Whatever your favorite genre of TV show is, if you like interesting female characters, you should watch Sense8. Even if you don’t normally like Sci fi, you should give it a try. This Netflix Original Show is basically eight different programs rolled into one. So if you like crime dramas, or cheesy action movies, or romances, or whatever else, chances are you’ll like Sense8.
And if you like your female characters like you like your coffee (strong, interesting, available in a variety of shades and from countries around the world) you should definitely try it out.
The premise of the show is that eight strangers around the world suddenly gain access each other’s experiences and memories. Each can now see, hear, smell, and know everything the others see and smell and know. Because the characters are from all around the world, yet connected, the show spends a lot of time exploring identity in the context of personal experience. It accomplishes this in part by playing around with forms of entertainment, from police procedural to Bollywood, that connect to each of the main character’s backgrounds. The baffling number of genres this show encompassas illustrates one of it’s best qualities—it’s amazingly inclusive.
For a show about personal identity and global connections, realistic diversity is the pretty much the point. And those qualities, realism and diversity, are what makes Sense8’s female characters such amazing metaphorical coffee. Sense8’s women are allowed to be as different from each other as women are in real life, but none of their many ways of being a woman is treated as better than the others. Sense8 never divides its women into whores and virgins or tomboys and girly-girls or quirky relatable protagonist and obvious villain popular bitch.
The best way to illustrate that is to go through the characters themselves. There’s Sun, a Korean businesswoman and secret underground boxing champion, Nomi, a Californian “hacktivist,” Kala, an Indian chemist, and Riley, an Icelandic DJ. These women are different in almost every way. They speak different languages, live on different continents, work incredibly different jobs. They are single, engaged, in a long-term relationship, newly falling in love, widowed. They are straight and gay, cis and trans, straight-laced professional types and semi-reformed criminals. Some have strong family ties and others have varying degrees of tension with their relatives. Some have both. Some of them have traditionally masculine skills, like fighting or hacking, and some don’t. Some are very warm and caring, while others are more guarded.
What these extremely different characters have in common is the respect afforded to them by the narrative. Their experiences are portrayed with nuance, and while none of them is ever defined solely by her relationship to femininity, that relationship is explored carefully for each character. The wonderful thing is how subtly and accurately this is done; many shows claim to write “strong female characters” by having those characters give a spunky speech to a sexist villain, or by writing a character who seems to have no thoughts or feelings about being a woman at all. If their femininity is explored at all, it’s usually done pretty clumsily.
In contrast, the women of Sense8 are created with more care than you usually see on TV. Sun is a stoic boxer who could easily be written as a typical emotionless badass, but her story revolves her complicated relationship with a family that’s always valued her brother more highly than her. The show manages to portray this situation as completely wrong, but still respect the sacrifices Sun makes within it. Nomi’s story has a strong streak of girl-power-y fun, but its light-heartedness never tries to gloss over the struggles she has faced as a transwoman. At the same time, being transgender is never treated as the “point” of her character. Kala, who feels pressured by her family to get married and notes that they’re more excited by her engagement than her graduation from university, captures the complex reality of good people acting under the influence of sexist ideas. Riley, a grieving and at times fragile woman without any combat skills, might be villainized for this “weakness” on another show. But here, her emotional struggles are given equal weight in the narrative. Sense8 treats each of these stories, however different, as equally important and valid.
Sense8 doesn’t just include women in its story. This show goes out of its way to make these women interesting, distinct, and well-rounded people, people who are shaped but not defined by their femininity. Season 1 is available on Netflix (give it at least three or four episodes before giving up; it starts a little slow). If you’re looking for characters you’ll get invested in, and if you have anything from an all-consuming love to a mild tolerance for Sci Fi, you should watch Sense8.
Image Credit: Inside Impulse, Indie Wire, VC Post