Jury Award at Sundance last year.
The former “Mr. Robot” star is writing, directing, producing, and starring in the semi-autobiographical project. According to Deadline, the series is “set in Boston and takes a raw look at a single twentysomething (Shaw) whose desires for relationships, sex, and a career collide with the realities of being a young single mother.”
Shaw also wrote and directed the short film “Too Legit” which starred Zoe Kravitz, and premiered at Sundance 2016. The short is a satire about campus sexual assault.
While at the fest earlier this year, Shaw told Women and Hollywood that she “wanted to make a movie that turned rape culture inside out — what if people openly talked and behaved in the way the statistics would suggest? What if we weren’t so hush-hush, silently going along with the fact that women are hyper-sexualized, objectified, and often attacked?”
She wanted people to think about the female experience — “the incessant victim-blaming. How pervasive our rape culture really is. What it must feel like to have your character assassinated after being assaulted. The dehumanization of women by both women and men. That rape and the commodification of women is a systemic problem, and we need massive change — everything from the way women are depicted in video games to the lack of female characters on the shows my son watches. That this runs deep, that inequality and subtle sexism contribute to rape culture, that rape culture is real and it’s fucking sad.”
