I watched New Blood and really enjoyed it. Right up my street. I then went on a twitter rant about the lack of meaningful female characters and tagged the author - Alex Ryder author Anthony Horowitz because IDEK why not?
And then he replied back to me:
And I think that is sooo gracious - not just to reply but to reply kindly. So I sent him a barrage of explanatory tweets and gratitude in reply which he will probably ignore but still. I followed him obviously.
It’s a very good show, very well-written BUT the two heroes are male, the three villains are male, the two heroes’ bosses are male, the primary suspect is male, the helpful witness is male.
On the female side we have Anna Chancellor who plays Anna Chancellor (and does it very well) being a super boss, but she gets about two tiny scenes per episode. We also have hero #1′s smart sister who has so far done little to advance the plot beyond being generically smart and being a future love interest to hero #2. We also have another girl who exists to be a love interest who betrays hero #2 but then we never discover what happened to her. She just drifts in and then out of the plot. We have the crying mother of a suspect. And we have two hot female twin assassins, who do synchronised murder and don’t have names. I mean, they’re cool and all, but totally without character.
None of these women REALLY impact the plot meaningfully or have character development (the sister has a bit) or depth of personality.
When you’ve a got a show where the two main characters are both male and you’ve (needlessly) made all the professional figures and rivals in their lives male as well, you need to do a bit better than just giving us Anna Chancellor. Any of those other authority figures could have been female. ANY of them.
Moreover, the trailer for the next case showed Anna Chancellor as a sillhouette for about 1 second and the sister staring into hero 2′s eyes for 1 second. Nothing about the plot of the story seemed to have any women in at all. Like, DON’T PEOPLE SEE THAT AND THINK IT’S REALLY WEIRD? It can’t just be me!? We’re 50% OF THE POPULATION.
