There’s a scene in the opening episode of Everything I Know About Love – Dolly Alderton’s adaptation of her smash-hit 2018 memoir – in which 24-year-old protagonist Maggie is all dressed up with nowhere to go. Her flatmates are all out. Her current squeeze, a Blake Fielder-Civil lookalike she met on a train, isn’t picking up the phone – and when he eventually does, he rebuffs her. Maggie is insulted, bored and increasingly desperate. She lies on the living room floor. She has a solo pint or three in the local old-man pub. The sheer desolation of being alone on a Friday night in your mid-20s is perfectly evoked and intensely relatable.
But Maggie (Emma Appleton) is not a bog-standard Billy no-mates. She is Messy Millennial Woman. MMW doesn’t slope home and call it a night. Instead, she bursts in on her housemate Birdy, who is in bed with her date, and pathetically suggests that the three of them hang out. When that offer is politely rejected, she literally sprints across London into the arms of the very man who had snubbed her hours before. The implications are clear: Maggie, who is loosely based on the now 33-year-old Alderton (Everything I know About Love is set in 2012, putting its protagonist firmly in generation Y), is self-destructive, irresponsible and determined to live life to the full – while drowning out any negative feelings by beckoning further emotional chaos into her life.
Maggie might believe herself to be unique, but she isn’t: Messy Millennial Woman is everywhere. Over the last few years, she has dominated TV comedy-drama, especially in Britain. She is Fleabag, Suzie in I Hate Suzie and Arabella in I May Destroy You. She is Aine in This Way Up, Jessie in Starstruck, Mae in Feel Good and Sasha in Mood, the BBC Three series about a wannabe musician who inadvertently starts working in the sex industry. The main traits of MMW are thus: she has a complicated love life and a dysfunctional relationship with her family. She is often an unreliable employee and sometimes an unreliable friend. Unhappiness, low self-esteem and a tendency to self-sabotage radiates from her – but she’s also joyful and charismatic: a good-time girl who lurches from chaos to crisis, from euphoria to despair.
In other words, she is fast becoming a trope – and a tired one at that. In fact, she must be exhausted: she powers practically every progressive, female-centric sadcom in existence. Her earliest appearance is probably as Hannah Horvath in Girls – Lena Dunham’s generation-defining sitcom about New York twentysomethings that debuted in 2012 – and she now takes the form of disgraced comedy writer Ava in the generation-gap sitcom Hacks. She has even managed to escape the confines of TV. Last year’s indie film hit Shiva Baby revolves around her (in that movie, she’s an escort called Danielle, awkwardly navigating a Jewish wake with her mother), as does Emerald Fennell’s Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman (she’s a droll medical school dropout entrapping men who think they are taking advantage of her). She’s detectable in the frank lyrics of pop star Self Esteem and features in the work of millennial bard Sally Rooney – whose novel Conversations With Friends, recently adapted as a BBC series, is about a confused, insecure university student who embarks on an affair with a married man.
It’s difficult to deny that Messy Millennial Woman seems like a net good. A couple of decades ago, the proudly flawed heroine was not a fixture of mainstream culture – now she rules the zeitgeist. Yet recently, MMW has started to migrate from a bracingly realistic proxy to something fast approaching a reductive stereotype, monopolising comic portrayals of the female experience. If you are a millennial woman who has never remotely identified with this personality – if you are (like me) a chronically risk-averse goody two-shoes – then Messy Millennial Woman’s domination may have felt overwhelming and alienating for some time now. Of course, many of the aforementioned shows do depict women with other personalities – in Everything I Know About Love, Birdy is hyper-organised and hyper-sensible, as is Jessie’s flatmate Kate in Starstruck – but they are never the beating heart of the show, never the ones we are invited to fall in love with. They can’t be when MMW is busy exuding so much main character energy.
Yet there’s another dramatic justification for MMW’s inescapable presence. Most of her shows take in themes of mental health and trauma – and exploring this interior world is a large part of what makes them trailblazing and compelling: Fleabag grapples with her best friend’s death; Feel Good’s Mae is sent spinning by the realisation that she was taken advantage of as a teenager; in I May Destroy You, Arabella struggles to function after being raped; I Hate Suzie chronicles the dehumanising impact of fame. Yet anxiety, depression, trauma and lack of self-worth are not the most visual of character traits; they only become engrossing if they are externalised – and an easy way to do that is to manifest them in reckless behaviour. This Way Up’s creator and star, Aisling Bea, masterfully captures the feeling of depression in subtle, evocative ways (a change in her tone of voice, the way she looks at herself in the mirror) but the nadir of Aine’s mental state is communicated by her running a red light on a misguided late-night bike ride and almost getting hit by a car – classic MMW behaviour.
Ultimately, though, this conflation of a personality type with trauma or mental ill-health is starting to feel unhelpful. It makes destructive behaviour a shorthand for psychological distress – when in reality many people struggle in quieter, more self-contained ways. It also has the effect of making MMW, and her often self-involved unhappiness, strangely aspirational. The chaos she leaves in her wake is, at least, entertaining. MMW is therefore often vaguely glamorous – she’s dangerously fun, the spirit of rock’n’roll kept alive in extortionate taxi bills and explosive arguments with your best friend. In Everything I Know About Love, this is articulated in an extremely on-the-nose way when Birdy comforts Maggie – whose desperation to be liked has resulted in her buying strangers drinks she can’t afford – with the idea that her flaws make her the opposite of boring. Remember: “Being fun is not easy! … That’s special, maybe the cost of being that special is always being overdrawn.”
The trope of the women who put the fun in dysfunctional is now so pervasive it is ripe for parody. Last year, the comedian Liz Kingsman staged One-Woman Show – a spoof of the all too familiar narrative of an irritatingly reckless woman with a concealed tragedy in her past who is stuck in a web of humiliating nights out, romantic rejection and faux-profundity. (It was also a send-up of the way these stories come to the screen: Fleabag and Mood both started out as plays, which was how I May Destroy You creator Michaela Coel got her big break, too). The fact that it was a sellout and critically celebrated sensation suggests audiences are becoming increasingly cynical when it comes to MMW’s charms.
It’s not that the Messy Millennial Woman hasn’t got great appeal – clearly she does – or that she isn’t rooted in reality (however little you relate to her actions, it’s hard not to identify with her at all). It is, rather, that she is ossifying into predictability, becoming the default, one-note expression of womanhood when the very point of her was to diversify the portrayal of female characters on-screen. Then again, she may not be long for this world: the youngest millennials are now 26 and you would hope that generation Z have something else up their sleeve. At the very least, they might entertain the idea that female characters are worthy of interest even when their lives aren’t quite such a whirlwind of thrilling disarray.
