Broads, Sisters, and Exes: Feminist Millennial Television and the Twenty-First Century

How a new generation of women-centered dramedies has revolutionized contemporary television.

This timely and telling analysis identifies the formal and thematic innovations pioneered by millennial feminists between 2012 and 2020 that have shaped the trajectory of our favorite shows today. Author Vincent L. Stephens offers close readings of nine pivotal series, including Girls, Orange Is the New Black, Broad City, Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Fleabag, Insecure, Shrill, and I May Destroy You. Across these series, women-led creative teams translated techniques from indie films, inverted gendered television tropes, and engaged in innovative temporal storytelling. These series, often including showrunners who also act, write, and direct, are the product of a new ecology of television driven by the rise of streaming platforms and a demand for more inclusive narratives. Broads, Sisters, Exes optimistically contends with women as aesthetic innovators and maps their influence on entertainment industry reforms that are slowly but surely increasing accessibility for creatives from groups historically underrepresented across media. Through elegant prose deeply rooted in an intersectional feminist perspective, Stephens expands the aesthetic and narrative grammars of contemporary television.

Vincent L. Stephens is the associate dean for diversity and inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University and a lecturer in the Department of Music. He is the author of Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music and has previously published works in multiple fields including popular music studies, television studies, queer studies, and African American studies.