New Series for Women's History Month
A short satire
March is Women’s History Month, and streamers will deliver new, groundbreaking series centering women.
Law & Order: Special Women’s Unit. An old (40) woman never gets around to marriage and is interrogated by police, who eventually lose interest. Every episode is this episode.
Mad Women. Exactly like Mad Men, except to combat workplace sexual harassment, women dress in form-fitting straight-jackets and are married off one by one until they all disappear.
Doctor Jackie. The titular strong female character is fired for being a pill addict/DEI hire and must navigate life as an unemployed, menopausal divorcée in withdrawal who’s got a new grudge and a newer ghost gun.
Lady Survivor. In the second greatest game ever played, women are stranded on a remote beach and must compete for male attention or be voted off by an all-men tribunal for being ugly/fat/competitive.
Grey’s Female Anatomy. A no-men reboot featuring gynecological interns/lesbians who must use medieval equipment on modern-day women due to funding freezes. In the pilot episode that is also the series finale, it’s Murphy’s Law all day when a woman with an unheard of but common autoimmune disease Ubers to the hospital but is sex-trafficked en route; medical students learn nothing about menopause and suffer a helicopter crash because the chick pilot has brain fog; and a resident must remove a bomb inside a uterus without getting too emotional.
Reality Kitchen. Real housewives must make dinners for families of five every night with only onions and lemons after husbands get lost in the grocery and forget to preheat the oven.
Space ER. The doctors are from Mars; the patients are from Venus. In this unscripted fiction of science, doctors tell patients to lose weight, which launches a battle of the sexes called Star Wars.
Girls: Next Generation. Four girls hate each other.
More Golden Girls. Four elderly (40) women live together, and their repressed rage manifests in Vaginoplasty and also breast cancer.
Sex and the City: Victorian London. Four turn-of-the-century archetypal women in an insane asylum become friends/lesbians. Instead of brunch, the women go to psychoanalysis. Instead of talking about their sex lives, the women repress their sex lives. Instead of STIs, the women catch hysteria from each other and are prescribed vibrators. Marriage is still the main concern.
The Lady of the Rings. The newest marriage-competition series. Hosted by the ghosts of suffragettes.
The Pitt for Women. No one will be talking about episodes like: A woman goes to the emergency department, and doctors ignore her until she dies. And: A woman having a heart attack is told that she’s having a panic attack; she dies. And: A woman asks too many questions and is escorted out by security. She dies. A documentary series.
Ocean’s 8 General Hospital. In the spinoff of The Pitt for Women, one woman in pain is not believed, so she assembles an eight-person crew to rob the Met Gala to afford a second opinion.
Janes the Virgins. Frigid virgins refuse to have sex with men who hate them, and incels have no choice but to hunt them for sport. Unlimited series.
The Apprentice’s Mother. The rules are as simple as the judges: Pregnant businesspeople are fired for coming down with pregnancy. Non-pregnant businesswomen are fired for not being pregnant. All other non-businessmen are fired or sent to the network’s other show Janes the Virgins and hunted for sport.
Girls’ Squid Game. A new young adult dystopian survival series about a secret contest for fatherless poors who must survive Red Light, Green Light, billionaire VIP oligarchs, and their first periods.
The Bad Doctor Marries at First Sight. A social experiment. An HPV pandemic. Doctors are matched by experts to their patients only one week before their surgeries that are one week before their weddings. In the mid-season penultimate 2-day episode of this crossover series, a doctor tells his patient, “You’ll feel just a pinch,” while performing a cervical biopsy. When the patient feels more than a pinch, she screams and then apologizes and then cries quietly. “There’s no crying in gynecology,” the doctor barks at her before proposing.
Code Yellowjackets. When IUDs are inserted without pain medicine into a woman’s soccer team, the women’s vagina-dentate fight back.
Botched Women. Women go under the knife to appease society. This is social media but televised.
Herstory Repeating. Episodes include “Manslaughter Conviction of 21-Year-Old Oklahoma Woman Who Suffered Miscarriage”; “Married Women Could Be Stopped from Voting Under SAVE Act”; and “Manslaughter Conviction for Man who Brutally Murdered His Wife and Kids.” This original series is the news.
Witches. Women/lesbians are hot witches?
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Originally published in the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus.
Original art by Natalie Peeples.
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Writing the Impossible Seminar: Sex, Violence, Illness, and More
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May 18th (Sunday)
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ICYMI: I’m Elissa Bassist, and I teach short conceptual humor/satire writing, funny personal essays, tragicomic memoir, emotional emails, and that’s it. I edit the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus, and I wrote the award-deserving book Hysterical. My next book is Inside Jokes: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers, co-written with Caitlin Kunkel and forthcoming in 2026.
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I would watch all of these shows. But definitely The Lady of the Rings. I feel like no one is getting married though, which makes the show that much better.
Scary funny. Funny scary. And brilliant.