Well hello there, my lovely Unicorns! I didn’t see you there. Oh, okay, that’s a bit of a fib. I totally saw you approaching. But not in a creepy way. Just saw you coming down the garden path through the window of my cottage here. How about a nice cup of tea? I’ve got just about every sort here. Or some lemonade? Maybe some water. After all, I love to have at least three drinks available at all times.
Now I don’t know about you, but I do enjoy a good prestige series from time to time. Oh, sure, you can find me rewatching a Monty Python episode just about any day of the week, but variety is the spice of life, and my comfort shows tend to run the emotional gamut, so I love to see stuff that piques my interest. So when I saw that Showtime was putting on an anthology series about some of the most famous First Ladies of the last hundred years, you can bet I was intrigued. Especially when I saw that one of the most famously queer ones was going to be a focus — and that it was clear from the trailer they were not going to shy away from that facet of her life. I was all in.
Before I dive too deeply into today’s focus, I should go over a few housekeeping things. First and foremost, there will be SPOILERS for the events of the first season. Second, I should give a few content warnings for relationship abuse, infidelity, and drug/alcohol abuse. (If you’re concerned that the show may have a trigger that I didn’t cover, this site will likely be able to warn you better than I can.) Finally, if this is your first time reading up on the Unicorn Scale, you can read all about the metric here.
The First Lady is a Showtime drama series that follows and dramatizes important moments in the lives of three trailblazing First Ladies from the last century — Michelle Obama (Viola Davis), Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson). The show not only focuses on how they changed the public role they were brought into with their husbands winning the presidency but the personal lives of the women as well.
What I Liked:
The first thing that struck me is that we have a bi woman (Anderson has talked about being in relationships with women in her past as well as with her husbands) playing a bi woman. This may not seem like it’s important, as actors often call on personal/emotional memory to relate to a character, but with queer characters and real-life personalities getting portrayed, it’s far rarer than it should be.
I also appreciated how Anderson is about the right age for the major events discussed in Eleanor’s life in the ‘30s and ‘40s but is youthful enough to play younger. So often with historical figures, the narrative covers a wide swath of life, but more often than not networks tend to cast younger women and age them up rather than what we see here, which robs women (especially women over 40 and 50) of plum roles that they can bring the right life experience to in order to flesh them out.
But what I appreciated perhaps most of all is not only showing Eleanor’s many strengths as a leading figure, but her complicated sexuality on full display. For years people have taken on a common narrative that Eleanor was a lesbian due to her longtime relationship with AP reporter Lorena “Hick” Hickok (Lily Rabe). Indeed, many from a younger generation know about her queerness (though not completely or correctly) from a famous scene from The Wedding Crashers. And even in correcting the narrative, some modern historians still go down the #AndTheyWereRoommates path (hell, even Wikipedia first lists Hick as a "devoted friend and mentor" to Eleanor).
But the truth is much more nuanced than that, and The First Lady does a good job of portraying Eleanor’s bisexuality. While it’s clear that Eleanor and Franklin (Kiefer Sutherland) were in love and attracted to each other enough in their youth to produce half a dozen children, Eleanor’s heartbreak at Franklin’s infidelity is immediate and rupturing both on a physical and emotional level, leaving her with wanting no more to do with Franklin physically.
Perhaps what I appreciated most in their longstanding agreement with her growing romance with Hick was the following exchange, which can be a good representation of bisexuality for some people:
FDR: It didn’t occur to me until this moment that there would be someone you would rather be with than me.
Eleanor: Not rather. Just different.
I also really appreciated that the show not only showed off how dynamic and progressive Eleanor was, but managed to show her failures, including her shortcomings as a mother to her own children. This left the series with a really well-rounded portrayal of a complicated figure in American history.
What I Didn't Like:
As per usual, my gripe about wishing people would use the term “bisexual” when talking about bisexual people is a missed opportunity with this series. The closest I can recall is the use of the term “sapphic” from her boarding school days. This seems especially to be a shame for a show that makes sure to also cover how Obama helped to usher in an era of same-sex marriage but also from that president who was the first to use the term “bisexuals” in a State of the Union address. Putting the bi pride flag prominently into the title sequence isn’t enough.
I can almost excuse Eleanor for not knowing or using the term, but for this to not be used when we have figures living in the 2010s in America and talking about same-sex marriage, it especially rubs me the wrong way.
The Rating:
The First Lady does a wonderful job of sketching the figures of powerful women who both helped shape American lives and did not easily fall into preconceived notions of their positions. In particular, the exploration of Eleanor’s romantic and sexual attractions were done in a grown-up way that allowed for balance and nuance, even if it did entirely not fit a heteronormative model of her time. What a delight to see both queer joy and considered discussions about the queerness of an important shaper of American history without dismissing an important part of her life. I recommend the show without hesitation.
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