The Waves: Middle-Aged Women Are Getting Their Due on TV

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Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate managing producer Asha Saluja and Slate senior editor Shannon Palus discuss women and aging on television. Through two seemingly unrelated shows—HBO Max’s And Just Like That and Showtime’s Yellowjackets—they dig into how these shows portray their protagonists for better and worse, and what makes the relationships between women compelling in both shows. In Slate Plus: Was it feminist that Carrie was an anti-hero in the original series of Sex and the City? Recommendations: Asha: The album Urban Driftwoods by Yasmin Williams. Shannon: Swabbing your throat for COVID and this Lululemon yoga mat. Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews, Shannon Palus, and June Thomas. Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves. This is the waves.
0:12.9	Welcome to the waves. Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and this week at least, women aging on television.
0:20.9	Every episode you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing we can't get off her minds.
0:25.7	And today you've got me Shannon Paulis, Slates senior editor covering science and health.
0:31.2	And me, Asha Salugia, managing producer for Slate Podcasts. We're here this week to talk about two
0:37.6	TV series that are giving us juicy female protagonists then and now. Showtime's new yellow jackets,
0:44.9	a thriller that timeline hops between a group of teen girls experiencing a major trauma
0:50.4	and the fallout they face in their 40s. And HBO's Sex in the City reboot and just like that,
0:57.6	which is causing all kinds of conversation as it revisits the life of Carrie and her friends in
1:03.3	their 50s. Shannon, why did you want to talk about this? I can't stop thinking about these shows.
1:08.8	Both of these shows have been getting me through quarantine and the winter lately. They're both
1:13.5	being released the old fashioned way on a weekly basis, which means that I have this like
1:19.4	appointment viewing again in my schedule, which is really nice. And they both feature middle-aged
1:24.9	women with the shadow of their younger selves hanging over them throughout everything they do.
1:31.5	In yellow jackets, that's a little bit more literal as the drama goes back and forth between
1:39.2	what's happening to the teen girls and what's happening to the 40-something women. And in Sex in the
1:45.2	City, it's just impossible to escape the fact that we're watching these women because we watched
1:50.7	them 20 years ago and we watched their younger selves waltz around the city. I don't think
1:57.1	anyone would make and just like that as a standalone TV show, Carrie Bradshaw and her crew are
2:02.5	kind of being haunted by their younger selves in a different way, which I find really, really
2:06.4	interesting. Yeah, well yeah, we're seeing how the how the decisions these characters make play
2:12.4	out over time and it's not like the span of a series, it's like the span of several decades. So
	...

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