Ginny & Georgia, Scarpetta, Ride or Die: TV's Fury Era

Acclaimed "Ride or Die" captivates audiences with a stellar cast and high critical scores, streaming on Prime.

I was sitting at my local café and overheard a guy telling the barista that he missed when television series had an A story, a B story, and a C story. Now it's ten main characters, he said, and it's exhausting. He called it superhero syndrome, the way every property now needs a phalanx of heroes standing shoulder to shoulder to justify the budget.

He was complaining about a landscape that's gotten wider, and it's not just television, the superhero era has done the same thing to movies. But the shows breaking through on streaming this year are doing something like the opposite. They aren't solving audience fatigue by trimming the roster. They're solving it by making one woman so dense with contradiction, so simultaneously in control and in flames, that she doesn't need nine other people standing next to her to hold your attention.

That's the thread running through Ginny & Georgia, Scarpetta, and Ride or Die. Three very different shows, but each one is built around a woman who is terrifyingly competent and furious, whether she's showing that fury or burying it, often in the same scene, often over the same trauma. Competence used to be the reward for surviving something. In these shows it's the weapon.

Some of that is a pandemic hangover. Life and death stopped being abstractions for an entire generation of viewers a few years ago, and a culture that has watched its collective attention fracture across a hundred streaming platforms can't afford quiet stakes any more. Getting anyone to sit still requires urgency that reads as literal survival. Action over conversation. Movement over analysis. But the smarter version of this trend isn't more bodies on screen fighting for airtime. It's women doing more, holding mastery and rage in the same hand.

Ginny & Georgia is Gilmore Girls run through a fun house mirror. The actors are good enough to make you love people who are, on paper, difficult to love: Georgia has a Julia Roberts smile and a shark's refusal to stop moving forward, and her daughter Ginny is wounded in ways she disguises with wit and straight A's. The series is built on an original sin, a child abused by her family who learned to survive by becoming ruthless, and that trauma doesn't stay contained. It passes down to her own children, who love her and resent her in the same breath, who watch a woman who is spectacularly good at keeping everyone alive and can't ever let herself stop being that good, because stopping is where the rage would finally have to go instead of somewhere useful.

It's the right moment for a Scarpetta helmed by Nicole Kidman. The show is campy and over the top in a way that matches its emotional stakes, which are also campy and over the top, and that's a compliment. The graphic depictions of tortured women's bodies were, at first, too much for me. Then I sat with it. This is a moment when women have watched powerful men protect each other and their friends in public, in real time, with very little consequence, and the reckoning that was supposed to end that has instead settled into something closer to background noise. Scarpetta doesn't look away from what men do to women, and it shouldn't have to. Kidman plays a woman whose competence, forensic, procedural, exacting, is inseparable from her fury at what she keeps having to examine. The gore isn't gratuitous. It's the show refusing to let the audience look away from what her competence is actually in service of.

Ride or Die keeps the same urgency running in a different register. It's a buddy story where the stakes are life and death in nearly every scene, where female friendship is the actual plot rather than the subplot, and where betrayal is treated as the serious thing it is rather than an excuse for mean girl theatrics. Hannah Waddingham plays the assassin with the high octane, take no prisoners command you'd expect and appreciate, but it's Octavia Spencer, as the housewife who discovers that the quiet competence she's spent years giving her family is exactly what the world needs from her too, who gives the show its ground. One woman's expertise has always been out in the open, armed and dangerous. The other's has been quiet for years, running a household and a family with an expertise nobody thanked her for, until it finally gets somewhere to go. Together they're the same idea split into two bodies: capability and fury, gorgeous to watch in Waddingham's character and delightful to see when finally released in Spencer's character.

So the guy at the café wasn't wrong that something has changed. He just had the diagnosis backward. Television isn't more crowded because writers ran out of restraint. It's more concentrated, because the culture needed somewhere to finally give creative expression to a rage it had been sitting on, and somewhere as safe as it is to watch one woman on screen be furious and formidable at the same time. Ten characters were exhausting. One woman holding both halves of herself at once, competence in one hand and rage in the other, is not exhausting. It's the only thing worth watching right now.