The new(-ish) 10-episode series Three Women—shot for Showtime, shopped to Starz, aired in Australia, shelved in the U.S. until now—is based on a nonfiction book. But for extended passages, it feels more like it comes from a collection of short stories. That’s a compliment, especially for a contemporary TV show. Countless recent series have drawn inspiration from memoir-adjacent nonfiction where translations of the author’s wry observations, often delivered through voice-over in a tone of hard-won wisdom, sound corny, even intrusive. Still, Three Women can’t resist its worst temptations.
For a great example of this problem, just wait for the fifth episode. This isn’t a spoiler; the mid-series installment mostly expands upon information offered up in the first episode, wherein Gia (Shailene Woodley), a writer for Esquire, is staring down that most relatable of dilemmas: a major book deal gone wrong.
She’s just turned in 200,000 words that her publisher hates, and she has one last chance to turn around her project focusing on sex in America. Faced with an unwanted mentor and a callow agent (Fred Savage), she drives cross-country, posts flyers on her trip to solicit interviews with real women, goes to a rodeo, and shows off a gorgeous head of unruly curly hair, all while participating in her own round of frantic yet boilerplate romantic drama.
Three Women has the good sense to bury most of this material later in the series, but lacks the wherewithal to chuck it entirely. It’s not that Woodley, the biggest star in an impressive cast, is bad in the role; it’s more that her full-throttle character is an increasing distraction in a show that focuses so intently on other, more interesting people—people who lack book deals or the accompanying habit of verbalizing the material’s themes.
After the first episode, which introduces Gia and three of the women she eventually profiles, each of the book’s subjects gets her own immersive hour: Lina (Betty Gilpin), a frustrated housewife whose cold-fish dolt of a husband recoils from her touch; Sloane (DeWanda Wise), a successful East Coast party planner who invites other people in the bedroom with her similarly successful spouse (Blair Underwood); and Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy), a young woman coming to terms with how she was groomed into a sexual relationship with her English teacher a few years earlier. (Here, the show uses real names from the book’s case, necessitating a disclaimer at the top of each episode that features Maggie.)
Gia pops up in some of these episodes before she gets her own showcase, and then, in its back half, the series moves all four storylines forward in combinations that shift from episode to episode, with Gia as the connective tissue. There are flashbacks, time skips, and, in one episode, a full 10 uninterrupted minutes of cross-cut sex scenes.
It’s a bold structure—and a showcase for moments (some sexual, some not) that are admirably explicit, even for a pay-cable drama. Yet the show never fully builds on the promise of its introductory stories for Lina, Sloane, and Maggie, despite terrific performances from Gilpin, Wise, and Creevy. For all of the show’s forthrightness about sex, menstruation, miscarriages, unhappy marriages, and more, it still manages to indulge portentous narrative clichés involving exactly what you expect out of unprotected sex, jealousy in sexually open relationships, and predatory men.
The show works most seamlessly when its characters are allowed to be specific, sometimes to the point of fascinating confoundment. Lina’s excitement over the possibility of ending her marriage, for example, pushes her into an overdrive that’s both charming and a little scary, played with remarkable coherence by the always-electric Gilpin.
In the grooming storyline, Maggie’s relationship with her parents is believably difficult to pin down, evading tedious expressions of either shameful doubt or full support. (They manage to hold both in their hearts at once.) Sloane, meanwhile, has the designated “fun” story (per Gia’s agent), which only makes Wise’s wielding of her sexual power more piercing.
The downside to the show’s attention to characterization, though, is that when more predictably plotty betrayals or backstories emerge, they sometimes feel like they’re happening in slow motion. This may not be entirely fair to author and series creator Lisa Taddeo, who is, after all, drawing from real life, not an actual short-story collection (though she did write one after the publication of Three Women). But it’s still possible to make real stories play out like soap opera—and that’s particularly true of Taddeo’s overwrought on-screen proxy, Gia.
The show undergoes a peculiar tug-of-war with this character, who isn’t included among the title’s three women but has at least as much screen time, sometimes even receiving counsel from the likes of Sloan or Lina, diminishing their own stories. Why do these compelling individuals keep swerving into Gia’s own roller-coaster life? Then again, not every misstep comes from Gia; the penultimate episode takes a profoundly tedious trip that underlines just how drawn-out these later episodes can feel. Somewhere around 30 to 40 percent of Three Women is an incisive, multifaceted portrait of female desire. The rest whips itself into a memoirist’s frenzy.
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