You’ve come too far on TV, baby

Within the first seven minutes of the pilot episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Moore’s character, Mary Richards, encounters the following questions in the course of her job interview at WJM-TV:

How old are you?

What religion are you?

Would you think I was violating your civil rights if I asked if you were married?

Divorced?

Never married?

Why?

Do you type?

That was 1970, and miraculously, Richards landed the job of associate producer, “for $10 less a week than a secretarial job.”

Fast forward nearly four decades and turn on the TV. The female lead is probably not an ambitious professional woman working her way up a ladder, dealing with a boss who openly drinks on the job and asks phenomenally inappropriate, and in some cases, illegal questions. Nope, she’s either already there or within reach of the top rung, and she’s got it all. Look at “Grey’s Anatomy” heroine Meredith Grey: in the course of a day, she’s assisting in the O.R., attending to her cancer-stricken best friend and managing the demands of a new marriage. Or there’s Dr. Lisa Cuddy on “House,” who is juggling the responsibility of being Dean of Medicine and hospital administrator at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital, all while mothering a baby she recently adopted.

Are we better off now, having DVRs stockpiled with shows that portray powerful women pulling off what used to be considered impossible?

According to the findings of a major report on the status of women by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, not really. We went from Mary Richards to Meredith Grey at top speed, and along the way, forgot about Roseanne Conner, who really represented the female head of household in America.

“Women’s professional success and financial status are significantly overrepresented in the mainstream media, suggesting that women indeed ‘have it all,’” the study says. What we see on television then are characters who “overrepresent how far women have in fact come in the workplace, underrepresent the kind of work most women do, and misrepresent how women can, and do, comport themselves on the job,” according to the report.

Looking at the disconnect
If you spend anywhere near the 153 hours per month watching TV the average American does, according to A.C. Nielsen, you’re probably tuning in to a woman who holds one of five jobs: surgeon, lawyer, police lieutenant, district attorney or cable news pundit. The real top five jobs for women were, in first place, secretaries and administrative assistants, followed by registered nurses, elementary and middle school teachers, cashiers and retail salespersons, according to the Department of Labor’s 2008 statistics on women workers.

Much has been made of the idea that women’s physical images are driven toward unrealistic goals by the media, but Susan Douglas, author of the chapter of the Shriver report titled “Where have you gone, Roseanne Barr,” affirms the point made by the labor statistics and argues that the image of women’s success is misrepresented.

“It’s really about the media being funhouse mirrors, the wavy kind where you walk in and certain parts of your body are exaggerated and other parts disappear, that’s what’s happening here,” Douglas said. “The success of women, that they’ve made it to the top has been wildly magnified and exaggerated and the extent to which millions of women are still struggling to make ends meet, juggle work and family and doing so even with some sarcasm, the way ‘Roseanne’ did, that’s gone. When it’s not there on the screens of America, it’s easy to say, what do you mean, women, they’ve got it knocked?”

When television got women right
Roseanne Barr didn’t just play Roseanne Conner on “Roseanne,” she conceived of and wrote for the character during the series’ nine-year run, and used her own personal experience to create a program that resonated with the type of women Douglas contends are left out now.

“The idea for ‘Roseanne’ was forged in that Hamburger Helper, no-frills reality I lived in from day one. Roseanne Connor rang true for so many people because she spoke their language and faced their same fears and disappointments,” Barr said. “It didn't take a ton of imagination or guesswork to think and talk and act like a struggling, working-class woman in America because I was a struggling, working-class woman in America.”

The same year “Roseanne” premiered — 1988 — the first flat-screen television debuted, Anna Wintour was named Editor in Chief of Vogue, and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show went national. It seemed change was afoot that pilot season. But if Douglas is right, the needle hasn’t moved and to this day, “Roseanne” remains the most accurate depiction of women. That comes as no surprise to Barr.

“Is it possible to be proud and sad at the same time?” Barr said. “Working people have really lost ground since ‘Roseanne’ first hit and then ruled the airwaves in its time slot. As I often say, and I'm not the only one, that show is more ahead of its time now than it was almost two decades ago. The average person continues to face powerful forces that never let up on the ripping off and the dumbing down.”

That “dumbing down” might just be the key to which shows often make it through their pilot seasons, albeit at the expense of portraying women — and men — accurately, according to Barry Levinson, who has been writing, directing and producing films and television series since the 1970s.

“What does TV portray that is real? Real male problems? Teenagers? No, and certainly not problems of females in our society, no matter what they are doing,” Levinson said. “It (what you see on TV) is all very light, unrealistic portraits of our society on every level. Silly is good. Stupid is better.”

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