The Winter TV season is here, full of familiar guilty pleasures and still more sassy female sitcoms to add to the bumper crop of the fall (Are You There, Chelsea?). Here we pick our favorites among them — chase any viewing of The Bachelor with these female stereotype-challenging series:
Alcatraz: This one seems made for this list. A trio led by a woman (Sarah Jones) investigates weird stuff going down at the creepy, famous prison that has been the setting for a billion dude movies. And the show was co-created by one of Lost‘s few female writers, Elizabeth Sarnoff. Exec producer J.J. Abrams delivers another one for the strong ladies.
House of Lies: Showtime’s latest edgy sitcom follows a team of brash management consultants led by Don Cheadle. It’s full of the kind of locker-room talk high-paid professions still traffic in, and Kristin Bell’s Jeannie dishes it out and takes it the way we imagine any successful businesswoman must. But she hasn’t checked her womanhood at the door and knows she needs to make different choices than a man to get ahead — like harvesting and freezing her eggs for later. Watching Cheadle’s character parent his adolescent son, who’s aggressively ambiguous about his sexuality, is another interesting depiction of gender politics.
