It's Not Just Baby Boomers Who Looove TV Shows About the Second Wave

Baby boomers get a lot of flack for glorifying the golden days of the 1960s through television, from programs like Mad Men to CNN’s The Sixties. But as recent pilot pick-ups suggest, their children have been indoctrinated into this obsession as well: A wealth of shows have come up in recent years fixated not on just that decade, but specifically on the women’s movement that cropped up then, too.

HBO, Variety reports, has picked up a new show from Lena Dunham called Max, which is “a comedy set in 1963 and revolving around the stirrings of second-wave feminism, as seen through the eyes of an ambitious magazine writer who stumbles her way into the women’s movement.” It sounds a little bit like Cosmo’s forthcoming television show, written by Leslye Headland, just set a few decades earlier, and a lot like the rash of shows about the ‘60s that have cropped up in recent years. Also at HBO, Marisa Tomei has been tapped to play Gloria Steinem in a mini-series on the creation of Ms. magazine. Addtionally, model-wrangler Eileen Ford’s life story has been optioned, and though she started representing some of the world’s top models earlier than the ‘60s, the company really peaked during the height of the women’s movement.

And we’ve already seen a few shows come and go that fixated on this time period as well, specifically benefitting from how women’s roles changed, like The Playboy Club or Pan-Am or The Astronaut Wives Club. It’s certainly rich subject matter, but as we’ve seen with The Playboy Club and Pan-Am, it doesn’t always work out that a show focused on the changing roles for women is particularly accurate or diverse—or even that interesting for the women watching. Especially because, as everyone knows, the best modern-day reinterpretation of the magazine world of this time period, or even the time period in general, is Down with Love starring Reneé Zellweger and Ewan McGregor.