This Saturday at 9PM, BBC America debuts its second original series, Orphan Black. A science fiction thriller, Orphan Black follows a young woman named Sarah (Tatiana Maslany), who is returning home after ten months away to try to reclaim custody of her daughter, who is being raised by Sarah’s own foster mother, when she witnesses another young woman, Beth, commit suicide at a train station. If that wasn’t unsettling enough, the other woman shares Sarah’s face. And as Sarah, desperate for cash, appropriates the dead woman’s identity, apartment—and as it turns out, the police department review she’s under for an unjustified shooting of a civilian—she learns that she doesn’t just have a twin: there are a disturbing number of other women wearing Sarah’s face.

I spoke to Maslany about the challenge of playing multiple characters in a single show, how viewers relate to unsympathetic female characters, and how science fiction depicts the near future and handles class. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In Orphan Black, you’ve got a core role playing Sarah, but you have to portray a number of other women as well. Was that one of the things that drew you to the series?

Absolutely…They’re all compelling, they’re all complex, they’re all very different. Sarah was definitely my entry point into the series. What fascianted me about her so much was her extreme flaws that were right out there, her behavior that was completely immoral and self-absorbed, always defending herself. What’s fascinating to me is she’s got that beautiful heart as well. She completely wants to be a mother to her daughter, and every part of her upbringing is saying she can’t do that, and she’s not worthy of that. It’s a really nice tension to play. And to get into all the other characters, each has a different worldview, and that’s how I approached them. How do they see the world? Is it a fearful place? is it fascinating? Do they love people?

Was part of the appeal the opportunity to build audience sympathy for an unlikeable female character? Men get to be anti-heroes far more often.

Yeah, that’s what I love about it. I think, for me, it was unlike any character I’d seen on screeen, any female character especially. She’s not immediately likable. She’s not good or bad. She’s very much an animal of impulse and instinct, of self-preservation and survival. People can relate to that. There’s something glamorous abou people on Breaking Bad or whatever, because I think it tapes into the darker parts of ourselves that we don’t get to experience on a day to day basis, or that society tells us is bad. And I think that’s what’s so compelling about Sarah. We’re all so flawed. we’re all like that. We’re all bad people sometime. It’s a matter of circumstance, it’s a matter of our rsesponse to the world and what it’s told us about who we can be and who we are. She’s really grown up in a world of hostility and violence. I’m happy that she gets to be the protagonist, that her action saren’t condemned.
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I’m waiting to see how Copper, BBC America’s first original drama, which follows the rudimentary police force in 1864 New York, turns out over the coming episodes. There’s a lot of promise there: an exploration of the settlement of Harlem, the challenges of standing up a law enforcement system in the aftermath of the Draft Riots, the impact of soldiers returning from the war, and rich cross-class dynamics. But across its first two episodes, Copper does something that I’ve gotten increasingly tired of in period dramas set in the late nineteenth century. It defaults to making significant female characters prostitutes, seemingly as a way to give female characters a credible amount of autonomy in a time when audiences imagine them cloistered by corsets and yellow wallpaper.

Of the five significant female characters in Copper, three are prostitutes: Eva Heissen (Franka Potente) runs a saloon and is a madam, Molly Stuart (Tanya Fischer) is an ambitious hooker in her employ, and Annie Reilly (Kiara Glasco) is a ten-year-old runaway who was forced into prostitution. Hell on Wheels, AMC’s show about the construction of the transcontinental railroad, gave Eva (Robin McLeavy) an adventurous backstory—she was first kidnapped and tattooed by Native Americans, turned to prostitution, and now is married. Deadwood, which portrayed sex workers with more nuance and humanity than any of the shows that’s followed in its footsteps, had depressed madam Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), her partner in a brotel start-up Maddie (Alice Krige), and Trixie (the spectacular Paula Malcomson) as a working prostitute with connections to almost everyone in town among its main characters, and many other working girls as minor ones.

Now, there’s no question that there are some legitimate reasons to portray prostitutes in period dramas. Sex workers had a certain amount of autonomy not always available to gently-bred ladies, and while I tend to think it’s a mistake to prioritize external action over interior, domestic drama—Deadwood, to its credit, always knew that Alma’s life was as interesting and rich as Trixie’s—if you want women present in seedy 19th century neighborhoods, prostitutes are a good way to get them there. At best, these kinds of stories can also be powerful testaments to the cheapness of female life, something that Deadwood played masterfully in its Francis Wolcott storyline about a serial killer of sex workers who believed himself to be sanctioned in his darkness, and that Copper is trying to replicate here with its opening story about a killer of child prostitutes. And if these shows want to tell stories about adult sexual relationships as we understand them today, with sex outside of marriage, prostitutes are an easy fall-back if you’re looking for the kind of woman who would be willing to have that kind of sex, or that kind of relationship that wasn’t necessarily on the road to marriage.

But prostitutes weren’t the only kind of women who moved freely about the world in the latter half of the 19th century, or who helped push the world and our thinking about gender into a more modern era. Victoria and Tennessee Claflin, who advocated for “free love”—a movement that really was about giving women rights in their marriages, the ability to divorce, and the freedom to bear children as they saw fit, though it did include legalizing prostitution—are precisely the kind of people who, if they showed up in a period drama, would be declared too advanced for the time. Victoria was a healer, the first woman candidate for president, and she and Tennie, backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, became the first women to own a Wall Street brokerage firm, using the profits to finance their newspaper. Nellie Bly did the reporting for Ten Days in a Mad-House, her undercover expose of the treatment of the mentally insane, and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, an attempt to beat Jules Verne’s novelistic record, between 1887 and 1890—and when she married and retired, ran her husband’s iron company. Actress Sarah Bernhardt left a string of lovers across Europe, slept in a coffin to help prepare for dramatic roles, worked as a courtesan, set up a makeshift hospital during the Franco-Prussian War and made the jump from stage to silent film.
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If we hadn’t already heard that Joss Whedon will be writing and directing The Avengers and returning to television with a Marvel series, this would be by far the most exciting pop culture news of the week: BBC America is apparently considering a spin-off show that would feature Alice Morgan:

There’s a school of thought that says crazy-quirky supporting characters aren’t as appealing when they’re thrust into the center of the action, but I’m willing to bet against conventional wisdom if BBC America greenlights a Luther spinoff centered around brilliant sociopath Alice Morgan (played to delectable perfection by Ruth Wilson). “The BBC is very interested in the project,” Luther creator and exec producer Neil Cross told Variety. “The only real question would be how many and how often we would do it — whether it would be a one-off miniseries or a returning miniseries, a co-production or not.” “Even if I didn’t sell this thing, I would still end up writing the miniseries,” Cross went on to say. “It’s something peculiar, but she’s far more clever than me, far more witty than me, far more everything than me.”

That’s a fantastic idea, and not only for those of us who are anticipating the withdrawal when Cross finishes his last miniseries installment about troubled detective John Luther (Idris Elba). Morgan, as portrayed by Ruth Wilson (who resembles an evil Emma Stone), is a powerful, original television character, a genius who killed her parents and when Luther figured her out, made him her moral lodestar, the only person she felt any emotional attachment to, and the only person who she recognized as having valid desires and needs other than her own.

As I’ve written before, in the great anti-hero shows of our era women, often wives, serve the audience-alienating role of reminding both us and the anti-heroes themselves that their anti-social behavior is less awe-inspiring and badass than it is a gross violation of community norms and often, other people’s rights. Even a female anti-hero like Patty Hewes does grotesquely awful things to other people does so in the name of a clearly-articulated greater good, and sometimes feels bad about it, as in that repeated scene of her shaking violent in the chair at her beach house in the first season. And while Aspergerian nerd Sheldon Cooper is one of the biggest characters on television, on Bones, Temperance Brennan’s confusion about social cues has been muted over the years. We like, or television thinks we like, to like our female characters uncomplicatedly, rather than transgressively.

Alice Morgan fits none of those models. It’s not that she doesn’t understand other people’s values and feelings—she just doesn’t particularly care about them. She’s ingeniously violent in service of her own interest, unlike Brennan’s use of her abilities to solve crimes and ease the pain of the bereaved, or Patty’s manipulativeness in service of her clients. And her sexual heat with Luther is unapologetically freighted, manipulative even as it stems from perhaps the only sincere affection Alice’s ever felt in her life.

TVLine suggested that a show build around Alice might follow a Dexter-like format, where Alice struggles to maintain a code that helps her pass as a decent person, while channeling the impulses she’s unable to repress. That makes sense, although I think there’s an important inverse. In that show, Dexter learned that some of the impulses and behaviors he’d been faking actually had meaning to him. A show built around Alice that intersected with a thoughtful consideration of gender could let her have some of those experiences, and also expose some of the uglier motivations behind the expectations that women be nice, and primarily oriented towards the needs of others. Anti-heroes have primarily been used to expose the flexibility of our own morality, our ability to attach to a corrupt cop or a family mobster. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be used to reveal the rot in what we cling to, as well as what we’re eager to let go.