“Nobody wants to hang out with the designated driver,” Cassie, a functional alcoholic, says in HBO’s The Flight Attendant. ” You want to know why ? Because it’s boring.”
In the past, pop culture has not always been inclined to tell stories of sobriety. And maybe this assumption is the reason. There’s a lot of drama in power outages, hangovers, and bad behavior, but the strict recovery rules? In Cassie’s words… boring. Or even worse, preacher.
And yet, despite its protagonist’s concerns, The Flight Attendant’s second series is one of many television shows, along with Disney+’s Single Drunk Female and BritBox’s The Dry, acknowledging that sobriety – and sobriety in particular feminine – can be a source of great television.
In The Flight Attendant, Cassie (Kaley Cuoco) has spent a year sober and established a seemingly healthy new life in Los Angeles, where serenity is only superficial. The flight attendant’s high conceptual conceit – featuring fantastical sequences playing out in Cassie’s head – has always hinged on her status as an unreliable narrator. But where the series previously used its drunkenness to achieve this, its second series applies the same level of inner scrutiny to sobriety as it does to addiction. Cassie, newly sober, disappears into a hall of mirrors, her sense of self shattered into warring surrogates. There’s the party girl she was; the traumatized adolescent; the depressive who can barely commit; and a moralizing example of who she could be if she had made better choices. Amidst all their noise, the real Cassie doesn’t drink but continues to put herself in danger, having replaced booze with something equally secretive and dangerous: being an asset to the CIA.
This rude awakening that sobriety does not solve the problems that alcohol once seemed to alleviate is also explored in The Dry, which sees 35-year-old Shiv (Roisin Gallagher) returning home to Dublin, six months sober. While her family suspects that her new identity as a drug addict is just another layer of self-absorption, Shiv discovers that her self-destructive tendencies have not receded: even sober, she gravitates towards toxic relationships and bad decisions. . She struggles to reconcile the idea of herself as an alcoholic with the image she has of alcoholism itself, crystallized by attending two very different AA meetings: one in suburban candle full of people who don’t look like alcoholics, and one in the center of town. town full of people who, at least in Shiv’s mind, do a lot. When she tries to leave, claiming she was just guessing at “the vibe,” the meeting leader chastises her for treating AA like “an aerial yoga class.”
These shows come after an extended period of heavy drinking women on TV. Sex and the City’s girl-about-town glamor shifted to Scandal’s Olivia Pope and The Good Wife’s Alicia Florrick – successful middle-class women for whom no hard day at the office was complete without pouring a half -bottle of burgundy. It was also the era of the unlikable anti-heroine finally allowed to hang out with her flaws, including her ability to abuse, in Broad City, Insecure and Fleabag. Aside from a few glimmers of deeper questioning about women’s drinking – Mickey in Netflix’s Love, Jessa in Girls, and Tuca in Tuca & Bertie – it has rarely made its way into the story as it did for the male characters who drank too much (Hank in Californication, BoJack Horseman, pretty much everyone in Mad Men).
Now we have TV shows that allow us to hang out with female characters as they try to work through their problem, like Single Drunk Female. Partly based on the sobriety journey of its creator, Simone Finch, it follows twenty-something Sam (Sofia Black-D’Elia) as she returns home after assaulting her boss, losing her job, and being mandated by the court to attend A.A. It’s a comedy but sobriety is not the punchline. For Sam, getting sober is deeply boring, sometimes oppressive, and often extremely boring; that’s before you get to the unfairly extortionate prices of non-alcoholic bar alternatives.
There is a valid argument that Single Drunk Female moves too quickly in Sam’s story but, as with The Flight Attendant and The Dry, it never suggests that sobriety comes easily, unlike the clumsiness of alcohol consumption. Miranda’s alcohol problem resolved overnight – or at least between episodes – in And Just Like That… (Although this is a show whose last character with a drinking problem died of a window opened).
On the contrary, for these women, sobriety is precarious, tense, hanging by a thread. Boundaries have shifted since they chose to quit drinking and they find themselves in totally uncharted territory, renegotiating every relationship in their lives. We witness the exhausting effort it takes to keep our balance perpetually at the top of a slippery slope, facing family and friends who think they can have “just one” or who stiffen each time they hear the unmistakable sound of glasses clinking. 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 culminated with the satisfyingly familiar scene of a character uttering the words, “I’m X…and I’m an alcoholic.” With these sober and curious shows, that’s more often the starting point – and we stay in the room to hear what happens next.