The Kate Bolick Show Gets Picked Up by CBS

A SYTYCB Entry

The TV show adaptation of Kate Bolick’s stir-causing Atlantic cover story “All The Single Ladies” sold to CBS yesterday, Deadline Hollywood reports. While The Lives of Independent Young Women has recently become a full-on pop cultural meme thanks to shows like Lena Dunham’s Girls, no mainstream television show has yet attempted to take on the “rom-com industrial complex” that consistently makes finding a male partner the central narrative of every woman’s life.

The show will center on “a successful, thirty-something woman who doesn’t want it all.” Just like in Bolick’s article, the main character turns down her boyfriend’s marriage proposal in favor of keeping her current independent single life, which to me, sounds like a canned attempt at feminism–as if the goals stop at just not needing men. But thankfully, as Slate‘s Alyssa Rosenburg points out, the show is still in development, and if it actually ends up being about an interesting character who just happens to be content to stay single, it could be a first for network television:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman on television is on the hunt for a man, or getting over a man, or stumbling into the Right Man Who Appears When She Least Expects It. Yes, recent television has featured at least some intriguing variations on the theme. On Bones, Aspergian anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan applied her academic theories to her dating life before asking her best friend and partner to donate sperm so she could have a baby with him. But then she fell in love with him. In TBS’s late, lamented sitcom My Boys, sportswriter PJ Franklin concentrated her social energies on her tight-knit circle of friends, in which she was the only woman, with her male pals providing insight and acting as obstacles to her dating life. But the idea of a sitcom where the heroine is committed to staying single, not merely attempting to shed that state, would be something new.

I think the show will have to push past just merely lacking the pursuit of storybook family life, and really get at the complexities of being a straight female in a world of shifting gender roles. My fear is that the character will end up  a caricature. But what I did like about Kate Bolick’s original piece was it’s take down of our culture’s obsession with traditional marriage being the end-all, be-all key to happiness. Just like many gay people would like to get married, many straight people are happy to remain single, and I found that liberating.

There were criticisms of the piece, of course, but a show centered on a totally relatable complex female character with goals outside of finding love is a welcome baby step, no? I guess the real question is–Will they be able pull it off?