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Diane Keaton’s Stillborn Feminist Show

I was sorry that Diane Keaton’s show Tilda, in which she was set to play a Nikki Finke-like blogger terrorizing Hollywood, never went forward at HBO, and now that I’m watching Entourage, I’m even more sorry that we’re not getting an insider-y looking entertainment industry story from a woman’s perspective.

But I regret even more that this show, written by Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Marti Noxon, where Keaton was supposed to play “an old-guard feminist leader who tries to give new spark to the cause by starting a sexually frank women’s magazine,” never happened. It would have been the most explicitly feminist show since Maude, right? And even more so since it’s about doing the work of feminism, not simply living by and advocating its tenets. It’s one thing to air a documentary about Gloria Steinem and her role in the second-wave feminist movement and to treat it like history, and another to do a show that acknowledges that the work of that movement is far from finished, and that dives straight into the challenges of the transition from the second wave to the third wave.

I’m not remotely shocked that this show didn’t happen. But I am sort of depressed by the fact that it counts as a good thing that HBO actually considered it.

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