When it comes to representation in TV and films, one writer feels very aware that 50 isn’t quite the new 30. But it doesn't have to be.
Remember when people said 40 was the new 30? That thought might hold some water, but unless you’re J.Lo, 50 isn’t quite the new 30. Take it from me — I’m kissing 54 on the lips right now. My birthday is a week away, looming as it does like a weird, oddly decorated, ceremonial threshold into fog-machine gusts that lead to some opaque future I can only hope is good. Yet, mentally, I can feel (and act and sometimes dress) like a 16-year-old boy. All right, fine — like my 32-year-old self.
I’m still the same idiot, but unless I mine the annals of the smorgasbord of streaming apps, it’s not like I can readily find a TV show or movie and laugh or cry at some on-screen version of myself that reflects this dichotomy. Indeed, even with all the talk of progress and parity out there, finding women over 50 in lead roles on television is still rarer than many of us would like. Take, for instance, when I almost spit out my coffee after reading how And Just Like That showrunner Michael Patrick King told The New York Times that if it hadn’t been a legacy show, the Sex and the City sequel series would have been an impossible sell: “I don’t think that anybody would take on new women characters at 55 without proof that people will watch.”
Damn! Am I out to pasture now?
AJLT was renewed for a second season, and for good reason — it was HBO Max’s most-viewed series premiere of a new original, ranking in its top 10 across all movie and series debuts, according to Deadline. It’s no wonder: AJLT, successful in its resurrection but not without its issues, was the show that launched a thousand hot takes. Whether compelled by nostalgia or curiosity, fans — composed of wistful millennials, assorted sympathizers, and, yes, women “of a certain age” — clamored to sop up the rehash with a biscuit, leaving nary a crumb of unexamined nuance behind.
And Just Like That
HBO Max
For my part, armed with a metaphorical knife and fork, I and my friends took to our social-media threads to conduct authoritative social, plot, character, and dialogue dissections as if we were preparing to give lectures on the topic. We couldn’t help ourselves! Crammed with good intentions and every imaginable cliché about middle age, there were a lot of relatable themes in each episode to sift through. Regardless of what you thought or felt about its execution, for some of us, the show’s success proves just how desperate we are to see ourselves reflected in the media we so rabidly consume.
A year-old Nielsen report about how women over 50 are shattering stereotypes on-screen and at home spits out some alarming facts: Women over 50 command only 8 percent of screen time even though they are 20 percent of the population. Equally as disappointing, our story lines are almost always relegated to matriarchal stereotypes that have endured for decades and decades.
“The 50-plus woman is successfully redefining these years as her new prime time, but a search for herself on-screen betrays her near-invisibility,” the report’s introduction reads. “Women 50-plus rarely see themselves in content, and when they do, they often find a reflection of a woman that doesn’t match their multifaceted relevance or reality.”
But wait — there's more to mention. According to 2021 statistics published by Women and Hollywood, out of 100 top-grossing films, just seven featured a woman 45 years of age or older in a major role, whereas 27 featured a man around that same age. That’s 3.9 films starring middle-aged men for every single film starring a middle-aged woman. What’s worse? All seven women were white.
Pamela Adlon (right) and Hannah Alligood (left) in Better Things.
FX
But take even a half-hearted look at what women in my age bracket are accomplishing out there, and it begs the question of just why is it so hard to write our stories for the screen. When your friend is a fellow pop-culture writer and feminist, you can find yourselves inspired by the same subject matter at the same time. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, the author of When Women Invented Television, and I, along with a bunch of other people, engaged in a hearty discourse about AJLT on social media when it first aired. Her fully realized takeaway was a sharp piece for BBC Culture extolling the virtues of rich, funny, compelling over-50 female characters, like Sylvie on Emily in Paris, Sam on Somebody Somewhere, and Sam Fox on Better Things, as kind of a battle cry for the inclusion of more of us, please and thank you. She chose her examples well — I see who I really am and who I want to be in these characters. Who could take their eyes off Sylvie? Who didn’t fall in love with Bridget Everett on Somebody Somewhere? When I interviewed Pamela Adlon, the co-creator, showrunner, writer, director, and star of Better Things, my friends all went bananas because, for us, she’s a rock star at making us feel seen.
Unfortunately, the ugly truth is we have so many stories to tell, but we rarely get the opportunity to tell them. “There are these huge problems in this stage of life that are inherently interesting and dramatic but we have rarely seen depicted,” Armstrong told me. “Middle-aged women talk about feeling ‘invisible,’ and this is a very literal manifestation of this.”
Armstrong is dead-on. It’s curious that AJLT got mixed reactions from fans when addressing these interesting and dramatic topics. While some of the characters’ peers nodded along to the acknowledgment of their very real issues, others yearned for their sexier, carefree days of yore, before the age-appropriate weight of parenthood, death, fractured friendships, sexual awakenings, and crises of faith led to days of reckoning that inevitably spurred their reinvention in some way. By the time you’re 50, you aren’t the same person you were when you were 30. Nor do you really want to be.
The thing is, the magic of television lies just as much, if not more, in the execution as it does in the concept. In our discussions of our representation on TV, we went on to lament the lack of female writers our age creating characters our age in writers’ rooms. “If there were more middle-aged women telling middle-aged women stories, then we would have lots of different experiences represented,” Armstrong said. “It’s been proven over and over that it truly helps people to see themselves depicted in media. And think of how, if younger people saw women in their 50s as badasses on TV, it could help with ageism.”
And there are examples out there that prove this point. With How to Get Away With Murder from our very own Shonda Rhimes, clichés were avoided, and brilliant performances were given by Viola Davis in a thriller-meets-murder mystery that endured for six seasons — when Davis was in her late 40s to her mid-50s. Yes, Annalise Keating did some questionable things throughout the run of the show, but she did it all with agency and passion.
Viola Davis in How to Get Away With Murder.
Eric McCandless//Getty Images
Sadly, Murder was an exception to the rule, but it’s not like we haven’t seen middle-aged female characters that buck stereotypical nonsense before. To note on the comedic side: The sheer brilliance of Absolutely Fabulous, a British pop-culture send-up comedy fueled by co-creator/writer/actor Jennifer Saunders and enriched by the stellar comic timing of Joanna Lumley, is still assurance that fans will quote a sharply written social commentary starring two middle-aged women (Eddie turned 40 on the show, whereas Patsy turned “39” with a wink many, many times) over 20-plus years across five seasons of a TV series, two subsequent films, and a series of specials betwixt and between. Totally wasted and pop-culture obsessed, Patsy and Eddie mocked their way through middle age without a modicum of seriousness or maternal instinct — and Eddie has kids. I laughed my ass off at every second of it even though I was roughly 10 to 15 years younger than those characters when I first laid eyes on them.
If gatekeepers all over refuse to hold space, place value, and compensate us properly for our considerable professional experience, how can we possibly get the big breaks we need to tell our own stories?
Rewinding 50 years, Maude, a ’70s Norman Lear sitcom starring an early-50s Bea Arthur of Golden Girls fame, tackled a variety of rich middle-aged realities like addiction, mental health, divorce, dealing with adult children, abortion at age 47 (pre-Roe v. Wade, mind you) — all the same things we deal with today (which is plenty of fodder for another think piece) — with sardonic humor. There was only a smattering of women in those writers’ rooms back then, but some did write for Maude, according to IMDb.
Disappointingly, the lack of representation of women over 50 we see today reflects real life, because ageism is alive and well in the workforce. A 2021 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found gendered ageism to be a “double threat” for women over 50 in the workplace. The 2019 Hiscox Ageism in the Workplace Study found as many as 36 percent of workers felt their age kept them from getting a job after turning 50. According to AARP, almost as many people over 55 are employed (39.1 percent) as have been unemployed long-term (36.1 percent). If gatekeepers refuse to place value and compensate us properly for our considerable professional experience, how can we possibly get the big breaks we need to tell our own stories?
Thankfully, Gen Xers like me have never had to endure the burden of asking permission to do much of anything. We just push on, nod at one another in acknowledgment, and hope it pays off. To women in their 30s or even 40s, the realities of life at 50 and beyond can seem eons away. But I’m here to tell you, time flies. And that in and of itself makes every birthday afterward worth celebrating. When you finally cross into the foggy mystery of your 50s, wouldn’t it be nice to feel like you could a) be fairly considered and compensated for a position worthy of your experience and b) escape the rigors of your compelling life by watching someone you can actually identify with on-screen?