How The Outstanding New Starz Series 'The Girlfriend Experience' Gives Us A Female TV Antihero For The Ages

Alison Bechdel is blameless in all this, but a couple of years ago, when the reductive-but-snappy litmus test for cultural sexism that bears her name was upwafting on the zeitgeist, it inspired a thought experiment of my own. Now, most of the mental quizzes I set myself when bored have mayfly lives, because after a while (and this is the problem with the Bechdel test and its subsequent dogmatization too), applying such agenda-based filters as a method of cultural critique becomes as robotic as Mr. Skin fast-forwarding through films to timestamp each instance of boob. But this one continues to rattle around, maybe because to my mind, no wholly satisfying answer ever presented itself. My "Danielle Plainview paradigm" is simply this: Who is the most qualitatively similar female version of the Daniel Day-Lewis character from Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood"?

The new 13-episode Starz show "The Girlfriend Experience" that quietly reclaims the...