This weekend, Sex And The City fans rejoiced at the news that the show will bereturning to our screens without Kim Cattrall. There is much speculation as to why, but it is clear that the show's films did the beloved character of Samantha a disservice. But she's not the only woman on television to have been treated unjustly...
Last year, Dawson's Creek landed on Netflix, giving us the opportunity to return to Capeside and once more wrap ourselves in the lives of Dawson, Joey, Pacey and Jen. I am a big fan of the show, of how it captured the true angst of teen melodrama, of its honest depiction of how important everything seemed when you were on the cusp of adulthood, of its depiction of a young, gay man Jack McPhee. But there's one thing I cannot forgive. Planning to watch it for the first time? You're going to want to stop reading here.
Dawson's Creek bowed out with a bumper finale, two episodes titled All Good Things... and Must Come To An End respectively. Having moved five years into the future since the previous episodes of the season, it showed us our favourite bunch of friends as they come home for the wedding of Dawson's mum. Dawson is now a successful, if frustrated producer. Pacey runs a local bar. Joey is a book editor. Jen runs a gallery, and has had a child. Off screen, actress Michelle Williams had become a huge star. But Jen has also picked up something else in the last five years: a terminal heart condition that claims her life. The scene in which she passes away - and Grams tells her 'I'll see you soon, child' - is devastating. But I also find it absolutely infuriating for its predictability in falling into a trope too often seen in television shows of the early Noughties: the punishment of the party girl.
When Jen Lindley arrives in the first episode of Dawson's Creek, it's clear that she is something of the anti-Joey, Katie Holmes' sweet teen princess. She has been sent to live with her strict grandmother by her parents, who don't know what to do with her. Despite the positive influence of a romance with Dawson, she shows her wild side throughout the series' run, enjoying getting drunk, trying to steal Dawson back from Joey, and hanging out with Abby Morgan, who meets a watery end of her own in what could be seen as an omen of what other party girls could expect. Eventually, Jen finds herself back on the straight and narrow, but she continues to be a little wild at her core. It's why we love her. Arguably, it's why she had to die.
The death of Jen over any other candidate (as if there was a quota to fulfil) presents a dangerous message. Are you a woman in Noughties television? Do you like to party? Enjoy a drink? Use recreational drugs? Like to rattle the headboard on occasion? You must be punished. While your male peers can screw up constantly, and the girl-next-door in your peer group can wander through life doe-eyed and unharmed, you're pretty much doomed. Jen was never going to survive Dawson's Creek. Even becoming a mother couldn't save her. 'She always felt like the outsider, the misfit', says show creator Kevin Williamson of the decision to kill her off. 'She was always the person who didn’t feel like she fit in. And I thought what a beautiful way to let her be the catalyst for everyone’s turning events.' So Jen is sacrificed, simply so that Dawson can grow up and Joey can finally get a grip and commit to Pacey.
She's not the only one. Take Edie Britt, the real estate agent of Wisteria Lane in Desperate Housewives. Played by the marvellous Nicollette Sheridan, Edie dared to enjoy sex, to wear risqué clothing that displayed the love she had for her own body and power. She had affairs. She drank too much. She was a general bad influence. She was electrocuted to death in the show's fifth season, the only main housewife in the show's entire run to be killed off. 'We had played out as many romantic complications with each of the women’s husbands' as possible, the programme's creator Marc Cherry told a jury, when Nicollette launched a wrongful termination suit. That's not a misquote: Marc Cherry says the show's resident slut had to go, because she'd ran out of men to shag.
Look at Marissa Cooper, the coolest teen in California in teen hit The OC. Initially, she seems like any other young woman on a classic rebellion route. But it's clear that there is real pain beneath the recklessness, best signified when her best friend Summer - party girl Lite - brandishes two stolen glasses of champagne with a gleeful smile, only for Marissa to reveal a nicked bottle of vodka. She runs off to Mexico, where she almost overdoses. When she is asked to share her emotions by her mean mummy Julie, she screams - literally screams - in her face and throws everything she can grab into the pool. In season 3, she falls in with a new crowd and her fate is sealed. She dies in a car crash. OC creator Josh Schwartz said the decision was 'born out of both feeling creatively like it was the direction the show needed to head and also, quite frankly, a function of needing to do something big to shake up the show.' He should have killed off Seth.
Consider Samantha Jones, the cherry on top of Kim Cattrall's delicious career. I know, I know, she didn't die. But when I look around the brunch table at Carrie Bradshaw, Charlotte York, Miranda Hobbes and Samantha Jones, I wonder why the smart-talking, sexually charged PR maven had to be the one to be stricken with cancer in the show's final series. Sex and the City's writers were smart people. There must have been a multitude of options when brainstorming arcs for the core four's final episodes. It seems obvious to me that Samantha was - accidentally or otherwise - being punished for her decades of debauchery. I am relieved that she was, at least, spared. One wonders if the death of socialite Lexi Featherstone - 'I'm so bored I could die' - is something of a Mrs Dalloway parallel, where the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith - spoiler: he also plunges from a window - enables Clarissa to accept her lot and live on. Perhaps Lexi died as a compromise, to allow Samantha to survive despite being in possession of a vagina that, as Charlotte once exclaimed, should be in the New York City guidebook.
These four, seminal shows were created by men, all of whom ensured that their programmes featured a classic 'bad girl' - a rebel, a drinker, a slut - in the core group. To paraphrase some of Jen's final words, they were 'the instigators, the girls who caused problems and upset the delicate emotional balance.' In all four cases, this bad girl was the only individual in their programmes' core casts to die or, at least, to be confronted with the real threat of death. Whether or not these male creators did this on purpose is, to me, irrelevant. They seemed to possess an innate, subconscious understanding that these women are karmically destined to receive their comeuppance in some way while their friends survive, to appreciate their own, less fun existences.
Jen Lindley, may you rest in peace in television history. May your spirit float around with Marissa Cooper and Edie Britt. I hope you're haunting the men who did you wrong, and having one hell of a party.
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