In Praise of the Unlikable Female Lead
There's a specific complaint that surfaces every time a woman anchors a difficult show. She's cold. She's selfish. She's hard to root for. I've been reading versions of this note for fifteen years, and it's almost never applied to the men in the same shows.
The double standard, laid out plainly
Walter White cooks meth, poisons a child and destroys his family across five seasons, and the discourse calls him a fascinating antihero. Tony Soprano murders people between therapy appointments and gets called complicated. Don Draper is a serial liar living under a dead man's name and is described as haunted.
Then a woman on television is ambitious, or a bad mother, or unpleasant in a meeting, and the reviews reach for "unlikable" like it's a genre.
What "likable" is actually asking for
It's a request for legibility. Male antiheroes get granted an interior life by default — the audience assumes there's a reason underneath. Female characters are more often asked to demonstrate the reason, to show the wound that justifies the behavior, before the audience will extend the same credit.
Shows that ignore this are consistently the more interesting ones:
- Fleabag — a woman whose defining trait is that she's doing something unforgivable and joking through it.
- Killing Eve, season one — two women, no justification offered for either.
- I May Destroy You — a protagonist who is sometimes wrong, sometimes cruel, and never sanded down.
- Yellowjackets — a cast of middle-aged women who did something terrible as teenagers and are not sorry in any legible way.
- The Dropout, Inventing Anna, and the whole scammer wave — where the appeal is watching a woman take up space she wasn't given.
The interesting question is never whether you'd want to have a drink with her. It's whether you understand what she wants and believe she'd do that to get it.
That's it. That's the whole bar. Everything else is a preference disguised as a critique.