“No one wants to hang out with a particular driver,” says current alcoholic Cassie on HBO’s The Flight String. “Do you want to know why?” Because it’s boring. “
In the past, pop culture has not always wanted to tell stories of sobriety. And maybe this assumption is the reason. There is a lot of drama in eclipses, hangovers and bad behavior, but strict rules for recovery? According to Cassie, it’s boring. Or worse, preaching.
And yet, despite the protagonist’s fears, the Stewardess’s second series is one of several television shows, along with Disney + ‘s Single Drunk Female and BritBox’s The Dry, recognizing that sobriety – and sobriety in particular – could be source of great television.
In Stewardess Cassie (Kaylee Cuoco) she sobers up for a year and creates a seemingly healthy new life in LA, where calm is only superficial. The stewardess’s highly conceptual arrogance – including fantasy series set in Cassie’s head – has always depended on her being an unreliable storyteller. But while the show previously used her drunkenness to achieve this, its second series applies the same level of inner control to sobriety as to addiction. Cassie, who has recently sobered up, disappears into the hall with mirrors, and her sense of self is split into feuding surrogates. There’s the party girl who was; the traumatized teenager; the depressed one who can barely get involved; and a dirty example of who she would be if she made a better choice. In the midst of all their noise, the real Cassie doesn’t drink, but she continues to take risks, replacing alcohol with something just as secret and dangerous: being an asset to the CIA.
Roisin Gallagher as Shiva in The Dry. Photo: Peter Rowan / BritBox
This harsh awakening that sobriety does not solve the problems that alcohol once seemed to alleviate was also explored in The Dry, where 35-year-old Shiv (Rosin Gallagher) returned home to Dublin, six months sober. Because her family is suspicious that her new identity as an addict is just another layer of self-absorption, Shiva discovers that her self-destructive tendencies have not receded: even sober, she gravitates toward toxic relationships and bad decisions. She struggles to reconcile the image of herself as an alcoholic with the image she has of alcoholism itself, crystallized by attending two very different AA meetings: one in a boogie suburb full of people who don’t look like alcoholics, and one in the inner city is full of people who, at least according to Shiva, do a lot of it. When she tries to leave, claiming that she just feels the “vibration”, the meeting leader reproaches her for treating AA as an “air yoga class”.
These shows come after a long period of women drinking heavily on television. The urban glamor of Sex and the City has shifted to Olivia Pope of Scandal and Alicia Florick of The Good Wife, successful middle-class women for whom no hard day at the office is over without pouring half a bottle of burgundy. It was also the era of the nasty antiheroine, who was finally allowed to let her flaws come out, including her ability to overdo it, in Broad City, Insecure and Fleabag. Apart from some flashes of deeper questioning about women’s drinking – Mickey in “Love on Netflix”, Jess in “Girls” and Tuka in “Here and Bertie” – she rarely got involved in the story, as it was for male characters who they drank too much (Hank in California, Bojek Konnik, almost everyone in Mad Men).
We now have TV shows that allow us to hang out with female characters as they try to solve their problem, such as Single Drunk Female. Partly based on the sober journey of its creator, Simone Finch, the film follows twenty-something Sam (Sofia Black-D’Elia) as she returns home after assaulting her boss, losing her job and receiving a court order to visit AA . It’s a comedy, but sobriety is not the main line. For Sam, sobriety is deeply annoying, sometimes depressing, and often extremely boring; that’s before we get to the unfairly extortionate prices of non-alcoholic alternatives at the bar.
One day … for twenty years Sam returns home to start his new sober life in Single Drunk Female. Photo: Elizabeth Sison / Freeform / Getty Images
There is a valid argument that the lonely drunk woman moves too fast in Sam’s story, but as with Stewardess and Dry, he never assumes that sobriety comes easily, unlike Miranda’s clumsy drinking, which is allowed overnight. – or at least between episodes – in And Just Like That … (Although this is a show whose last character with an alcohol problem fell to his death from an open window).
Instead, for these women, sobriety is insecure, tense, hanging by a thread. The boundaries have shifted since they chose to give up drinking, and they remain moving through a completely unfamiliar terrain, renegotiating every relationship in their lives. We are witnessing the grueling effort required to constantly balance the top of a slippery slope facing family and friends who suggest they may have “only one” or harden each time they hear the unmistakable sound of glasses ringing. Deciding not to drink is a choice that these women have to make every minute of every day, over and over again.
In the past, the stories culminated in the satisfying, familiar scene of a protagonist who utters the words, “I’m X… and I’m an alcoholic.” With these sober and curious shows, this is more often the starting point – and we stay in the room to hear what happens next.
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