New Shows + Movies by Women — The Year So Far

The ebb and flow of titles is always unpredictable, so I thought I’d do something a little different this week. Last week saw 13 new shows and movies by women. This week sees just one, “Past Lies” from Spain. It’s frustrating when that happens, but rather than just pitch a single title up here, I’ll take the opportunity to share some standout shows by women I’ve seen so far from this year. First, let’s tell you about “Past Lies”:

NEW SERIES

Past Lies (Hulu)
directed by Julia de Paz, Clara Roquet

A group of successful women are shaken when the 25-year-old remains of a missing high school classmate are found in Mallorca, where they shared their senior trip. Star Elena Anaya may be familiar to American audiences from her lead role in “The Skin I Live In”.

Director Clara Roquet won Best New Director and was nominated for Original Screenplay at the 2022 Goya Awards, Spain’s equivalent to the Oscars. Director and co-writer Julia de Paz was nominated for Adapted Screenplay the same year.

“Past Lies” premieres on Hulu tomorrow, Friday May 10.

THIS YEAR’S SHOWS SO FAR

Links go to my reviews, let’s get in:

“Fallout” (Amazon) is one of the best shows of the year. It’s an incredibly biting and visually beautiful post-apocalyptic dark comedy co-showrun by Geneva Robertson-Dworet. It works as an adventure, as action, as science-fiction, as character drama, and especially as a dark comedy. Watching it kind of broke me because as fun as it is, its retrofuturist satire bites deeply into modern anxieties.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (Amazon) is a spy comedy showrun by Francesca Sloane. Dry humor in an unsettling atmosphere makes for an incredibly unique feeling – the whole show is quirky but tense. There are multiple memorable guest stars, which is usually a feature I don’t care much about, but here it’s used very well and in ways that sometimes undermine the concept. Maya Erskine and Donald Glover star, and the pair act the hell out of it.

Those two are pretty intense. If you need something lighter but still very worthwhile, “Renegade Nell” (Disney+) is a really fun historical adventure/comedy about a woman forced to become a thief. It’s showrun by Sally Wainwright. I’d compare it to a period “Buffy” with much higher production values, or a series-level “Pirates of the Caribbean” without the baggage. If the first episode doesn’t hook you, you are unhookable.

“Death and Other Details” (Hulu) is fun if you can get along with its period-mystery-in-modern-times vibe. Mandy Patinkin plays the wacky detective. It’s co-showrun by Heidi Cole McAdams. Its quirk might come off as overly precious to some, but I ended up liking its diorama-esque stylization. It acts like a stage comedy, which is something I look for, but you’ll be able to tell pretty quickly if it’s your thing or not.

And of course, “Abbott Elementary” (Hulu) is still a great comedy co-showrun by Quinta Brunson. The writing has an incredibly good feel for its ensemble and where their strengths lie. Usually a sitcom gets its good writing in early seasons and the ensemble develop their timing in later ones, but “Abbott Elementary” has enjoyed both right off the bat.

I’m working on “Unnatural” (Netflix) right now. I loved Nogi Akiko’s police series “MIU404” because it presented a way that police can help people from a non-antagonistic perspective, and it focused on both large and small cases. Not everything was high drama, life-or-death stakes. Its sensibilities were completely different from an American cop show. “MIU404” is still on Netflix. I highly recommend it, and I’m thrilled Nogi’s prior series “Unnatural” – about a woman leading a forensics team investigating odd deaths – is now there, too.

On my watchlist are the second season of Tima Shomali’s Jordanian drama “AlRawabi School for Girls” (Netflix). The first season was incredibly salient, punctuating an intriguing interpersonal drama about bullying with some rattling scenes.

I also need to watch Korean vigilante mystery “A Killer Paradox” (Netflix) written by Kim Da Min, and I keep hearing really good things about Vivienne Medrano’s animated musical-in-hell series “Hazbin Hotel” (Amazon) so I’ll be checking that out.

In this feature, I limit the weekly coverage to series showrun or directed by women (or else I couldn’t do the amount of research I have to do weekly). But I do want to highlight how good of a year it’s been for anime written (or based on work written) by women:

“The Apothecary Diaries” (Crunchyroll) is the best mystery going for a second year in a row. It follows Maomao, the daughter of an apothecary in Imperial China. She wants to remain anonymous and live a quiet life of testing poisons on herself, but her knowledge of chemistry and medicine means she can make connections between clues others can’t. The mysteries are balanced between small and large, between incidental and intentional, and its protagonist is a unique blend of tenacious and lazy that you usually don’t see – especially for women characters. “The Apothecary Diaries” is based on a light novel series by Hyuuga Natsu.

“Delicious in Dungeon” (Netflix) is a rangy fantasy series that tells its story through cooking (of fantasy creatures), written by Ueno Kimiko and based on a manga series by Kui Ryouko. Its talented but sometimes bumbling adventuring party is a familiar anchor of fantasy, but done very well here. As they set out to resurrect one of the party’s sisters before a dragon fully digests her, what makes the show unique is how it world-builds. They’re broke, so they cook monsters along the way. Hunting and cooking requires knowledge of the dungeon’s ecology and environmental impacts, which in turn reveal complex relationships between the world and its magic. It’s deeply thought out and surprisingly engrossing. And while it’s not primarily an action series, its action scenes are phenomenal.

“7th Time Loop” (Crunchyroll) is one of the best uses of time loop fiction I’ve seen, about a woman who repeats five years, each time taking a different career. Every time, a war that envelops the world causes her death, and she restarts that five year chunk. She keeps the skills and knowledge she accumulates each go-round, and makes it her mission to use these to stop the war. It’s written by Machida Touko and based on a light novel series by Amekawa Touko. I would’ve preferred it got an extra episode to give the ending some more room to breathe, but it has such incredible character writing along the way that it’s a minor flaw. There are scenes here that are so literary and layered they should be studied if you’re even remotely interested in storytelling.

“A Sign of Affection” (Crunchyroll) is a superb and tranquil romance between a deaf woman and a man who learns sign language. What I like about it is that things don’t come easy – and I don’t mean the usual trope of dragging the will they-won’t they out. What I mean is that both characters question if they truly like each other or simply see in each other an idea they want to embody in themselves. Yuki’s been sheltered and likes that Itsuomi travels the world. Does she like him, or just that he represents a wider world out there? Itsuomi travels because he seeks out new experiences. Does he like her, or is she simply a new experience that will fade once familiar? The great gentleness and care for the other with which they figure this out already provides the answer, but even if the anime itself is pretty sentimental, it’s refreshing to see this realistic complexity and sense of responsibility be the core of the story. It’s also a really good view on a man doing the work to unlearn assumptions and understand someone else’s perspective. Itsuomi doesn’t automatically know how to understand and relate to someone who’s deaf, and he makes clear mistakes, but he does the work to unlearn bad habits and replace them with recognition and communication.

This last one is current season, so only halfway in, but “Train to the End of the World” (Crunchyroll) is a very hidden gem. It fuses wholesome with disturbing as four girls drive a train through an incredibly artistic and metaphorical post-apocalypse to find their lost friend. It’s cosmic horror if the power of very stubborn friendship was enough to fight your way through it, and holding onto that in the face of unprecedented weirdness has its own way of speaking to our times. It’s written by Yokote Michiko.

Take a look at new shows + movies by women from past weeks.

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A Remarkable Piece of Feminist Fantasy Writing — “7th Time Loop”

Technically, this is “7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!” Most of that title’s red herrings anyway. The important thing is that this is an absolutely phenomenal piece of writing and a beautiful work of animation.

Rishe has lived six lives. Upon dying, she loops back to her most embarrassing moment – her engagement being publicly broken off by her country’s doofus of a prince. What was devastating the first go-round is now just a waste of her time. What will she do with this life? She’s been a merchant, medic, scholar, maid, hunter, and in her last life, she disguised herself as a man and became a knight. The only problem is that five years into each loop, she dies as a result of widespread war. In fact, the cause of that war is Prince Arnold of Galkhein, who directly killed her in her sixth life.

Maybe in this seventh life, she’ll just take things easy. That is, if a chance meeting doesn’t cause Prince Arnold to propose to her. Her conditions for marriage are that she can laze around as much as she wants, and that he can’t touch her without her permission. He agrees, but despite the title, there’s not much lazing. Rishe immediately gets to work as Galkhein’s new princess, using what she knows to learn why the war starts and work toward avoiding it.

The strange thing is, while Arnold is a warrior with a streak of coldness and is certainly threatening, he’s also empathetic, pushes through measures designed to help the poor, and has little patience for nobles trying to abuse their power. It’s a far cry from the picture of a warmonger Rishe has drawn of him in the past. Some of her assumptions hold. Many don’t.

“7th Time Loop” contains some of the best character writing in any series going, animated or live-action. There’s a bracing ballroom dance scene where Rishe tests Arnold freshly after he announces her as his fiancee. Ignore the clip title; Crunchyroll tries to make every title a meme. The scene is more about strategy than romance for Rishe. Look how exquisitely the dance itself is animated:

He might win the dance, but she uses it to extrude information about him that plays out in the following scenes. I’ll set that aside because it gets a little spoilery, but there is a beautiful dialogue shortly after where Rishe drinks wine that jealous suitors have laced with spicy red peppers. Arnold asks her why she’s still drinking it if it’s ruined. Because the wine will have lost its purpose if it’s not drunk. So he swigs it down with her. It’s a reflective moment of her attitude toward each of her lives, that each of them has to be full, have purpose, be felt down to each detail, good and bad.

He finishes the wine to…share in the burden? Understand her perspective? Protect her from pain? Or because it annoys him? To prove he’s as tough as she is? Because he wants to talk and it eliminates a distraction? We know the answer to this is the answer to how he will either support or fail her in this life. This one scene is a key to the entire series; it metaphorically answers the mystery that she’s trying to figure out. But it’s impossible to tell just from this. It could be kindness. It could be impatience. It’s too early to give us that big of an answer.

It is a towering piece of writing captured in just a passing moment inside a scene that has several other more immediate things it goes on to do. But that attention to character dynamics inhabits every detail of the series, and Rishe’s experience in so many avenues often allows her to plant seeds of ideas episodes ahead of when she’ll need to use them.

That doesn’t mean anything comes easy for her. She puts in work. She never knows if that work will truly pay off or not. Some of her gambits are dicey, and need to fall back on less desirable Plan Bs. She’s a good negotiator, but five years as a merchant doesn’t mean she’s as good as a lifelong one. She’s a skilled sword fighter, but she already knows from how her sixth life ended that she doesn’t hold a candle to Prince Arnold’s skill with a sword. But she also knows these limitations and when to shift from using one piece of experience over to another. Living so many lives has given her a thorough sense of herself. She can also take the risk of being firmly committed to her courses of action. What’s someone going to do? Send her back for an eighth life?

Rishe is one of the most complex realizations I’ve seen of an assertively feminist character within a fantasy world. She’s experienced being royalty, being a professional, and barely scraping by. She’s traveled the world’s cultures in one life, kept in one place as part of a community in another, and surrounded herself with the sick and injured in yet another. Every death, she’s brought back to the moment where hope is torn away from her, caring less each time and simply becoming excited at the possibilities of what she’ll do with this life.

Time and again Rishe calls out elements of privilege and holds them up for that person – and often, everyone else – to see. She makes arguments about gender education gaps, medical access, and for economic investment in those living in poverty, all within the bounds of a fantasy world and in ways that make sense to the plot as it’s happening.

Sometimes we see these messages applied in more modern ways to a fantasy world, and that’s good, too. Sometimes things need to be overt, speak from the outside-in, and break bits of the genre that deserve to be broken. That’s needed.

Doing it in other ways that fold seamlessly into the fantasy world isn’t better or worse, it’s just different. Rather than applying our perspective to the fantasy, it allows the arguments to be made through the fantasy world’s perspective. If a character can make those arguments successfully in a world wholly different from our own, it lends those arguments the strength of that additional perspective. Rishe makes those arguments from the inside-out of the fantasy. We need both ways of doing that, and this is one of the best examples of that inside-out approach that I’ve seen.

Her relationship with Prince Arnold is more unpredictable and could go any number of ways. Yet she holds her own in it and creates her own agency within it regardless of his approval. It’s the scenes where she’s handling her own business where Rishe shines, creating a community that can begin to prevent a war, hand in hand with relentlessly creating opportunities for others.

I honestly can’t say enough about the writing. “7th Time Loop” is adapted from Touko Amekawa’s light novel series and she knows how to write consequential, involving scenes that test and reveal relationships. She knows how to give the audience answers to our questions ahead of time but keep the key for reading those answers to herself, so that we anticipate the moment when another scene might give us part of that key and we can start to make more connections.

The animation is sharp and clean, using a really full color palette, and with a very choice eye for when to go for broke and push its boundaries. That dance above is breathtaking. The animation of eyes in this is particularly stunning, and they know it. There’s a shot in the fifth episode of an eye welling up with tears that captures the feeling of that moment in a way that’s staggering. And, like so many details in the series, it means far more than it initially lets on.

The title is still a bit weird to me. “7th Time Loop” makes perfect sense. “The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy”? She’s not a villainess. She hasn’t been a villainess in any of her lives. I assume that’s there because the villainess-with-meta-knowledge genre is popular in anime right now. Her insistence on a carefree life lasts like…one scene before she decides she’s way happier making medicine and going undercover with the maids and trying to solve unemployment and stopping a war. She’s literally the hardest working character in a show right now. Arnold is her worst enemy for maybe an episode before he’s really just more of a mystery. Maybe enemy, maybe love, maybe all of the above. But it is a catchy title, I’ll give you that.

This is THE standout anime of Winter. It might actually just be the standout new show of Winter, across the board. It seemingly came out of nowhere. It’s from two newer animation studios: Kai and Hornets. There’s not a whole lot of fanfare about it, though strong word of mouth seems to be building its audience steadily. The writing is astounding, the animation choices are often surprising. I’ve said that like five times already, it’s worth saying again.

There’s some other new anime I like this Winter, and maybe three or four really good ones, but this is on a rarefied level of quality. “7th Time Loop” is on a “Frieren” level of storytelling, though with very different goals in mind and very different approaches to fantasy. I cannot laud its writing enough, nor recommend “7th Time Loop” highly enough.

“7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!” is on Crunchyroll.

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