“No one wants to hang out with the designated driver,” Cassie, a working alcoholic, told HBO’s The Flight Attendant. “You want to know why? Because it’s boring.”
In the past, pop culture has not always been willing to tell stories of sobriety. And perhaps this hypothesis is why. There’s a lot of drama in blackouts, hangovers, and misbehavior, but are there strict rules for recovery? In Cassie’s words … boring. Or even worse, preacher.
And yet, despite the worries of its protagonist, the second series of The Flight Attendant is one of several television shows, along with Disney + ‘s Single Drunk Female and BritBox’ s The Dry, recognizing that sobriety, and specifically female sobriety , can be a great TV source.
In The Flight Attendant, Cassie (Kaley Cuoco) has had a sober year and has established a seemingly healthy new life in LA, where serenity is only superficial. The lofty concept of the flight attendant, with fantastic sequences set inside Cassie’s head, has always depended on her being an unreliable narrator. But while the show previously used its intoxication to achieve this, its second series applies the same level of inner scrutiny to sobriety as to addiction. Cassie, recently sober, disappears into a mirror room, her sense of self divided into surrogates at war. There is the party that was; the traumatized teenager; the depressive who can barely participate; and an example of a sanctuary of who he might be if he had chosen better ones. Amidst all the noise, the real Cassie doesn’t drink, but she continues to put herself at risk, having replaced alcohol with something equally secretive and dangerous: being an asset to the CIA.
Roisin Gallagher as Shiv in The Dry. Photo: Peter Rowen / BritBox
This rude awakening that sobriety does not solve the problems that previously seemed to soften alcohol is also explored in The Dry, where Shiv (Roisin Gallagher), 35, returns home to Dublin, six months sober. With his family suspecting that his new identity as an addict is just another layer of self-absorption, Shiv discovers that his self-destructive tendencies have not receded: even sober, gravitating toward toxic relationships and bad decisions. She struggles to reconcile her idea of being an alcoholic with her image of alcoholism in itself, crystallized by attending two very different AA meetings: one in the suburbs of the candle full of people who don’t look alike. alcoholics, and another inside. city full of people who, at least for Shiv, do a lot. When he tries to leave, claiming that he only feels “the atmosphere”, the meeting leader reproaches him for treating the AA as “a class of aerial yoga”.
These shows come after a long period of women drinking heavily on television. Sex and the City girls’ glamor shifted to Scandal’s Olivia Pope and The Good Wife’s Alicia Florrick: successful, middle-class women for whom no day is hard to come by. the office was complete without pouring half a bottle of burgundy. It was also the era of the antiheroine anti-heroine, who finally allowed her flaws to pass, including her over-indulgence ability, to Broad City, Insecure and Fleabag. Aside from a few more bursts of interrogation about women’s drinking (Mickey in Netflix’s Love, Jessa in Girls, and Tuca in Tuca & Bertie), it rarely got into the story, as it was for the male characters. who drank too much (Hank a Californication, BoJack Horseman). , almost everyone in Mad Men).
Now, we have TV shows that allow us to hang out with female characters while trying to solve their problem, such as Drunk Single. Based in part on the journey of sobriety of its creator, Simone Finch, follows the life of Sam (Sofia Black-D’Elia), a twenty-five, as he moves home after assaulting his boss , losing his job and receiving a court order to attend AA. It’s a comedy but sobriety is not the focus. For Sam, getting sober is deeply annoying, sometimes oppressive, and often extremely boring; this before reaching the unfairly exorbitant prices of non-alcoholic alternatives at the bar.
One day at a time … Sam, in his twenties, returns home to start his new sober life as a Single Drunk Female. Photo: Elizabeth Sisson / Freeform / Getty Images
There is a valid argument that the drunken single woman moves too fast through Sam’s story, but, as with The Flight Attendant and The Dry, she never suggests that sobriety comes easily, unlike the clumsy of the Miranda drink that is resolved overnight, or at least between episodes. in And Just Like That … (although this is a show whose last character with an alcohol problem fell to his death from an open window).
In contrast, for these women, sobriety is precarious, tense, hanging by a thread. Boundaries have changed since they chose to stop drinking and are left navigating totally unknown terrain, renegotiating all the relationships of their lives. We are witnessing the grueling effort it takes to balance perpetually on top of a slippery slope, in front of family and friends who assume they can have “just one” or get it right every time they hear the unmistakable sound. of the glasses. Deciding not to drink is a choice these women have to make every minute of every day, over and over again.
In the past, stories have reached their climax with the satisfying, familiar scene of a character uttering the words, “I’m X … and I’m an alcoholic.” With these sober and curious shows, this is more often the starting point, and we stay in the room to hear what happens next.