It wasn’t that long ago that “Murphy Brown” caught hell for its title character’s decision to raise a child on her own. Yes, that was a thing in the late 1980s. And just last month, the president of the United States upbraided a reporter, saying she “wasn’t Donna Reed,” referring to the actress who embodied the 1950s TV ideal of the good housewife.
Expectations of women as shaped by television — especially as to their moral character — have long been pretty narrow. It would be many years after “Murphy” before female leads could be seen as unapologetically independent, complicated and neither fully “good” nor fully “bad.” That multidimensional territory had long been reserved for men. But then came “Nurse Jackie” and “Girls” and even “The Mindy Project” and “Fleabag.”
Now a new crop of quality shows has these kinds of flawed but compelling young women bursting forth in all their human messiness — strident, selfish, rebellious and all.
Sara Kucserka, co-creator of Hulu’s series adaptation of “High Fidelity,” grew up in the age of “Murphy Brown” and has watched the TV landscape change. She largely credits the evolution of women characters to a “huge groundswell of female creators who are rising up and saying, ‘We are just as complex and difficult and complicated as any male character you’ve been seeing on television.’