LOS ANGELES — Ally Sheedy’s career boasts hit movies including “The Breakfast Club” and “WarGames,” an award-wining turn in the indie film “High Art,” and a string of TV roles scattered over the years.
While she often returned to television between big-screen projects, Sheedy was unaware of how many innovative shows had joined the ranks of the conventional. Then the 2020 pandemic lockdown arrived.
“I downloaded Hulu and HBO Max and Netflix and all this stuff that I never actually watched. I suddenly got an education on the streaming platforms,” she said in an interview.
When the script for cable channel Freeform’s “Single Drunk Female” came her way, Sheedy said, “it felt like of a piece with the kinds of shows I had been able to watch. … I suddenly understood, ‘Oh, I see why a show like this could be made.’”
In the dark comedy, Sheedy plays mom Carol to the title character, 20-something, newly recovering alcoholic Samantha (Sofia Black-D’Elia). There’s no sugar-coating, with characters whose vulnerabilities are on full display as Samantha is forced to move back in with her mom.
The pair’s relationship is “very fluid and messy, which is what I love,” Sheedy said during a Q&A with TV critics.
Black-D’Elia (“The Night Of,” “Gossip Girl”) described the mother-daughter dynamic as “complicated and funny and weird and nuanced in a way that I think any girl with a mother can understand and relate to, and it’s really fun doing it with Ally.”
The layered approach immediately attracted Sheedy to the 10-episode series, which is in its first season on Freeform and on Hulu. Creator Simone Finch based it on her experience as a young woman.
Does Sheedy see parallels between contemporary TV and indie movies such as 1998’s “High Art”? In that film, Sheedy played a a drug-addicted photographer in a relationship with a younger woman, earning an Independent Spirit Award for best female lead.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said. “There was a moment, maybe extended moments (into) the late ’90s, when indie film was developing and fruitful.”
The films included “a lot of roles that were written for women outside of the box,” she said, with “High Art” among them.
