Make way for the funniest women on TV

Sadly, shows on the Indian television lack variety and are mostly interested in good-housewives or obedient and responsible working women-protagonists, (not-forgetting-to-mention: who always ‘have it all’). Because of this, many of us are drawn to American and British shows for more flawed-hence-more-realistic characters. Unfortunately, even here, the genre of comedy, lacked female representation for a long time.

Women on television have mostly been objects and rarely subjects when it comes to comedy. Shows like ‘Two and a half men’ that are painfully sexist (at least TAAHM was, till Charlie Sheen was the lead,) have been highly popular on the celluloid, even in India!

Thankfully, since the end of the last decade there has been a drastic change in this trend. From a female head writer hosting the ‘Weekly Update’ on ‘Saturday Night Live,’  for the first time in three decades; to a twenty-something woman like Lena Dunham, making and starring in her own show - women are shining on TV.

LA Times>

This year particularly, saw a series of hilariously funny shows on the American Television. While we may still have to wait here in India to see them, you should know you have a lot to look forward to.

According to a report in Elle, shows like ‘Broad City,’ ‘Girls’, ‘Inside Amy Schumer’; and women like Morgan Murphy, Amy Poehler, Chelsea Peretti and Leslie Jones, have ‘killed the notion that women aren’t funny’ this year. The best part about these shows is that their leading ladies aren’t pretty women clad in skimpy clothes who are less-than-smart. All of these women are flawed, with less-than-perfect lives, and issues that women actually face, and still manage to be funnier than most shows on TV today.

Most of us have grown up watching ‘Friends’ and ‘Sex and the City,’ but we have to admit that these women were too perfect and their world was too ‘dreamy’ for the real world. With such shows, and hopefully, many more that we will be seeing, I’m sure television will be devoid of decades-old disparity that we have tolerated for way too long.