The Rise of the Messy Girl: A New Trend in Television Reflecting Our Complex Lives

Introduction: As summer approaches, the television landscape is set to embrace a new trend: the "Messy Girl" theme. This trend features multifaceted female characters who are not just one-dimensional but rather 360-degree beings, displaying their successful, vulnerable, raw, and even lying sides. These characters resonate with viewers, reflecting the complexities of our own lives and the societal pressures we face.

The Better Sister: A Case Study Prime Video's murder mystery The Better Sister, starring Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks, is a prime example of this trend. Biel plays Chloe, a high-profile media executive who reunites with her estranged sister Nicky (played by Banks) after Chloe's husband is brutally killed. As the murder investigation unfolds, the siblings must confront painful family secrets that drove them apart to uncover the truth behind his death.

Biel's character is pegged as the "good" one, while Nicky is more rough around the edges as a recovering addict who had to put her life back together after losing custody of her son. The show highlights the dueling "good" and "bad" labels society wants to place on these characters and on women in general.

Biel and Banks both agree that these multifaceted female characters resonate with viewers because they show all sides of a person, giving a canvas to paint a real picture of an authentic person. As Biel puts it, "Both of these characters really fall into that messy girl...or just a human girl."

Other Shows Embracing the Trend Netflix's Sirens is another strong contender in this trend. The dark comedy stars Julianne Moore, Meghann Fahy, and Milly Alcock and has garnered 18.2 million views on the streamer, putting it at the top of Netflix's English-language TV shows for two weeks in a row. The show follows Devon (Fahy) as she confronts her sister Simone (Alcock) over an eerily close relationship with her enigmatic billionaire boss (Moore).

On June 5, fan-favorite Ginny & Georgia returns for a third season on Netflix. The series continues to explore the relationship between the free-spirited Georgia Miller (played by Brianne Howey) and her teenage daughter as she navigates high school. Howey calls Georgia "larger than life," but also "exhausting," teasing that there are "one or two things this season Georgia does that are really hard to get behind."

We Were Liars, out on Prime Video June 18, is another show that aims to enter the chat with this trend. The show is based on the popular 2014 book and has three generations of a wealthy family's secrets to unpack as drama ensues at their private summer utopia.

Why This Trend Matters The rise of these "messy girl" characters reflects the complexities of our own lives and the societal pressures we face. Dan Green, the director of the master of entertainment industry management program at Carnegie Mellon University, believes viewers crave authentic characters over "one-dimensional female archetypes." He adds that "life is complicated and messy...so are the characters we view on TV."

Claire Sisco King, chair of cinema and media arts at Vanderbilt University, credits The Sopranos as the first in the canon of these types of shows, citing other examples like Dead to Me (2019), The Flight Attendant (2020), and Orange Is the New Black (2013) as other examples of TV series that showcase "messy leading women." She notes that these series emphasize