Believe it or not, women aren’t dead after turning 40. Triumphing over the baggage of the first two decades of adulthood doesn’t erase the future or provide a template for the next step in the journey. These decades are whirlwinds of emotion and novelty that women often feel left out of and detached from the rest of society. Yellowjackets and The Golden Girls utilize realistic, relatable issues revolving around this ignored time period with thoughtfulness and intelligence.
Women’s stories have long been discriminated against once they reach a certain age, and this lies in direct juxtaposition with the plots of male protagonists on the TV and movie screen. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are arguably the two best dramas ever. Tony Soprano and Walter White are both in their 40s and 50s for the majority of the shows. Succession’s biggest badass is Logan Roy, a man so old he’s supposed to drop dead (and eventually does) for most of the series’ run.
Men seem to be stereotyped as gaining complexity as they reach middle adulthood. Both the actors and the characters in these masculine profiles of the human mind are of a certain age, and it happens so often that fans don’t even realize the normalcy of it. If more series would approach the same time period in a woman’s life with respect and creative liberty, you’d get shows like The Golden Girls and Yellowjackets frequently. They would be the norm rather than the trendsetters.
The performers portraying the characters in both shows deserve major credit for allowing the stories to be so compelling. We already mentioned the four ladies of The Golden Girls (all of whom deservedly won Emmy awards during their time on the show), but the grown adults on Yellowjackets are also jaw-dropping talents. Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, and Lauren Ambrose combine to make the Showtime series one of the best-acted on the small screen today. They allow the audience into the turmoil within the characters, making it believable how their time lost in the forest impacts them in the present and compounds the already-present problems surrounding divorce, children, and more.
Thankfully, Ricci and Lynskey have been nominated for Yellowjackets. This demonstrates that the voting body is starting to grasp the importance of women’s stories as they hit their 40s. Movie stars haven’t been so lucky throughout history. The average age of a female Academy Award winner is just under 37 years old. This is almost an entire decade younger than male winners. Yellowjackets is turning the tide for older dramatic female actors, in turn perpetuating the legacy The Golden Girls started in the 1980s.
Yellowjackets might explode on Netflix this month due to its association with horror, Halloween, mystery, and intrigue, but it’s the power of the leading women and their backgrounds that elevate the series into something wholly different than its peers. It reminds fans that femininity doesn’t disappear, but matures as time goes on. The show should thank The Golden Girls for starting to solve that puzzle with a laugh; they continue to fill in the rest of the pieces with a scare!