‘Three Women’ Is a Foursome of Stories Where One Would Suffice
In adapting her nonfiction bestseller Three Women for television, author Lisa Taddeo has made the title something of a misnomer. To the trio she profiled in the book — housewife Lina (Betty Gilpin), withering under her husband’s sexual neglect; wealthy Sloane (DeWanda Wise), struggling with the boundaries of a polyamorous marriage; and college dropout Maggie (Gabrielle Creevey), who confronts a high school teacher she had an affair with while she was a student — Taddeo adds a fictionalized version of herself, Gia, an emotionally guarded reporter played by Shailene Woodley.
But rather than introducing a fourth woman’s story, viewers may come away from this 10-episode miniseries thinking Taddeo should have focused solely on one, thanks to Gilpin’s transcendent performance as Lina.
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It’s been a long journey to the screen for Three Women. The book was published in 2019, Showtime soon acquired the TV rights, and production took place in late 2021. Then Showtime underwent a change in management, philosophy, and even name — to the not-at-all clunky or confusing “Paramount+ with Showtime” — and began purging itself of any project, even ones already completed, that wasn’t connected to a preexisting series like Dexter or Billions. One of these, Ripley, went to Netflix, and turned out to be one of this year’s best shows, with Showtime likely gifting Netflix some Emmys later this month. Three Women, meanwhile, will now debut on Starz.
The show opens with Gia seeking the advice of legendary journalist Gay Talese (James Naughton), whose 1980 book Thy Neighbor’s Wife, about sexuality in post-WWII America, is meant to be a model for the one she’s struggling to write. He suggests she do what he did and sleep with a bunch of married people to find out what makes them tick. Gia takes a different approach, buying a used van and traversing the country, trying to find candid women wrestling with aspects of their own sexuality. Over time, she meets Lina, miserable in her marriage to a man who won’t touch her; Sloane, trying to get permission from her husband Richard (Blair Underwood), who usually has strict rules for which outsiders can be brought into their bedroom, to sleep with the attractive young Will (Blair Redford); and Maggie, reeling from the aftermath of her predatory teacher Aaron (Jason Ralph) being acquitted of all charges against him associated with their affair (*). In the midst of this, Gia has a fling with Jack (John Patrick Amedori), who becomes so smitten with her that he uproots his own life to follow her in her journey, despite her hollow protests.
(*) All the episodes featuring the Maggie storyline begin with a legal disclaimer that acknowledges the results of the trial, then adds, “There are many sides to all stories. This one is Maggie’s.”
There’s a lot going on, and Taddeo presents it all in a confusingly fractured timeline that takes away more than it adds. Episodes that focus largely on one of the women (or one of them with Gia), feel more focused and emotionally potent than the ones that bounce around from plot to plot. But whether she’s flying solo for an hour or sharing time (if not scenes) with her co-stars, Gilpin makes it hard to pay attention to anyone else. The other actors are good (Creevy, a Welsh actress whose strong work in the high school drama In My Skin debuted on Hulu a few years back, is palpably vulnerable in the Maggie scenes.) Gilpin, though, is just jaw-droppingly great.
When we meet Lina, her marriage is so dire that her husband Ed (Sean Meehan) won’t even kiss her anymore; in a counseling session, their priest tries to explain this to Lina by comparing how it feels for Ed to kiss her to the way she describes the sensation of rubbing against Ed’s itchy old Indianapolis Colts blanket. She cares for their kids largely on their own, and wears gloves year-round to help with nerve pain that only the unconventional Dr. Henry (Ravi Patel) seems to believe is real. Eventually, she begins an affair with her high school ex Aidan (Austin Stowell), and Gilpin’s performance is so brimming with life, it’s nearly as overwhelming to witness the physical and emotional transformation Lina feels at being touched and paid attention to by a man as it is for her to experience it. There is great joy in Lina’s story (she brags to Gia that she gave Aidan “the best gosh darn blow job in the history of the world!”), but also sorrow (Gia forces her to confront a past trauma she’s stayed in denial about for years), and Gilpin delivers it all, and then some.
But the structure of the season means that the Lina story is front-loaded, and Gilpin isn’t around a lot for the concluding episodes. She’s missed. The other storylines have their moments, though Gia’s arc, while borrowing some details from Taddeo’s own life, comes across as more scripted than the rest. And even with four mostly distinct plots with their respective central characters, Three Women feels bloated at 10 episodes, most clocking in around an hour.
The individual pieces also never quite seem like they should be part of the same whole, regardless of how much or how little we see Gia interact with the other three. (With Lina, it’s a lot; with Maggie, hardly at all.) Part of Gia’s writers block seems to stem from her difficulty in tying together these separate threads, either narratively or thematically. She tries declaring it a collection of stories about desire, but even she acknowledges that an adult authority figure sleeping with a teenager in his care is, at best, a lot more complicated than that. “Maggie, why name her desire at all?” Gia wonders in voiceover. “Wasn’t hers actually just trauma? People attack nuance.”
It’s not hard to imagine a handful of shorter series, or, better, movies, that dealt with only one of the characters, rather than trying to tell all their stories simultaneously. All seem like they’d work better on their own, the Lina plot most of all. In another piece of narration drawn from Gia’s in-progress book, she declares, “Lina, Sloane, and Maggie were not people who wanted to be watched. They were women who needed to be seen.” Thanks to Gilpin, Lina is the one of the Three Women who most needs to be seen.
The first episode of Three Women debuts Sept. 13 on Starz, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all 10 episodes.
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