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10 Women-Centered Shows to Watch in 2020
What We're Watching

10 Women-Centered Shows to Watch in 2020

by Cristina Escobar
written by Cristina Escobar

Have you seen the news? According to a new report, we’re getting more media from women’s perspectives than ever before — a whopping 10% of top-grossing films were directed by women last year, representing the highest percentage in 13 years. And while some activists are literally shedding tears of joy, everyone agrees there’s still a lot more work to be done (see how the Golden Globes completely shut out women directors).

So together let’s start 2020 with a TV diet that’s more like 90% women-led, 10% men and keep pushing the ratio in the right direction. To help, we’ve put together a list of the ten women-centered shows we’re most excited about in 2020. Happy watching!

Call the Midwife

This BBC favorite is now in its ninth season and for those looking for a Nonnatus-House fix, you can catch the Christmas special before the new season starts airing state-side in March. Call the Midwife is pretty much the only show that valorizes women’s bodies and work without sexualizing them. And it does this while championing political issues like abortion and mental health to create truly compelling TV. Although, it does make us sad to see women in 1960s London get better maternal care than Americans today…

The Good Fight

We’d watch anything with Christine Baransky in it. And the same goes for Audra McDonald. So we’ll be re-upping our CBS subscription when The Good Fight returns later this year. We’re fine with the departure of Maia Rindell (played by Rose Leslie) and hope the show spends its free time centering its black characters (and hey, maybe there will even be a Latinx or two!). Whatever happens, we know The Good Fight will continue its tradition of cutting-edge political commentary, making this entirely women-helmed show a therapeutic must-see in an election year.

Grey’s Anatomy

We’re still watching Grey’s Anatomy and we’re not embarrassed about it! The second half of the show’s sixteenth season will air in 2020, not to mention whatever they have cooked up for the likely seventeenth installment. The show has morphed from its early bed-hopping days (don’t worry there’s still plenty of sex) to taking on issues ranging from working motherhood to systemic problems with healthcare. But if anyone can fix our medical system, we’re confident it’s Dr. Meredith Grey.

Insecure

We named Insecure one of our top shows to watch in 2019 but then it didn’t come out! So count us even more excited for the fourth season, which both Issa Rae and HBO promise will be out in 2020. That said, we’re happy for Rae whose major movie stardom delayed the premiere. This season, we’re expecting Issa to give us more heartbreak, laughs, and insights as she and her crew celebrate the trials and joys of being young, black, successful, and female in Los Angeles.

Killing Eve

Did you see Jodie Comer in Star Wars? It was blink and you’ll miss it but that’s not what we’re most excited about. The villainess from Killing Eve is having quite the year from her Emmy win to her appearance in the coveted franchise. That said, we all know our national treasure (that we borrowed from Canada) is still Sandra Oh. And we’re excited to see these two back together again, particularly, because women make murder and espionage more interesting (thanks to creator Pheobe Waller-Bridge)!

Pose

Pose is beautiful, heartbreaking, and fun, set in New York’s ballroom scene of the late 80s, early 90s. While we’re glad the show has gotten Billy Porter that much closer to his EGOT (looking at your Oscar), we’re particularly enthusiastic that the show’s Afrolatinx stars Mj Rodriguez as Blanca and Indya Moore as Angel are getting their due. We’re expecting season three to be just as poignant as Blanca continues her recovery from AIDS complications and Angel braves the fashion industry as an out, trans model.

Russian Doll

The first season of Russian Doll was pretty much perfect so we’re having a hard time imagining what they’ll do in season two. That said, we trust this all women writers’ room and directorial team to deliver a stunning sequel. Netflix is cagey about the details but we can’t wait to see Natasha Lyonne, Charlie Barnett, Greta Lee, Dascha Polanco, and Ritesh Rajan back together contemplating life and death. At the very least, we’re promised great music, costumes, and the rare depiction of the true diversity of New York City.

Shrill

Show creator Lindy West holds a special place in our heart from her writing days at Jezebel. Two books, a New York Times column, and one show later, we’re even bigger fans. Staring Aidy Bryant and Lolly Adefope, Shrill follows a young journalist and her roommate as they make careers for themselves in their plus-sized bodies that have nothing wrong with them except how society views them. With the bonus points earned for the abortion scene in season one, we’re sure Shrill’s second season, out this year, will deliver a tragicomic look at the reality of being a young woman in America today.

Vida

We think Vida is pretty much the best thing on TV. Created by Latina Tonya Soracho and following the Hernandez sisters as they deal with gentrification, sexual mores, and identity issues, Vida is as hot as it is compelling. Plus it bucks all the stereotypes of latinidad from how we eat our tacos to how we deal with generational conflict. Season two ended in a hell of a cliffhanger and we can’t wait to see what season three means for the bar, the sisters, and the entire neighborhood.

Westworld

It’s been a while since we’ve been to Westworld (we think it’s destroyed now) but we’re still excited to dive back into HBO’s sci-fi dystopia. Helmed by Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton, Westworld is the ultimate critique of patriarchy — exploring what happens when men get to live out their toxic masculine fantasies (surprise there’s a lot of rape and violence). In season three, the victims of these attacks are fully sentient and ready to fight back with their superior strength and knowledge. Plus watching Tessa Thompson kick ass is always a pleasure.

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Our Top 10 Shows of 2019
What We're Watching

Our Top 10 Shows of 2019

by Cristina Escobar
written by Cristina Escobar

2019 was the first full year of latinamedia.co and we were blessed with a bounty of riches when it came to TV. So many great shows centered women, people of color, and even the oh-so-elusive women of color. Here we’ve ranked our top ten shows of the year. Our criteria? How much we liked it (duh), its overall quality (based on our scientific quality meter), and how smart it was when it came to matters of gender, race, sexuality, etc.

10. The Good Fight

The Good Fight is the perfect show for the Trump era. It tackles breaking news and longstanding conspiracy theories (the pee tape) with equal amounts of the sincerity and absurdity of this moment. This year’s season three saw the ever-wonderful Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart join, lead, and eventually quit a #Resistance group, with her firm Reddick, Boseman at times supporting and at times detracting from that work. We also got more of Audra McDonald as Liz Lawrence (née Reddick) plus standout performances by Cush Jumbo as Lucca Quinn and Sarah Steele as Marissa Gold. Really, the only thing that would make this show better is a guest appearance by Alan Cumming, reprising his role from The Good Wife’s Eli Gold, aka Marissa’s scheming father. Well, that and broader distribution. Who pays for CBS?

9. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

We were sad to see Crazy Ex-Girlfriend end this year but at least it ended on its own terms, pulling off a pitch-perfect ending. With original songs each episode, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend managed to be technically difficult without ever appearing overworked. We’re talking about the show with the most nuanced depiction of mental illness on television, thanks to numbers like “Anti-Depressants Are So Not a Big Deal.” The show was intentional about its feminism (the entire premise), anti-white supremacy (see the casting of Josh Chan, Valencia’s arc, when we learn Heather’s background), and even a nuanced discussion about being bisexual (Thanks Darryl). It’s also jammed packed with jokes about Southern California, the law, and musical theater. We’ll miss Rebecca and crew but are excited to see what show creator Rachel Bloom does next.

8. Undone

With eight episodes just over the 20-minute mark, Amazon’s Undone could have been a long movie. Instead, it’s a beautiful, short, serialized journey into the mind of one Chicana. Alma, portrayed by Rosa Salazar, is bored with her San Antonio life and sabotaging up her relationships as a result when she starts traveling through time. It’s more than disconcerting at first but her dead, white father played by (Better Call) Saul aka Bob Odenkirk serves as her guide, helping Alma learn to master her power with the hope of avenging his death. There’s only one problem — it may all be in her head, part of the schizophrenia that runs in her family. With a diverse cast each delivering standout performances and cutting-edge visual techniques, Undone is prestige television at its best, engaging with Latinx themes like mestizaje to weave a wonder-filled narrative.

7. Pose

Created by Afrolatino Steven Canals in partnership with Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, Pose is the real deal. The first season set records for the number of trans actors featured on a TV show and this year’s second season got rid of the obligatory white characters (we love you though Evan Peters and Kate Mara), making it even better. Pose made stars of Black Latinxs like Mj Rodriguez (congrats on the Critic’s Choice nomination!) and Indya Moore, not to mention opening the red carpet for Billy Porter, the winner of every unofficial fashion contest and of course, even official acting ones like the Emmys. And its writers’ room features the likes of Janet Mock and Our Lady J, demonstrating for those in the back, just how great TV can be when you authentically tell underrepresented stories.

6. Fleabag

Fleabag is topping a lot of lists and we love it as much as the next critic. Pheobe Waller-Bridge is an amazing talent, her comedic timing is impeccable and her writing on Fleabag (not to mention on Killing Eve) manages to be cutting, insightful, and hilarious. This year’s season follows Fleabag’s pursuit of the hot priest (Andrew Scott who you may remember as Moriarity in Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock). The priest manages to be the perfect match for Fleabag — he sees her when no one else does, noticing her asides to the camera and matching her self-destruction with his own. Our only issue is how this very funny British lady gets to tell the definitive story of sleeping with your priest when her whole country left the church some 500 years ago.

5. The Good Place

Who would have thought a sitcom that regularly namedrops Immanuel Kant could actually be funny? It turns out the big questions of philosophy can make for great television in the right hands (specifically, Michael Schur’s of Parks and Rec and Brooklyn 99 fame). The Good Place delivers laughs with the stumpers, helped by the outsized charisma of its diverse cast. With an even gender split and featuring as many non-white as white characters, the six principles are loveable and flawed. We want to name a stand out performance but really all six (Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop, William Jackson Harper as Chidi Anagonye, Jameela Jamil as Tahani Al-Jamil, Manny Jacinto as Jason Mendoza, D’Arcy Carden as Janet and Ted Danson as Michael) are all phenomenal and have fantastic team chemistry. We wish there was a Latinx in the mix but give The Good Place a pass as one of the only meaningful redemption arcs for women out there.

4. Russian Doll

We called it “perfect.” And indeed, Russian Doll functions as a neat little capsule of a show with eight short episodes filled with cool-girl aesthetics, rabbit holes, and memorable one-liners. One might think Russian Doll’s premise — a woman stuck repeating her 36th birthday and death shortly thereafter — could get tiring. Instead, the show allows so many ways to interpret Nadia’s plight (is she in a video game? A religious quandary? A cycle of trauma?) that we found ourselves constantly pondering new theories and eagerly waiting to hear, “Sweet birthday baby” just one more time. It helps that Natasha Lyonne appears to be playing a fantastical version of herself and is surrounded by people that actually look like New York — such as Charlie Barnett as Alan Zaveri and Greta Lee as Maxine A second season is forthcoming and we can’t wait to see how they expand on the perfectly closed and complex narrative of season one.

3. Schitt’s Creek

Schitt’s Creek has been getting a lot of attention since it migrated from Canada to the US via Netflix. We started off skeptical — rich-people-problems shows are not exactly our favorite. But after the first few episodes, Schitt’s Creek proves itself to be something greater and by this year’s third season, we’re seeing the Rose family in their most interesting iteration yet. They both have and haven’t changed — they’re still wearing their ridiculous avant-guard black-and-white outfits while still reconciling their worldly self-concepts to their new roles as citizens of Schitt’s Creek. But they’re also growing with David finding love and purpose in his store, Moira learning how to shine productively in the local theater scene, Johnny using his work ethic and experience in something worthwhile (the hotel), and Alexis learning how to value more than just status and appearance as evidenced by her getting an education and turning down that PR job. With the Roses, Schitt’s Creek has created fully fleshed out people who grow and change without betraying their problematic core. It’s a wonder to watch.

2. Jane the Virgin

We love Jane the Virgin. Yes, it ticked all of our boxes by centering Latinas as we see ourselves, family-oriented with big dreams, trying to find love and happiness while navigating the intricacies of class, religion, race, etc.. We’re talking the human condition here and Jane had lots of that, resisting stereotypes even as it revealed in its telenovela cheesiness. We particularly loved Jaime Camil’s Rogelio De La Vega who managed to be hilarious, desirable, silly, and vain all at the same time. Jane ended this year with a heartbreaking opening arc (really, Michael coming back from the dead couldn’t be more devastating) and concluded by taking care of the Villanuevas with commercial and personal success all around (how can I get a book deal like that?). We’ll be rewatching this one for years to come.

1. Vida

Vida was the best show of the year. Sexy. Thought-provoking. And most importantly for us, Latinx. In season two, the Hernandez sisters (Mishel Prada as Emma and Melissa Barrera as Lyn) are back in Boyle Heights for good, determined to make the bar and building profitable as they figure out what it means to make a new life in the old neighborhood. This year continues the trajectory of the first, exploring gentrification, racial identity, and sexuality with complexity and nuance. Season two is our favorite so far, with visually stunning set pieces like the after-hours party and sex scene between Emma and Roberta Colindrez’s Nico. It also benefits from being able to complicate many of its characters, particularly Chelsea Rendon’s Marisol who struggles with her sexuality, beliefs, and ambitions that pits her both with and against the sisters. Luckily, Vida’s already been renewed who knows it may just top our 2020 list too.

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We Are Changemakers: Attending My First #WeAllGrow Summit
Justicia and Cultura

We Are Changemakers: Attending My First #WeAllGrow Summit

by Cristina Escobar
written by Cristina Escobar

Have you ever been in a room where every single person is impressive? Maybe when you started college or that fancy new job. Now imagine that room and instead of being intimidated, you feel welcomed, valued, and seen. Last week, I attended the #WeAllGrow Summit and found myself in exactly that situation.

Everywhere I went, I met amazing women. The poet I admired. The podcaster I can’t wait to start listening to. The journalist who is speaking truth to power. The artist whose work I’ve already started supporting. I’ve never been part of a community like that before and I have every intention of replicating it not just via my social media feed but also IRL with the chingonas in the Bay.

We came, we grew, we presented.

So would any of these amazing women be interested in hearing me speak? Spoiler: yes! Suited up in our #MakeLatinasVisible T’s, LatinaMedia.Co Co-Founder Nicola Schulze and I led a workshop called “What A Hashtag Becomes A Movement: A How-To on Online Organizing.” We drew on our combined twenty years of experience of social justice organizing and marketing to host a conversation about how to build a successful groundswell online. In the end, we all came out just that much more energized to do this work and do it in community.

As a media critic, the highlight of the event for me was the panel featuring the Vida team and of course, the Q&A with Yalitiza (we’re on a first name basis now). Vida showrunner Tanya Saracho was hilarious, strong, and smart, challenging us to support each other and laugh at ourselves. Meanwhile the cast — represented by Mishel Prada, Ser Anzoategui, and Chelsea Rendon — spoke about the transformational nature of the show, how it humanizes Latinx people in a time when we so desperately need it (see the news coming from the border if you need some background on what I’m talking about).

Dear Television Academy — The queer brown show “Vida” deserves an Emmy. Period.

The conversation with Roma’s Yalitiza Aparicio had me (and the whole audience) in tears — multiple times. Remember before Roma, she’d never acted before and didn’t have Hollywood aspirations. But today as the first indigenous woman to be nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award and one of the rare Latinas to walk that red carpet, Yalitza’s an inspiration to so many of us. On stage, she spoke of her journey as an actress and dedicated her performance as domestic worker Cleo to her mother, who’d done that work in real life. I loved the story she told of her mother walking down the street at home and everyone congratulating her.

While Yalitza’s evident heart, sincerity, and insightfulness shone through, what really got me was when five women from the audience told Yalitza what seeing her on-screen meant to them. For Latinx people as a whole and more specifically, indigenous women, Yalitza’s success has meant so much. We’re talking about a woman who serves as the sole representation (and a positive one at that!) of a group that’s normally erased and when they do appear are usually stereotyped, othered, and/or demonized.

Yalitiza and the Changemakers, courtesy of Nicole Goldinez, @nicolegoldinezphoto

It’s an immense burden and one Yalitza shouldn’t have to carry alone. Yet she is alone for now and somehow manages this solemn responsibility with maturity and grace. As the women assembled spoke from the heart, we all cried — Yalitza, the speakers, the audience. To share this moment of being seen and appreciated, thanked and giving thanks, united and individually celebrated was so intense. I’m sure it reverberated out into the cosmos and I hope even the Hollywood moguls felt it.

The summit’s theme was “We Are Changemakers” and it rang so true. This is an amazing group of women who are changing the world and doing it together. It was a thing of beauty to be a part of and I left with the strengthened abilities, connections, and ganas to go make it happen!

Cover image courtesy of Maria Jose Govea, @thesupermaniak.

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“Vida:” The Millenial, Latina, Queer Show of Our Dreams
Justicia and Cultura

“Vida:” The Millenial, Latina, Queer Show of Our Dreams

by Cristina Escobar
written by Cristina Escobar

The second season of “Vida”is available to stream on the Starz app Thursday, May 23 with episodes airing weekly on the Starz network starting Sunday, May 26. The first season is available now on Starz and via the Hulu add-on. Warning: spoilers ahead.

The second season of Starz’ Vida is out this week and I’m so excited. If you missed the first season (because it’s on Starz, because you didn’t even hear about it because it’s on Starz), Vida is the millennial/Latina/queer show of our dreams.

It follows two Chicana sisters, Emma and Lyn Hernandez, who return home to Boyle Heights to bury their mother and decide what to do with the family business, a neighborhood apartment building and bar. Emma is the career-driven chingona, taking charge and ruffling feathers everywhere she goes. She also happens to be a lesbian. Lyn, meanwhile, is all drifting free spirit. She moves from man to man, business idea to business idea, with her good looks, overall cool, and loose morals (stealing a credit card in her deceased and debt-laden mother’s name — yikes) to live well beyond her means.

Soon, Emma and Lyn realize that not only is the bar/building vastly underwater with bills owed to greedy gentrifiers but their mother was married to her female “roommate” Eddy despite not even being out to her daughters. Newly widowed, Eddy has one-third share of the family business with the rest split between Lyn and Emma. Together, this unlikely trio has to figure out a way forward.

Created and led by Latinas, Vida’s baked latinidad into its every fiber and the results are amazing. There’s the all Latinx cast. The Boyle Heights setting. And there’s the way Vida truly centers family, identity, and a nuanced conversation about gentrification.

Created and led by Latinas, Vida’s baked latinidad into its every fiber and the results are amazing. There’s the all Latinx cast. The Boyle Heights setting. And there’s the way Vida truly centers family, identity, and a nuanced conversation about gentrification. The first season manages all this deftly, making Vidaread as an edgy, critical darling while being firmly rooted in the Latinx experience.

I particularly appreciated seeing Emma and Lyn navigate their identities in response to the question so many of us grapple with: are you Latina enough? Emma spends the first season confronting the idea that she hates where she’s from with several characters stating or implying as much. The truth is, Emma doesn’t hate Boyle Heights — she’s just estranged from it as her mother sent her away in a (failed) effort to stop Emma’s queerness. This rejection led Emma to build walls against her loved ones and her home. Yes, despite her prickliness, Emma learned formal Spanish, ensuring her ability to communicate in the neighborhood. And while her initial instinct is to sell the bar, she ends up picking another path. She figures out the predatory nature of the loans her mother took out and that selling would mean letting those folks win, so she decides to stay and use her college-educated business acumen to make the place profitable. Emma’s straddling two (three? multiple?) worlds and trying to figure out what pride in her identity means while also dealing with self-loathing as a rejected and isolated daughter.

What does it take to be “Latina enough?” Speaking Spanish? Being from the neighborhood? Never leaving?

You see, Vida doesn’t just have latinidad at its core, it’s also dealing with female sexuality in its many forms. There was A LOT of sex in the first season with Lyn and Emma each having multiple partners, plus a prolonged solo scene. And since this is Starz, yes, those scenes were erotic as hell. But take note — they didn’t rely on the usual male-gaze tropes of depicting women as objects. Instead, I saw sex scene after sex scene with different sets of participants (woman/man, woman/woman, woman alone), all centering female pleasure and the woman’s perspective. It was hot. And this rare, woman-focused depiction of women’s sexuality is made even more powerful by how it centers and values brown bodies not as sites of sexual gratification but as agents deserving of love and pleasure.

Building upon its depiction of sex and brown identity, Vida uses gentrification as its looming threat, powering the plot. Gentrification’s the reason Emma and Lyn stay in Boyle Heights instead of returning to their lives in Chicago and San Francisco after the funeral. It’s the reason Eddy isn’t able to be forthright about the books at the beginning and it lays the groundwork for her ending up in the hospital at the end. And, of course, it’s the menace Marisol and her group of activists are working against, a battle that puts her in conflict with the sisters.

This rare, woman-focused depiction of women’s sexuality is made even more powerful by how it centers and values brown bodies not as sites of sexual gratification but as agents deserving of love and pleasure.

Gentrification threatens all of Boyle Heights. For Emma, the conundrum is if you need to charge $8 a drink to pay your rent then you can’t stay a neighborhood place. But if you don’t charge that amount and lose your property, the next place that opens won’t cater to the original residence either. For the residence, it’s what’s pushing them out of their homes and wreaking havoc on their community. For the activist group, it’s how to hold back the tide of economic “development” that’s destroying the neighborhood and, to push the tide metaphor, like water always seems to find a way.

In other shows with big external threats, there’s often a clear answer. Is it war or monsters that threaten you? Then fight for your life. Kill your enemies and create your own bit of peace. Think Walking Dead, Lord of the Rings, even Mash. Is it a natural (or supernatural) disaster? Perhaps surviving is enough. Gather the people you love and try to make it like Viggo Mortenson in The Road or Helen Hunt in Twister.But what if you’re facing gentrification? Putting one developer out of business won’t end the threat, no matter how slimy and terrible they are. Surviving may mean moving, which here means defeat.

It’s not clear what to do or try to save when your enemy is gentrification.

The first season of Vida setup gentrification as the show’s primary danger, exploring the ways it works and why it’s so intractable. I’m excited for the second season to delve into solutions as Emma, Lyn, and Eddy work to save the bar. The answers aren’t clear but I hope we see them join Marisol and try to overthrow the system. I can’t imagine Emma tagging anything or either of the sisters marching in a protest (although I could see Eddy taking to the street). No, I envision Emma meeting with city council members to change laws while Lyn uses her charm to get the intel needed. Perhaps, working together, these women can push on all the levers needed to save Boyle Heights for its residents and for us. I’ll certainly be tuning into the second season to find out.

And even if we can’t find the solutions to gentrification in the show, Vida is doing its part in the real world. You see, the problem at the heart of gentrification is that the market and American culture at large don’t value actual Latinos. They want our food and our art and our labor but not our humanity. In fact, they don’t even see us. When compared to our numbers in the general population, Latinx are the least represented group on screen. And when we do show up, we’re usually criminals and drug runners. This is the country that elected Donald “Mexicans-are-rapists” Trump as President.

In its way, just by existing, Vida is helping to right these wrongs, displaying Latinas as the beautiful, complicated, fully human people we are. And it’s doing so in a way that appeals to the hipsters who wrote off One Day at A Timeand Jane the Virgin as too fluffy, inconsequential, or not for them. Take note and join me in watching, evangelizing and generally not shutting up about season two.

The problem at the heart of gentrification is that the market and American culture at large don’t value actional Latinos. They want our food and our art and our labor but not our humanity… Vida is helping to right these wrongs, displaying Latinas as the beautiful, complicated, fully human people we are.

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Jane, Eve, Issa
What We're Watching

10 Women-Centered Shows to Watch in 2019

by Cristina Escobar
written by Cristina Escobar

Some 75% percent of our media comes from the white, male perspective and it all feels the same to me: tired. Men have been speaking for so long, it’s like they’ve run out of things to say (not that the prospect of repeating themselves is getting them to shut up).

Luckily, there’s a lot of amazing, women-centered media out there from comedies to thrillers to prestige dramas. To help you avoid the same old, I’ve pulled together the ten shows I’m most looking forward to in 2019 — that all just happen to center women (last year’ spoilers ahead):

Big Little Lies

Big Little Lies

The award-winning first season of Big Little Lies featured Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Shailene Woodley as mothers in the elite community of Monterrey, CA, subverting the superficial suburban mom trope and portraying domestic violence in a more thoughtful way than I’ve seen before.

The second season, set to premiere in 2019, is a bit of coup — partly because the first season wasn’t supposed to be a “season” at all but rather a self-contained mini-series and partly because it was based on a book with no sequel. But the market talks and season two is bringing in none other than Meryl Streep, promising more of Zoë Kravitz’s character Bonnie Carlson, and (finally) featuring a woman director. Count me in.

Call the Midwife

Call the Midwife

Taking place in 1960’s London, each episode (for seven seasons and counting) of Call the Midwife features at least one birth, depicted with unusual candor, sympathy, and heroism. The show has not been great on race (the first two plots with Black characters featured interracial babies born of affairs between Black men and white women) but Call the Midwife added a Black nurse in season seven and has since been clearly trying to address its wrongs.

Centered on women and our bodies — both the act of giving birth and the physical nature of nursing — Call the Midwife dramatizes aspects of the human experience we rarely see. With season eight coming in 2019, tune into this show for beautiful costumes, a warm vision of humanity, and women as nurses, nuns, and mothers.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Round Up

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

This musical comedy exploring mental health issues and the false romance narratives that bombard women, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend manages to leave you humming and thinking. This year will complete its final and forth season and lots of questions remain: what does a happy ending look like when it comes to mental health? Will Rachel Bloom’s Rebecca end up with one of her past flames? Or would she be better off alone?

As I’ve written before, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a feminist project, featuring a diverse cast and re-writing the rules of who can be loved. It’s also one of the least watched shows on television so it’s good to support and show content makers that audiences will tune into quality, feminist content. Plus, there’s lots of salty pretzels.

The Crown

The Crown

Netflix’s budget-busting juggernaut, The Crown, is back for a third season with a new cast as the Queen and her royal family age. I’ll miss Claire Foy’s ability to be emote without emoting, simultaneously expressing power and insecurity. That said, I trust the show creators to cast well again and this time hopefully without a gender pay-gap from the beginning.

I’ve learned a lot of history from this show as the Queen engages in nearly seven decades of world events. And while the colonial perspective can be rough (who cares how the monarch feels when its millions of brown people risking their lives for their self determination?), the show explores the difference between public and private personas beautifully while offering a unique insight into privileged British life.

Grey’s Anatomy

Set to become the longest running medical drama, Grey’s Anatomy will finish up its 15th season and probably run the first half of its 16th in 2019. Shonda Rhimes is no longer involved in the day-to-day but seasons 1-7 veteran Krista Vernoff is at the helm and bringing the show back to its old stalwarts: love-triangles, extreme medical situations, steamy hospital romances. I love Grey’s and having it made it this far, plan to see it to the end.

Grey’s Anatomy has always featured a diverse and inspiring depiction of leadership, excellence, and sexuality and that hasn’t changed. And as the titular Dr. Grey has gone from starry-eyed intern to widowed, award-winning physician, these fifteen years have allowed us the rare treat of watching a complicated woman’s evolution and continued adventures, sexual and otherwise, into middle age.

Insecure

Insecure

I’m excited for the fourth season of Issa Rae’s Insecure, coming out in 2019. Following a group of “basic,” 30-something Black women in LA, Insecure deserves all the awards for its hilarious exploration of identity, romance, and what it means to be a striving Black woman. It’s fixed everything you hated in Girls and Sex in the City, somehow making you nostalgic for your old, shitty apartments and ringing humor out of racial injustices large and small.

Season four promises to be just as good with the group’s lives only getting messier as Issa and her best friend Yvonne Orji’s Molly Carter date roommates and Issa seemingly going into business with her ex’s current partner. Bonus points of you watch live with Black Twitter.

Jane the Virgin

It’s Jane the Virgin’s final season and I’ll miss the Villanuevas. This Americanized telenovela started with an accidental, artificial insemination and has built upon this fantastical premise to explore motherhood, class, racial identity, Catholicism, and immigration to name just a few. The original love triangle seems to be back with Brett Dier of Michael Cordero fame returning in the season four finale to mess up the expected proposal between Justin Baldoni’s Rafael and Gina Rodriguez’s Jane.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a more thoughtful, fun, and heartwarming portrayal of Latina identidad on television. In fact, the show’s secret weapon seems to be its compassion for all its characters — mothers of all stripes and types, people rich and working class, women with hugely different attitudes toward sex — allowing the viewers to sympathize with each end of spectrums we normally find so polarizing. Also Jamie Camil is an international treasure.

Killing Eve

Killing Eve has everything spy aficionados could want: globe trotting, international intrigue, double crosses, and murder. Sandra Oh as Eve Polastri, the bored M16 operative, became the first Asian women nominated for a lead actress Emmy and is set to host the Golden Globes. Her talent is met by Jodie Comer’s diabolical assassin, Villanelle. The binge-able BBC hit is now on Hulu and season two is slated for release in 2019.

With all the trappings of a traditional thriller, the woman-ness of Killing Eve is unmistakable. Both the killer and detective are women and that opens up new avenues of psychological intrigue like when Villanelle, obsessed with Eve, fills her suitcase with beautiful, perfectly fitting clothes and sends it to her house, managing to fulfill a female fantasy and threaten her love object at the same time. The sexual tension between Eve and Villanelle further heightens the drama (particularly in contrast to Eve’s relatable but boring relationship with her husband) as does the female-gaze of the camera work. With Oh and Comer signed up for the second season, 2019 is sure to bring more of the steamy, pulse-racing fun.

Shrill

Based on the book by the same name by Lindy West, Shrill is set to premiere in 2019 starring and co-written by Saturday Night Live’s Aidy Bryant and produced by Elizabeth Banks. Those names are enough to get me excited — especially because I love Lindy West. She came up as a journalist under Dan Savage, helped pioneer Jezebel, and has since graduated to a feminist New York Times column and writing best-selling books.

Shrill is West’s memoir, telling the story of a fat young woman who’s striving to improve her life and career but not her body. All of which makes it the perfect vehicle for Bryant and I can’t wait to catch it on Hulu.

Vida

Vida

Latinas are the least represented demographic in media so a show that’s Mexican, queer, and ambitious has me tuning in. Starz’ Vida follows two Latinx sisters returning to Boyle Heights to take over the family business after their mother’s death. There, they confront gentrification, their mother’s lesbianism, and aspects of their own identity.

Picked up for a second season in 2019, Vida is clear in its intention to expand the portrayal of Latina and Latinx experience on TV. Latinx show creator Tanya Saracho has spoken out about how she uses her success to lift up la raza and the show even has a Latina behind the camera in Carmen Cabana — this despite the notoriety of cinematography for how few women fill its ranks even in the sexist entertainment industry.

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