Shailene Woodley Tells The Story of Three Women
A Fascinating Show About Sex and Love Among Women Who Have Experienced Little of Either
Ever since she burst into tears underwater in an incredible moment in The Descendants I have been unable to resist the work of Shailene Woodley. So many brilliant actresses are capable of playing frail appearing women with steel underneath them; Woodley can do that but is always better at playing those who put up brave fronts that are more front then they admit. It was true in her immediate follow-up roles, either as Miles Teller’s new girlfriend who gets dragged into his alcoholic path in The Spectacular Now; as Hazel Grace as a teenager reluctantly finding love while attached to an oxygen tank in The Fault in Our Stars; as the photographer who falls in love with the most famous whistleblower in history in Snowden. Woodley has an ability to show a ferocity when she needs to: none will ever forget her work as Jane on Big Little Lies, a woman who shows up in Monterey with her first grade son and finds herself at the center of a conflagration that she inadvertently causes while she is hunting down something she doesn’t even know she’s looking for.
Unlike her fellow powerhouses from that series Woodley has not worked as constantly in television since the second season of that show ended. (A third is under way according to Nicole Kidman, but considering how busy everyone else in the cast is…another day) In part that is probably due to the fact that she started in television in the Freeform drama The Secret Life of the American Teenager widely considered one of the worst television shows in history. (That’s a pretty high bar given so much TV over the years but fine.) She also has the misfortune of being the female lead of what appears to be the only YA film franchise that never got finished. She played Tris in what were the first three films of Insurgent but they each dwindled to box office that the fourth film was never made. She did have a major project that was going to be released — and therein hangs a tale.
Three Women was greenlit by Showtime in 2022 and actually filmed. However while it was being made the network which has been responsible for some of the greatest original programming of the 21st century began to undergo the financial collapse that forced it to merge with Paramount back in 2023. As a result the network killed off much of the series it had greenlit and also dropped many of the programs it had already filmed. However, just like with Ripley which Netflix brought back from the dead earlier this year, Starz snatched it up and started to air it this fall. It doesn’t have quite the high level of quality of the Emmy winning series but it’s already deeply fascinating to me.
Three Women is based on a non-fiction bestseller by Lisa Taddeo, who also has written the original series. Taddeo appears to be played in this adaption as Gia played by Woodley. Gia seems more of a framing device in the first two episodes, someone who links the stories of the title characters. This only came as a momentary disappointment to me because I was immediately drawn in by the stories of the three women we met.
The stories are linked by the themes of sex, marriage and female behavior. I can understand why Showtime would have jumped at this as an idea for an adaptation: this has been their tower of strength for more than twenty years. It’s not just all of the female run dramedies they were known for in their first decade but the way they were willing to discuss sex frankly in ways that HBO, for all of the explicit sex in its fantasy bound series was rarely willing to discuss seriously. I still hold that Masters of Sex, the incredible drama featuring Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan as the pioneering sex researchers Masters and Johnson was one of the best shows of the last decade, primarily because of how it was about not merely the study of sex but how it helps bring about human connections through it. Three Women moves the subject from the 1950s and 1960s to the present day but its very clear in it how far we have come and haven’t simultaneously.
The title women are Lina (Betty Gilpin) a dissatisfied homemaker in rural Indiana whose husband hasn’t touched her or even kissed her in three months at the start of the series; Sloane (DeWanda Wise) an African-American entrepreneur who brings both men and women into the marital bed of her husband; and Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy) a twentyish waitress in the Pacific Northwest, who has never been able to get over the affair she had with her high school teacher. After two episodes we’re still not sure how Gia found all three of these women but after the first episode we do understand why she tells us they “all had the audacity to believe that they deserved more.”
At first glance none of the women would appear to have much in common on the surface. Lina is a homemaker in what is essentially a fundamentalist Christian community where marital concerns are brought to a minister and if you have a panic attack in front of your children, your husband judges you for it. Sloane is a strong, independent woman who has a bold face and who seems to have no problem with the affairs she’s having with her husband watching (Blair Underwood has rarely appeared so sleazy) but there are clearly rules to their affairs and she seems about to break one. Maggie was once a promising athlete and hope for her community, who now works for minimum wage is living with her parents. The only thing they seem to have in common is their unhappiness but that could be true of so many women — then again, that’s why Taddeo created the series in the first place.
The second episode focuses entirely on Lina. This was enough for me because it put another of my favorite actresses in television at the center of a story. Betty Gilpin has been one of the quiet powerhouses of the last decade: tall and statuesque, she is at her peak playing women who know what they want and will do nothing to stop it. From her breakout role as an out-of-her depth doctor in Nurse Jackie to her work as Liberty Belle in the still missed GLOW to Mo Dean the conscience of Gaslit to her incredible work in Ms. Davis Gilpin seems able to do anything. Which is why it should say something that’s she never given a performance like this in my ten plus years of watching her.
Lina is a woman who is suffering from pain in her joints and the agony that she is the mother of two children and her husband doesn’t feel he has to touch her anymore. During the first episode she’s in so much pain that she goes to see this therapist who one of her ‘friends’ tells her: “I don’t know if I feel comfortable being touched by an Indian.” The Hindi doctor in fact talks to her frankly and with respect, something none of her other friends or family are willing to do. He makes it clear to her that all your problems can be solved ‘with a good orgasm’. And it’s clear she hasn’t had one in a very long time. At the end of the first episode Lina goes to her car with a dildo to try and find relief. It clearly works…but it becomes harder to find it when you’re trying to do family stuff. That becomes clear when she thinks she’s having a heart attack in the second episode and calls 9–1–1 — and her husband seems more bothered about having to pay for it then his wife’s health.
Given how much time she spends with her family breakfast after church, it’s clear she is second fiddle to her husband to them. She ends up going to a ‘woman’s research group’ which Gia is emceeing (and suffering from the same reluctance as Lina is to do so). Lina makes it clear as to how miserable her life is while she tries to say her husband is a good man. Then she talks about her first and only love — Aiden — who she loved as a teenager before they broke up, and there is a strong possibility she became pregnant and everything that happened to her afterwards was a result.
She manages to arrange to go to a bachelorette party as a ruse to see Aiden. Gilpin is remarkable in every moment of the twenty minutes that follow. We see her go from her housewife clothes to putting on makeup and a bright red dress. She goes to the party and then awkwardly extends herself by ordering a drink. Then she hears her favorite song and begins to dance.
That night she offers a prayer to God. “Let me have one good thing. I deserve one good thing.” She paused. “Except the kids, of course.” Then Aiden knocks on her door. There is no small talk; both of them know what they want. The two of them slowly undress each other. Lina tells Aiden that they don’t have to worry about birth control because she’s on her period. Before they get fully undressed she gets a towel which makes sense. She tells him she hasn’t been with anyone other then her husband in eleven years to prepare him.
The scene that follows has explicit nudity and explicit sex but it is erotic rather than pornographic. When it is over there is some clowning and then Aiden gets dressed. He walks out, she follows him wrapped in the covers. They kiss and he walks away. Before he departs we see Lina running up and down the motel lobby. Then she gets inside the motel room and with a look of pure, unadulterated joy that I have never seen Gilpin show in more than a decade of watching her, she gives a purely unironic chant of “Thank you, God!” It’s one of the most glorious things I’ve seen in a TV drama because for a woman who has been bound by shackles of faith (we constantly hear evangelical radio during the episode) she truly believes she experience a touch of the divine.
At the end of the episode Gia and Lina have their first one on one conversation. We still don’t know all the details of why Gia is here yet or what her backstory is but it’s clear that Lina does mean it when she says that you should never do too much for love. I don’t know how Lina’s story will end any more than I do any of the other women in this show (I haven’t read the book it’s based on yet) but I am drawn to both her and all of the characters in it.
One of the surprising drawbacks of the era of Peak TV has been that while we have been able to do more explicit sex scenes throughout TV very little of the era has done much to discuss it as a genuine effect on our lives. There have been some promising signs over the past few years that we may be moving away from that part of it, in the exception Netflix series Sex Education which truly was about the title rather than exploitation, much of the work we saw in Pose, particularly in the African-American LGBTQ+ community and the recent Fellow Travelers where an intense gay love affair led to deeper discuss of what it meant to be defined by more than who you sleep with. Three Women looks like it could well continue this promising — and increasingly necessary — insight into the world of sex as part of our identity.
The darker aspects of it hang over ever aspect of the show — in Lina’s story we hear the discussion of Richard Mourdock senatorial campaign who famously took the position that rape was something God intended to happen. This kind of story will draw fire in certain crowds much like the attitude of so many of the men and women we meet in all three stories but in this era we need them more than ever. These women don’t wear capes or save lives, but in their own ways they are all heroes waiting to be found. I want to hear more of their stories. So should we all.
My score: 4.25 stars.