Drinking at work, infidelity, the tumultuous times of the ’60s—if you’re missing “Mad Men,” some might suggest you check out “Good Girls Revolt,” the latest from Amazon, which dropped last Friday. The clothes, the hair and the sexual harassment are all there, but “Good Girls” creator Dana Calvo argues that you should hit pause if you think her show is a “Mad Men” rip-off.
“Don Draper was such a quintessential American male,” Calvo said. “He was the Marlboro man on Madison Avenue. He was solitary and internal, brooding and conflicted, and he really had no one to process his emotions with, which is what we’ve done to men in our society, which is part of the problem. But women move through the world differently. My show is sunnier, and I think it has their evolution and their conflict with each other and supporting one another.”
Calvo’s good girls are the women of News of the Week magazine (inspired by the actual Newsweek). Front and center are Jane (Anna Camp), Patti (Genevieve Angelson) and Cindy (Erin Darke), who, in spite of bringing very different perspectives to their jobs as researchers for the magazine, all love their jobs.
“I wanted to put them in very different but equally controlling circumstances where there were high stakes to break out,” Calvo said. “Jane is waiting for that proposal, that all-important proposal, so she can ‘start her life.’ Cindy is in a controlled marriage. For her to [separate] from this guy who is about to ‘start his life’ with his career as a lawyer in Connecticut would, to anyone from the outside, that would be insane. She won the lottery. Patti is all about sex, love and rock and roll, and she’s sort of come back from the future because six months in San Francisco was like time travel for her. And the thing with Patti is once you’ve had awareness, you can’t unsee it.”
As Calvo explained, the three women represent different points of the spectrum in the ’60s. Jane is stuck in a 1950s mentality, Patti is racing ahead into the ’70s and Cindy finds herself tugged in both directions. Their perspectives affect the way they handle their work lives, where they support the work of different male reporters, making them look better but never getting a byline themselves. The unfairness especially doesn’t sit well with Patti, who hates to be confined and doesn’t hesitate to speak her mind.
“Patti wants to get away with stuff,” Angelson said. “She walks in, she knows she’s not dressed to the traditional uniform of News of the Week and she knows she can get away with it. She knows she’s not supposed to be taking the lead on all these stories, and she does it anyway because she wants to get away with it. Patti is doing stuff in a kind of coy and devilish way because she doesn’t know she has the completely legitimate right to do it above board. … I pretty much just tried to be everything I wish I could be in my own life: brave, indulgent, sensuous and all heart.”
Encouraged by ALCU lawyer Eleanor Holmes Norton (Joy Bryant), Patti and Cindy begin looking into filing a discrimination lawsuit, while Jane is isolated from the group because, despite being the best researcher, she doesn’t consider herself a “career girl.” For Camp, Jane’s arc sings with unrecognized empowerment.
“I think that she’s in denial [that she is actually a career girl]. I think she loves her job. She truly, truly wants to be the best and wants to be fulfilled from her work and not just her family. I think she’s been told [all] her life that she should only get fulfillment from marriage and a family, but deep down within her, I think she wants to have more fulfillment from her career,” Camp said. “But it’s definitely scary because it’s the exact opposite of what she was trained to believe and think. So it’s going to take a lot of courage for her to find her voice as a career woman.”
Cindy, on the other hand, is dying to be a career woman but facing pressure at home as her husband insists she has a year before they start a family. In the pilot, she discovers he has poked a hole in her diaphragm, shattering the trust between them and shaking her faith in her marriage. While Jane learns to let go, Cindy starts to assert herself through meeting with other women.
“It gives her this sense of community, which gives her some strength,” Darke said of her character’s emerging relationships with other women. “I think the lawsuit, also, where she feels a part of something and she is helping to change something. She feels strong and able and valued—I don’t think those are things that Cindy has ever had that feeling before.”
Though there are examples of a few (dysfunctional) marriages on the show, the real gender dynamic comes into play in the newsroom, with each researcher-reporter pairing serving as something of a “work marriage.” The women contribute substantially to the professional relationships and long to be treated like partners, but they also get kicked around without a hint of respect.
“Part of the trouble and the complication of it is random positive reinforcement,” Calvo said. “Sometimes, it works beautifully. So then it’s like, well I can’t demonize that guy or I can’t throw the towel in or I don’t want to leave my job because sometimes our groove and my job and this magazine is the best place in the world to be. So that’s really what we wanted to show, which was, if it was all bad, why would they want to stay? It wasn’t. There was a lot of great stuff there.”
For Calvo, a lot of the material in her show felt familiar on a personal level. Before getting into television, she worked as a journalist, getting her start as a copy girl in the Washington bureau of the New York Times. She recalled coming up in the newspaper world hearing about what these women had to go through to pave the way for her.
“We had this experience so often on the show, which is, ‘Oh my God, we’ve come so far; oh my God, we’ve so far to go.'” Calvo said. “The minute you give language to things like sexual assault and sexual harassment and pay [disparity] and chauvinism and sexism, you give people tools to discuss them and then change them. But if we don’t even have the language for it, it does what it’s supposed to do, which is further isolate the victims of those systems.”
As far as we’ve come by 2016, Calvo is right: There’s much left to do. Our country is plagued by social and political issues that give rise to turmoil, prompting many to compare the current time to the 1960s and ’70s. Current issues and turmoil aside, Darke said there’s something we can learn from the past.
“I think the biggest thing we can learn from that period is to act, to act on what’s frustrating,” she said. “One of the things that I found most inspiring about researching that period was that when people were unhappy about something that was going on, they did something about it. It wasn’t just talking, it wasn’t, ‘Oh, I’m unhappy, and I’m going to continue being unhappy and telling everyone I’m unhappy.’ It was, ‘I’m unhappy, what can I do to make it better?’
“In a weird way, I think social media nowadays gives people—me included—a feeling that you’re doing something by putting it out into the world. But it’s not actually an action. I think the active activism in the 1960s and 1970s is something we can so be inspired by today.”