Lately there’s been a television development trend featuring professional women behaving badly.  But yet, their behavior has few consequences either personally or professionally. Does beauty and brains get you a free pass?

I think it’s a trap of believing extreme situational drama and comedy is more interesting than real character driven stories.  The problem with extreme situations is “habituation.”  Audiences get bored and the show has to continually up the ante.  More and more extreme situations and outrageous circumstances eventually divorce a show from reality.  The premise isn’t credible any more.

ABC recently premiered Black Box, a show about Dr. Karen Black, a brilliant neuroscientist (Kelly Reilly) who is bi-polar.  She is fine when she takes her meds.  When she doesn’t BANG immediately she turns into a very bad girl. She does dangerous things and has unprotected sex with wanton abandon.  Yet she is a warm caring physician who is amazingly insightful with her patients. In a very disturbing scene, after telling her how important it was to take her meds, her fiancé decides he likes the crazy violent sex she enjoys when she is in her manic phase. It sounds like he would rather have her mentally ill and porno hot than stable and simply sensual.

Dr. Black is a Power of Truth character.  The show is about essential Power of Truth questions: What is really going on (inside my patients)?  What is just below the obvious problem/symptoms?  Do I see what I think I see?  Who can I  trust (especially with my secret- which would end my professional career)?  Can I trust myself? How do I gain others’ trust (even when they are not rational or even lucid)?  She says “the brain is the biggest mystery”?  Dr. Black is hiding, denying, and lying even as she seeks the truth.

Next on the naughty list is Bad Teacher on CBS, a show about Meredith Davis (Ari Graynor), a recently dumped trophy wife who wants to find her next rich husband.  She flirts and fakes her way into a teaching job to scope out the divorced dads who pick up their kids at school for the weekend in their luxury cars.  She is a foul-mouthed, bad behaving, outrageously unprepared, and ill-informed teacher with a heart of gold who is secretly great with kids.  She gets a pass because she means well.

Meredith is a Power of Ambition character.  She is all about the bling, the status, the prestige, the brand name, and the money.  She wants a rich husband and she wants him now!  Meredith is not afraid to trample standards of ethics, flaunt rules of proper conduct, and ignore professional confidentially and personal privacy to get what she wants.  She gives some picked-on nerdy girls lessons in swagger and that makes everything all right.  UPDATE:  This show was cancelled and lasted less than one season.

NBC has placed a pilot order for a new comedy, Bad Judge.  According to press releases, this show is about a hard-living, sexually unapologetic woman (Kate Walsh) who plays fast and loose with the law doing, I assume, very bad things.  But her life on the edge is a problem because she also happens to be a judge in the criminal court system. I’m sure she also is brilliant at her job. Will her bad behavior go as unnoticed and consequence free as in the above two shows?

I haven’t seen the show but in Private Practice Kate Walsh played a Power of Truth character.  She had loyalty, fidelity, and trust issues.  We’ll see if those reappear in this new role.

So what’s with this trend? Maybe the folks in programming don’t think there is enough drama, comedy, and interest in professional women who are good at what they do and must balance the difficulties and tensions in their career aspirations, family matters, and romantic life.  Maybe real characters with real lives living with authentic personal drama just isn’t enough in their view.

I am a fan of Orange is the New Black.  In this show, an ordinary woman (Taylor Schilling) does bad things (acts a drug courier) which lands her in jail.  It is the consequence of her actions that leads her into the extreme situation.  Every choice, good or bad, that she makes in jail also has consequences.  Although sometimes outrageous, the show is based in believeable  character action and reaction. This show feels more real to me than the shows about bad girls with big jobs.