By Catherine Barrie

‘Chaotic life, lots of sex, little sense of purpose,’ says Brian Logan, speaking on TV’s Fleabag-esque ‘messy woman trope’. Apparently, the tide has turned on Michaela Coel, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Dolly Alderton and Billy Piper. The Messy Millennial Woman (‘MMW’) has been brutally killed off by The Guardian, and I can’t stop wondering (and hoping) how far up the ballot the icy ‘Scandi-Noir’ is for the chop. A rugged alcoholic detective is fighting his demons and has a daughter who no longer speaks to him – sound familiar? I see very few articles condemning that tired trope.

Disclaimer: the word ‘messy’ is liberally used throughout this article but only as broadly as it has been applied to all these works. I wonder about the vagueness of the word ‘messy’. Is there really something so messy about a woman bored during a date? Or a woman discouraged by her job? TV is about conflict. What is so messy about a woman in conflict?

Our obsession with phasing women in and out of fashion and slapping a big fat label on female characters is as old as the bible. There’s the maternal Virgin Mary, and there’s Eve, the whore, the femme fatale. Failure to recognise the detail in these characters is costing us the bigger picture.

Coel’s Arabella is not a ‘messy woman’. She’s a victim of sexual assault. And she’s black. I May Destroy You is a series about race as much as being a woman and, importantly, addresses the treatment of black gay men who have experienced sexual assault. Amia Srinivasan’s astounding book The Right to Sex details how the hyper-sexualisation of black women means they are disproportionately more likely than any other race to be victims of sexual assault, though the least likely to be believed. Arabella cries, she screams, and she sometimes gets it wrong. It is indeed ‘messy’. But is it not also powerful and important to see a black woman own her emotions so truthfully?

I do see some validity in the critique of Fleabag and Everything I Know About Love. Money and whiteness do allow for some self-indulgent and ‘promiscuous’ behaviour, though it’s this that makes blindly sticking I May Destroy You into the same box hugely unhelpful. To imply that the so-called ‘messy woman’ boat has sailed just as Black and Asian women have started to get onto it is disheartening. Yes, it may have been done before, but not like this –  not like Michaela Coel.

I Hate Suzie similarly came under fire. Written by Billie Piper and Lucy Prebble, the show follows the breakdown of a former child star that ensues after her nude pictures get leaked online. Again, Suzie is a victim. Piper and Prebble made a fantastic choice in casting Iranian actress Leila Farzad as Suzie’s talent manager, Naomi. Naomi grows increasingly disillusioned with online dating and hook-up culture throughout the show, crunching down on peanuts almost obsessively during her Tinder date.

For the date, they meet in a private ‘orb’ in a rooftop bar. It’s artificially edgy and modern and resonates with Nina Power’s book ‘One-Dimensional Woman’, in which Power writes on the materialisation of feminism. Power asks: ‘Did the desires of the twentieth-century woman’s liberation achieve their fulfilment in the shopper’s paradise of naughty self-pampering, playboy bunny pendants, and bikini waxes?’. The ‘messy woman’ says no. If anything, she, the messy woman, is responding to the onslaught of upbeat, naughty consumerism that has been forced down women’s throats by a mighty ‘girl-boss’ hand.

In the longest female masturbation scene in TV history, Suzie struggles to orgasm for seven minutes as she fantasises about being with a man who likes fast cars and big watches, and who repeatedly calls her a slut. Naomi, in the form of an apparition, interrupts the failing fantasy and appears sitting in the back of the man’s sports car. She tells her, 'You’re fantasising about what HE finds attractive.’ The scene cuts to Naomi on a train, silently distressed, as the man next to her aggressively wanks whilst staring at her. I Hate Suzie teaches us that despite investing in our own pink vibrators and subscribing to PornHub, sex is still a man’s domain. As Nina Power writes in her book, consuming sex as we have done has not liberated women. Suzie, Fleabag, Arabella, and Maggie are still unhappy (and messy).

I Hate Suzie, I May Destroy You, Everything I Know About Love, and Fleabag all explore the self-indulgence Nina Power speaks of in her book. These women hate themselves for it, filling themselves with guilt and shame about it and convincing themselves they are deeply flawed. They aren’t – but guilt is a trait deeply ingrained in the female psyche, especially when it comes to sex. This is why the messy woman is not a ‘millennial’ trope (‘millennial; said like you’ve caught a whiff of something mouldy at the back of the fridge).

Yes, they are indeed modern: Arabella is spiked in a bar, and Suzie is the victim of phone hacking. However, to suggest they are ‘millennial’, when the word is often accompanied by an eye roll, somewhat cheapens Suzie and Arabella’s complex relationships with sex. I’d actually argue that their ‘messiness’ is integral to these shows.

Despite the fact Arabella uses coke, the ingestion of a drug she did not decide to put in her body is still wrong. Even though Suzie cheats on her husband, she does not deserve to have nude photos of her and her lover leaked online. It’s hard to understand why female characters cannot be seen as complex and why we feel we must attach such an entirely lazy and predictable ‘y-ending’ word to them. Such language is designed to disarm and patronise a woman who is in conflict. A woman in conflict with others is bossy, catty, bitchy. And a woman in conflict with herself is ‘messy’.

Seeing as the messy woman is dead, gone, and been hastily buried, you might want to turn your attention back to the new Scandi-Noir, Trom. Set on a cinematically atmospheric and formidable Norwegian island, it follows a silver-haired, stoic journalist as he tries to solve the murder of the estranged daughter he neglected in favour of his job. The Guardian has hailed it ‘your new juicy BBC Scandi-Noir obsession’, despite admitting it was ‘formulaic’.

The promo photos attached to The Guardian article include the titular Trom wearing a long black coat on a windy hill, looking very sad, with a concerned woman standing slightly behind him. Trom is a broody, stoic and deeply complex middle-aged man. He’s certainly fighting his demons. Despite the praise, after watching the first episode, I was not very impressed. It was formulaic. One word did come to mind of Trom’s character. Stroppy. Or SMAM (‘Stroppy Middle-Aged Man’ – if you really wanted to be cheeky).