A dive into the maelstrom of TV news writing in mid-1980s Melbourne. occupation: reporteran Australian series in 6 episodes available this Thursday on Arte.tv and broadcast on February 2 on Arte, follows Helen Norville (the charismatic Anna Torv of Fringe, Mindhunter and The Last of Us), star co-anchor of the news magazine News at Six, who fights to be taken seriously as a journalist in a misogynistic, sexist and homophobic editorial staff. Chronicle of a telegenic figure, the journalist, figure of emancipation in the series.
Recruited in 1984 to bring a glamorous touch and sit alongside the “king of information”, Geoff Walters (Robert Taylor), Helen Norville, who we discover two years later, has the art of raising the ratings, but suffers from a lack of credibility, stuck between a paternalistic partner and an authoritarian and phallocratic boss (William McInnes).
Helen Norville, heroine endowed with “a sacred temper”
“At the time, we only had four television channels in Australia. Every evening, in the hostels, we sat down to watch the news. It was a more ritualized moment than today, and the presenters were really part of people’s daily lives. When it came to presenters, I admit, we mainly commented on the clothes they wore or the style of their hairstyle… However, you had to show a lot of toughness to access this position, ”recalls Anna Torv in the series press kit.
The journalist will join forces with Dale Jennings (Sam Reid), a diligent, respectful and ambitious young reporter, to impose herself on her colleagues. Together they will cover a chain of events from the Challenger shuttle explosion to the AIDS crisis to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
In the manner of madmen, occupation: reporter examines the power structure of a workplace as a way to interrogate an entire era. “I wanted to tell the relationship of a man and a woman who, each on their side, are in conflict with the cliché that is expected of them. It wasn’t until I started to think about the setting in which their story could take place that the idea of television occurred to me. In this environment, the pressure is particularly strong on the image that we must give: virile and charismatic for men, beautiful and posed for women”, explains Michael Lucas, the creator of the series.
For Anna Torv, Helen “is a fighter. While the daily life of many women in the 1980s was confined to the space of the home, she exposes herself to try to change things, in the relationships between men and women and in the way of doing journalism.
A small revolution in the 1970s
A work of emancipation on the small screen initiated in the 1970s by the sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which aired on CBS from 1970 to 1977. “It was the first series to feature a woman in prime time in the United States. The heroine is the producer of an evening news for a TV channel,” explained to 20 minutes in 2014 Séverine Barthes, lecturer at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, co-author of Decode TV series (DeBoeck).
This series – unpublished in France and cult in the United States – featured a single and independent woman, focused on her career as associate producer of a news program at the fictitious local station WJM in Minneapolis. In 1970s American television, having a series centered on a protagonist who was neither married nor dependent on a man was a small revolution in the era of second wave feminism.
“The female journalist in TV series is often independent. She stands out against men with her strong character,” continued Séverine Barthes. Since then, female journalism always rhymes with emancipation. In the 1980s, the sitcom Murphy Brown featured Candice Bergen as an investigative journalist, co-presenter of the television news magazine For Your Information (FYI), recovering alcoholic and explicitly feminist on CBS.
Carrie Bradshaw disrupts female sexuality
In 1993, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman on ABC, features a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for Metropolis’ Daily Planet, Lois, with a much larger and more rewarding role than she originally was. Lois is therefore no longer anything but the hero’s sidekick, the young lady to be saved, but an intelligent, feisty and pugnacious woman.
In 1998 on HBO, Sex and the City follows the tribulations of four single New York women in search of love. Even columnist Carrie Bradshaw’s feminism seems very soft by today’s standards, her adventures with her New York friends have changed many women’s relationship with their bodies, their sexuality and their desire, and greatly advanced the treatment female characters on television.
Alex Levy, at the forefront of #MeToo
In the post-MeToo era, the figure of the journalist has established itself as that of female emancipation in television series. From 2017 to 2021, the sparkling series The Bold Type follows three friends who work in a women’s magazine, Jane, the editor, Kat, the queen of social networks, and Sutton, the assistant. Inspired by the life of Joanna Coles, former fashion magazine editor Cosmopolitan, The Bold Type distills under its glitter and girly tunes, hypercontemporary messages of empowerment around anorgasmia, harassment and violence against women.
In 2018 on Amazon Prime Video, Good Girls Revolt is inspired by a true story, that of the women of the magazine Newsweek (News Of the Week in fiction) at the dawn of the 1970s. That year, they decided to sue the American magazine for sexual discrimination: men have the status of journalists and women do not have the right to sign the articles they write and are relegated to the work of uncredited researchers.
In 2019 on Apple TV+, in The Morning Show, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon excel as two TV journalists at the forefront of learning the lessons of #MeToo and rebelling against a patriarchal media industry. Since the 1970s, the figure of the journalist in the series has accompanied all the evolutions of the female condition.