In BritBox’s “Riot Women,” they’re forming a rock band. In Peacock’s “The ’Burbs” and Netflix’s “How to Get to Heaven From Belfast,” they’re meddling in criminal investigations and uncovering dark secrets. In Netflix’s “The Hunting Wives,” they’re the ones causing crimes and trying to keep them hidden. Meanwhile, the titular heroine of “Matlock” on CBS may very well spearhead an operation that brings down Big Pharma.
They say women get ignored as they grow older. But turn on the TV and just try to take your eyes off them. This year’s crop of Emmy contenders is loaded with shows about middle-aged and senior women having a good deal of fun as they risk getting themselves into a heck of a lot of trouble.
“The thing that’s so hard as you get older, is that people stop looking at you a certain way or thinking that you have interesting opinions that are relevant, and so she used that to her advantage,” “Matlock” creator and showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman says of her lead character, played by Kathy Bates. In this show’s world, cutthroat litigator Madeline Kingston is double-crossing just about everyone as she poses as the more demur old Southern grandma known as Madeline “Matty” Matlock. Her aim? Infiltrate a swanky New York law firm that may be duplicitous in the opioid crisis, an epidemic that also happens to have taken the life of her daughter.
Snyder Urman says that, as her drama finished out its second season with the suggestion that this takedown may work, Matty also realized “how much there is out there that’s still for her. And that’s the exciting optimism of the character.”
“I want the show ultimately to be optimistic and fun to watch,” and that even though “it has a real underbelly, the show is not dark in its real DNA,” Snyder Urman says.
But the creator says she also must be pragmatic. She cannot ignore the fact that Matty’s in her late 70s or that this double life and its conflicting stories would be a hard con for anyone to pull off for the long-term. The writers will play into obvious physical limitations, like what the character would feel like after she pulled an all-nighter, but for the most part Snyder Urman says, “everyone ages differently,” and “she is a very sharp person now.”
“Mortality and the reality of age circle around her, but I don’t want to play that much of that, because that’s not where this character is at 77,” Snyder Urman says. “I think showing someone who’s still so present in the world … is important for us to see — especially as life expectancy gets longer.”
Matty also benefits from the support of her actual family, like her devoted husband Edwin (Sam Anderson) and grandson Alfie (Aaron Harris). She also has a chosen family of younger co-workers like Skye P. Marshall’s tenacious attorney Olympia Lawrence who, as the series has progressed, has helped fill part of the hole that formed in her heart after her daughter’s death.
On the opposite side of this coin is Peacock’s “The ’Burbs.” Creator Celeste Hughey’s adaptation of the Tom Hanks movie stars Keke Palmer as Samira Fisher, an attorney and new mother who recently relocated to her husband’s suburban childhood home. Even if those two things weren’t enough to make her a little paranoid — Samira describes herself at one point as “basically feral” — she begins to sense that her partner, Rob (Jack Whitehall), isn’t telling her everything about his teen years, nor are the townspeople who were around back then. Her only hope at uncovering the truth appears to be a trio of Xoomers with enough time to kill that they can gather in the afternoon to drink wine and gossip.
“They’re all outsiders; they’re all dealing with their own kind of shame and secrets, and I felt that you don’t often see a group of friends who have diversity in age as well as backgrounds and race,” says Hughey of what draws Samira to Julia Duffy’s widow Lynn, Paula Pell’s Marine veteran Dana and Mark Proksch’s perfectly named eccentric loner, Tod Mann.
“It wasn’t extremely intentional to me to make sure that there was older ages represented as well,” she adds. “I wanted to create the most ragtag team of weirdos that I could possibly find.” Hughey has now come to think of this foursome as a modern-day Dorothy Gale and her friends from Oz.
Especially because this is a murder-mystery comedy, Hughey also aims to surprise the audience. She says it would have been easy to make Lynn a busybody or a “Karen” suspicious of Samira, a person of color coming into a largely white space. But instead, she says that Samira quickly learns that Lynn is the “neighbor who, I hope, we all have — the neighbor who’s always looking out for the block and making sure you’re OK; keeping eyes on the street.”
She also didn’t want to make them into a Greek chorus.
“Each character comes to me musically, like hearing their cadence, hearing their speech,” Hughey says. “In writing, if you remove all the character names and you can’t tell them apart by dialogue, then you have a problem. So, to me, it was really tapping into a specific tone and way of speaking, which automatically makes them feel like just a real person.”