Mrs America is the story of the movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the resistance to its ratification led by Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative woman from Illinois.
The series is produced by FX, with episodes available in the UK weekly on Wednesdays on BBC 2 at 9pm or all episodes available to stream immediately on iPlayer. Each episode has a run time of less than an hour, so it’s good for the casual viewer or for a binge watcher. I had planned to watch this weekly but that went out the window pretty fast after the first episode and before I knew it, I’d watched three.
Each episode with the exception of the last two deals with a specific character or characters, which gives you the opportunity to get to know who’s who. This is something I often feel is overlooked in favour of story pacing. In fact, I find it especially useful if, like myself, you aren’t familiar with this particular moment in American history. I didn’t feel like the pacing was affected and the result is that we’re given a well-rounded story. It doesn’t just focus on the women either, it actually does look at the starkly different relationships they have with the men in their lives. Being a series about the feminist movement, it could have been so easy to colour the men in a totally negative light. They’ve avoided that pitfall but without glossing over the sexism of the time.
The series is well written and it makes clear at the beginning of each episode that although the series was based on the story of the political movement, that bits of the series are subject to artistic license.
The costumes and the soundtrack immediately transport you to the 70s, starting with the annoyingly catchy intro music. The soundtrack is pretty good.
The cast is led by Cate Blanchett, playing Phyllis Schlafly, other names include Tracy Ullman as Betty Friedan who was a high-profile figure in the women’s movement in the US and wrote the book The Feminine Mystique published in 1963. Uzo Aduba (Crazy Eyes in Orange is the New Black) plays Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman, elected in 1968 and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination. Other names include Joanne Tripplehorn (Basic Instinct, Criminal Minds), Elizabeth Banks (Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games series, Sam Raim’s Spider-Man trilogy, Scrubs), Rose Byrne (28 Weeks Later, Knowing and X Men First Class and Apocalypse) and John Slattery (Howard Stark in the Marvel franchise, Flags of Our Fathers) who plays Phyllis’ husband Fred Schlafly.
With a cast such as this I felt that there was more than a glimmer of hope for the series and after watching the trailer, I felt that this series might be something good. I have to say it has lived up to and to a degree exceeded my expectations. Don’t be put off by the subject matter, the nine-part series makes for an impressive piece of television, well written, funny, with some odd moments thrown in too.
