Bad TV I cannot stop watching compulsively: Firefly Lane edition
Yikes.
It’s no use to sit here and pretend that I did not gobble up all of Netflix’s Firefly Lane, Katherine Heigl’s latest TV comeback vehicle, like an oversized bag of gummy bears—I’m talking 10 episodes in 72 hours, enough to give myself a stomach ache. This is the shit I live for: Women! Melodrama! A whimsical childhood street! Being a little hysterical and overwrought about Female Friendship™.
Kyle Chayka writing in The New Yorker calls this “ambient TV” but these are just my viewing habits. I spent one Christmas break alone in my 20s when I couldn’t afford to fly home bingeing Hart of Dixie, a CW show that follows Zoe Hart, a Manhattan doctor who moves to small-town Alabama to reconnect with her Southern roots. It featured Rachel Bilson practicing medicine almost exclusively in short shorts, a lot of gratuitous mentions of Magnolia Bakery as shorthand for Dr. Hart’s urban cool and Australian actress Jaime King putting on the most horrifying Southern accent I’ve ever heard. Even as we were asked to go along with these absurdities, the emotions and relationships felt grounded enough to make it all work, well enough anyways.
Firefly Lane sadly doesn’t quite manage to clear that medium-level bar. The show follows the enduring friendship and lives of Tully Hart (an odd coincidence!) and Kate Mularkey over the course of three decades. Tully, played by Katherine Heigl, is brash and ambitious, the grating DGAF personality intended to salve the wounds of her turbulent adolescence spent with Cloud, her hippie, addict mother. Kate is meek and bumbling, given considerable charm by Sarah Chalke, and from a traditional nuclear family that, dun dun dun, harbors secrets of its own. Each episode cuts back and forth in time, with a transparent formula—this formative experience here led to this behavior/this reaction in the most recent timeline.
We see Kate and Tully, played by younger actresses, in the initial intoxicating blush of making a soulmate-like best friend, as they bond over Leif Garrett and battle middle school bullies, the sweetest and most affecting parts of the show. We follow them in their 20s as they are up-and-coming reporters and as they lightly tussle over the attentions of their hot boss, Johnny, an Australian (?) former war correspondent (??) who is, for some reason, managing a local Seattle TV news station. And we see them in their 40s in the 2000s, when Tully has become a popular daytime talk show host, a kind of cross between Ellen and Oprah, chasing away her demons with pills and booze. Kate, meanwhile, is struggling with her separation from now-hot husband Johnny and going back to work for the first time in a decade, while also raising a teenage daughter.
The show was brought to my attention by this otherwise good Washington Post profile of Katherine Heigl that tracks the immolation of her career, and then proceeds to make a rather preposterous suggestion.
Yes, she did brand her 2007 Judd Apatow comedy “Knocked Up” “a little sexist” and lamented that it painted women as uptight “shrews.” Yes, one year after winning an Emmy for her role as Izzie Stevens on “Grey’s Anatomy,” Heigl abstained from 2008 awards consideration because she “did not feel that I was given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination.” And yes, she complained about working a 17-hour day on “Grey’s” in 2009, when her own schedule was possibly to blame. It was a spate of comments and actions that many decided collectively painted a picture of the worst kind of woman: a difficult one. [...]
But as the years have passed and the world has changed, there seems to be a growing realization that maybe, just maybe, the Heigl backlash outweighed the crime. In a post-#MeToo world, in a post-Trump world, is it not laughable that so much grief was given to a woman for speaking her mind?
I am loving that a vague mention of a post-#MeToo, post-Trump world means you can excuse all sorts of bratty behavior, mostly because I also enjoy being a professional brat. Brats should be a protected class. I truly admire the chutzpah of dramatically removing yourself from Emmy consideration to publicly shade your high-profile boss, but I wish Katie Heigl would just say “yeah, maybe that was a bit much!” instead of something something strong woman, opinions, feminism.
Anyways, Firefly Lane is equally confused about its ideas about women and babies and marriage and careers. There are a thousand threads to pull at when you’re tracking a friendship for more than 30 years and Firefly Lane lightly gestures at some of them before going in the most hackneyed directions. It feels like it’s ticking off a long list of “women’s” issues: sexism, harassment, sexual assault, pregnancy, infidelity, miscarriage, etc., etc. without lingering on anything long enough to give it depth.
Which is a shame, because I’m endlessly fascinated by these forces that shape women’s lives and I’ll look anywhere, even a cheesy Netflix soap, for insight. Why would Kate decide to give up her career after having a baby when it’s clear that she’s anxious about losing her identity to motherhood? Why doesn’t Kate’s mom, a housewife oppressed by her domestic duties and an admirer of the women’s movement, get a job, as droves of women were doing in the 1970s, instead of having an affair? Why doesn’t the question of women’s ambition get more thoughtful treatment? And then there’s Tully, who becomes a dartboard for various female traumas so they can make her good and fucked up by the time she gets to her 40s, and underpin some of her more erratic decision making.
But onto the more fun stuff: please regard the sepia filter + CGI combo to make Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke look like they’re Barbies in heaven in the 80s portion of the show.
Look at what they did to Tully’s poor mother, the very hot Beau Garrett?
What is going on with Firefly Lane’s wig budget?
We also get a long B-plot about why hot boss/hot husband Johnny is so driven to leave Kate and the family to go cover the Iraq War. Apparently, in the 1980s, he witnessed the murder of his friend/priest/dissident Ramon in the El Salvadoran civil war and failed to “get the story out,” a confusing turn of events because as far as I can tell, the U.S. media extensively covered that conflict and its atrocities. You know exactly what Johnny is thinking because characters are able to accurately and succinctly name their feelings and motivations most of the time.
If you’re going to cook up such a sanctimonious journalism plot (and there are a lot of hilarious ideas about journalism here), why not at least give it to one of your female leads!
Should I chill out and stop taking this so seriously? Probably. But I am frustrated!
In pandemic times, I feel even more soft, tender and grateful for the sustaining friendships with women in my life than ever before, and it does seem like there is more widespread recognition that those bonds are as central to our lives as romantic partnership/marriage. So I wish programming that centered on those relationships would do better, even if they are a part of Netflix’s churn factory.
Iconic TV friendships tend to be a little neat, a counterweight to the protagonists’ complicated romantic entanglements—think of Leslie Knope and Anne Perkins, or Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang. Give me the real mess that is bound to occur among people who truly consider each other soulmates over the course of decades! Insecure was great at this last season, showing how the dynamic between Issa and Molly curdled into something untenable.
The end of Firefly Lane’s first season indicates that there has also been a serious breach in Tully and Kate’s friendship and they are no longer speaking to each other. I suspect that this is because Tully sleeps with Johnny after a near-death experience in Iraq, but I hope I’m wrong because that, true to form, would be so boring. Nevertheless, I will be watching!
Miscellaneous:
I wrote a little essay for Gen Magazine’s How I Got Radicalized series about doing Carmen Electra’s aerobic striptease exercise tapes as a puritanical teen swept up in the purity ring agenda. I was on my friend Nicole’s I Also podcast, all about women’s relationship to wealth and money (please, I beg of you, fast forward through all the bits where I chuckle at myself). Like everyone else, I watched the Britney doc and I am still struggling with the issues therein—Tavi Gevinson’s essay in The Cut made me think a lot but then, I am also casually wondering if it is possible for women to ever have sexual agency under the oppressive systems we live under! This sweet and sour garlic eggplant recipe is among the best and easiest things I have made recently and I recommend it.
A plea:
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