“Good Girls Revolt,” on Amazon Prime starting Oct. 28, is a perfect storm of things I love: journalism and feminism and 1960s New York City and Nora Ephron (if only briefly). So to claim I’m writing about it impartially would be ridiculous.
That said, I think it’s worth unpacking the notion that it’s the female “Mad Men.” On its surface, sure, same time period, same place, different perspective. But at the risk of offending the “Mad Men” faithful, the early episodes of this show are so much more nuanced than the AMC drama was, at least in the beginning (I just remember watching Don Draper and Co. and thinking, “OK WE GET IT EVERYONE SMOKED EVERYWHERE”).
Besides, “Good Girls Revolt” is telling a story you actually might not be that familiar with, whereas I think we’re all pretty clear on the fact that sexism ran rampant in office culture in the 1960s. This show tells the specific, and fact-based, story of the women of Newsweek (“News of the Week,” in its thinly-veiled incarnation here) who sued for sexual discrimination in 1970 — becoming the first female class action lawsuit — and won. It’s based on a book, “The Good Girls Revolt,” by Lynn Povich, who was one of those women.
Before that time, female employees at the magazine were relegated to being researchers at the magazine, who’d put together information on stories that men would then write up — and get credit for. When Ephron (Grace Gummer) challenges this protocol in the pilot, she’s told that’s just the way things work — and she quits (only to quickly get another gig at the New York Post, we find out later, this time as a writer).
Showrunner Dana Calvo, who previously worked as a journalist, painstakingly recreates the look and feel of a newsroom in the late 1960s, but more importantly she focuses on the nascent stirrings of feminist revolution, percolating under the surface in a wide variety of ways. If “Mad Men” often came off as a thinly-veiled love letter to a simpler time, “Good Girls Revolt” has a clear-eyed view of why that time period was so stifling for women. And it has a first-rate cast in Anna Camp, Erin Darke, Genevieve Angelson, and, though their roles are smaller, Gummer as Ephron, and Joy Bryant as civil rights lawyer Eleanor Holmes Norton, who instigated the notion of filing the suit.
Patti (Angelson), the most bohemian of the main characters, is a budding hippie and a free-love type: When we first meet her, she’s having sex with her work hookup, Douglas (Hunter Parrish), in the copy room. But she’s also a dogged reporter and a fierce defender of independence who goes into a tailspin when her 18-year-old sister announces she’s gotten engaged. “I think about you cooking and cleaning for Randy for the rest of your life and it doesn’t make sense to me!” she rages. To the show’s credit, this isn’t a black-and-white storyline: Her sister says she’s happy to be getting married and wants a different life.
“GGR” excels in its ability to expand its lens to include so many different stories and perspectives, and it doesn’t paint all men as bad guys or sexists. The paper’s editor, Finn (Chris Diamantopoulos), is the one we see most struggling with work-life balance. He’s under stress from the magazine to be on call 24/7, and his wife (Odelya Halevi) resents him for his absence, and he genuinely seems to be trying to work it out (rather than expecting her to fall in line, as we might have seen in a “Mad Men” episode).
There’s also a topicality to “GGR” that has only grown since the show went into production. First and foremost, as Calvo has said, the behavior of the Republican presidential candidate has harkened back to an earlier time when crude sexism was rampant. “Twenty-seven months ago, it was more like, Amy Schumer was just busting out of the comedy scene and everyone was making noise about hiring more women directors,” Calvo recalled. “But this toxic campaign tenor has, in a way, provided this relief map for the stories we’re trying to tell now.” It’s hard not to recall the back-and-forth about gender that has permeated the culture for the past year when watching women on this show struggle to be seen as more than assistants and sex objects.
And we feel Black Lives Matter echoes in a storyline that sees Patti and Douglas reporting on a story about a Brooklyn police officer who is killed along with eight Black Panthers — the latter, she points out, being a detail only noted at the very end of the news coverage of the cop’s death. When they go to his funeral, they hear a relative giving a speech about “taking this neighborhood back.” When she asks Douglas how he can possibly not understand that as racism, he simply tells her he has to report the story like he sees it. And he gets to, of course, because he’s the only one of the two of them who gets a byline.
I can’t wait to see where “Good Girls Revolt” goes, which is something I don’t think I ever said about “Mad Men” — except for wanting it to skip to the part about women’s liberation. And it couldn’t possibly be premiering at a better time, what with its message about the historical things that can happen when women band together.
