Glenn Close

Glenn Close is one of the former film actresses now finding success on television. (Michael Tran / Getty Images © 2009)

by Linda Holmes

Mary McNamara, television critic for the Los Angeles Times, argues today that television offers women better roles than film, making it crazy for a actress — her example is Katherine Heigl — to leave TV and make movies.

An artistic reason to remain in television? It's a world gone mad!

Problem with the thesis? A look at the evidence, after the jump...

McNamara has obviously been rather profoundly irritated by The Ugly Truth specifically — there's a lot of that going around — and she makes note of the thing that bothered me most about that movie as well: the sheer amount of time devoted to humiliating Heigl's character over and over again.

But is the big-screen/small-screen divide that simple? There's some truth to the fact that a certain axis of cable television drama has become a rich source of roles for women. (Think Glenn Close, and all the women on Big Love.) But McNamara is comparing the most interesting women on television to the least interesting women in movies.

Close's Damages is not the TV equivalent of He's Just Not That Into You, is what I'm saying. Well-written roles for women still exist in movies — just not usually in mainstream romantic comedies.

(And in fairness, the roles for men in those movies don't have any substance to them either: It's not like Gerard Butler's role in The Ugly Truth and Ryan Reynolds' role in The Proposal are prize parts.)

Furthermore, most of the best roles for everybody come out in the awards-seeking movies of the latter part of the year. If you look to last year, you'll find movies like Doubt and Rachel Getting Married, both of which had stupendous roles for women. Late July is never a fair time to let yourself get too despairing about the state of serious and thoughtful movies. It's ... late July, after all. All the thoughtful movies are on vacation at the summer house.

But maybe the most interesting thing about McNamara's argument, whether it's true or not, is that it is even being made. While you can question it, you can certainly see how she got there. (Not that every assertion holds up: Desperate Housewives is not good support for this argument.)

For many, many years, it was a mostly unquestioned cultural assumption that television was creatively worthless and inferior to film in every respect, and that going from television to movies was not only a financial promotion, but a creative one as well.

For some actors, that's undoubtedly still true. But it's not the goes-without-saying truism it used to be.

categories: Movies, Television

7:49 - July 28, 2009

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