‘Three Women’ Review: Shailene Woodley and an Excellent Betty Gilpin Get Mired in Starz’s Clumsy Adaptation

Spend enough time complaining about padded limited series that would have worked better as movies and superfluously ambitious movies that would have been better fulfilled as limited series, and it becomes a relief to offer a small new variation: Starz‘s new 10-hour limited series Three Women would have been better as three movies. Or possibly it would have been better as a three-season anthology series. All I know is that watching Lisa Taddeo‘s adaptation of her own acclaimed book, I’ve rarely been as conscious that the way a story was being presented onscreen couldn’t possibly be the best way for that given story to be told.

Related Stories

Business

Lionsgate, Starz Extend Movie Licensing Deal Ahead of Formal Separation

TV

'American Primeval' Team on Portraying the Brutal History of America's Westward Expansion: "The Truth of This World Is Violent"

Three Women is, more accurately, three different stories told in suboptimal fashion — maybe four if you include what should have been a framing device but, owing presumably to “It’s my darned book” privilege, has been given equal weight throughout.

It’s a show that’s packed — overflowing? — with solid performances, plus one or two great ones, as well as one with earnest and valid observations on female agency, female desire and the power of female storytelling. But despite ample handholding throughout, Three Women only occasionally comes together on an episodic level, much less as a dramatically unified whole.

The three stories:

In Nebraska, Lina (Betty Gilpin) is miserable because her husband (Sean Meehan’s Ed) has stopped touching her and compares kissing her to touching wet wool. She fantasizes about rekindling affections with her hunky high school flame (Austin Stowell’s Aidan), but when she attempts to instigate an affair, the result isn’t exactly what she imagined.

On Martha’s Vineyard, Sloane (DeWanda Wise) and hubby Richard (Blair Underwood) are successful party planners who retain the spark in their relationship through swinging and cuckolding, with a careful set of rules. She fantasizes about circumventing those rules for something more sustained with hunky fisherman Will (Blair Redford), but when she attempts to instigate an affair, the result isn’t exactly what she imagined.

In North Dakota, waitress Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy) is finally ready to come to terms with the trauma caused by what she alleges was an inappropriate relationship with a teacher (Jason Ralph’s Mr. Knodel) when she was underage and he was 30. That each episode featuring Maggie has to begin with a title card explaining the real-life legal conclusion of her case against Mr. Knodel is a pretty clear warning that the result isn’t going to be exactly what she imagined.

The framing device that’s kinda a story:

In New York City, journalist Gia (Shailene Woodley) is struggling to write a long-promised book on sexuality in contemporary America. After her editor scraps 200,000 words on the subject, Gia is sent to consult with revered nonfiction scribe Gay Talese (James Naughton), who is sexist and a bit gross, but also inspires her to hit the road looking for stories. Stories like the three above? Yes, Virginia! Stories like her own involving a lovable stalker (John Patrick Amedori’s Jack)? Apparently!

Not all these tales are created equal, however. Lina’s peaks early, though Gilpin’s raw and thoroughly unpredictable performance is the series’ best. Sloane’s peaks late, though its failure to smartly deal with the intersection of gender, class and race in any consistent manner become really frustrating long before that. Maggie’s comes closest to having a beginning, middle and end, but thanks to the legally required caveat at the beginning of each chapter, it infuses a note of perspective and subjectivity to all of these narratives that the rest of the show isn’t prepared to engage with.

So you have three plotlines ebbing and flowing at different rates, and being unfolded in lurching spurts. The premiere introduces each woman in a standalone third. The second through fourth chapters focus on one woman per episode. The sixth through 10th parts split up sometimes two, sometimes three and sometimes four threads, sometimes in long and uninterrupted arcs, sometimes cutting between them like a wacky ensemble dramedy.

I felt like the episodes that remained the most focused helped develop actual investment within the confines of that hour. But the gap between the second and sixth installments was enough to cause me to lose the investment I had in Lina, despite Gilpin’s work, and there’s no momentum to be found anywhere.

That sort of lapse in attention didn’t happen in the episodes intercutting between narratives, but the flailing efforts to underline literal and thematic connections had the unfortunate effect of making serious drama feel sitcom-y enough that I mentally retitled one chapter “The One Where Everybody Orgasms From Oral Sex” and another “The Gang Disposes of Bloody Sheets Again.” In the recurring imagery — no show in television history has ever been this pro-condom — and echoed dialogue are a constant awareness that Three Women started life as a book and that the things that work on the page don’t always work on the screen.

That sense grows even stronger any time Gia, as Taddeo’s barely veiled (she keeps her mother and future husband’s names intact, but changes her own) proxy appears. If you didn’t know that Gia represented the author and that most of her voiceover was lifted directly from the book — and if it weren’t probable that she and her narration were present in every incarnation of the script — one could almost believe test audiences had complained that a series with Lina, Sloane and Maggie exclusively was too difficult to understand, and that those coddling elements were added deep in post-production as a response. Any time you spot Woodley’s lioness mane or hear her voice, you know thematic over-explaining is about to ensue.

The directors, all women starting with Louise N. D. Friedberg and including Cate Shortland and So Yong Kim for multiple episodes apiece, aren’t to blame for the structuring problems. Each hour, especially taken in a vacuum, is scattered with intimate and poetic moments. Both the season and the episodes feel too long, but giving these moments room to breathe, if only as a way of validating the significance of the women and their voices, is still a worthy ethos. That extends to the myriad sex scenes, which are orchestrated to upend the male gaze and offer a notably different version of televisual eroticism, pacing be damned.

Gilpin, wearing her emotions on her sleeve in a performance of tentative smiles, red-rimmed eyes and barely contained desires, is the series’ pillar. That Lina is enjoying a second adolescence with her bygone fling is meant to be mirrored in the youthful immediacy of Maggie; Creevy’s portrayal, which never lets her Welsh roots show, calls to mind a Freaky Friday/Mean Girls-era Lindsay Lohan. That Lina is so open and exposed is meant to contrast Sloane, whom Wise plays as maintaining an enigmatic and alluring facade that takes a long time to inevitably crack. Playing a friend and possible adversary to Sloane, Lola Kirke packs a fair amount of sympathy into a brief amount of screen time.

The men are designed as variably attentive boners, so other than Underwood it would be hard to find a memorable performance on that side of the ledger — though Brian O’Byrne is heartbreaking as Maggie’s well-meaning father and Ravi Patel offers a few funny beats as a doctor whom you think will be important and then mostly is not.

But you’re not watching for the men and you probably won’t continue to watch for the stories, which I’m betting were more effectively treated in Taddeo’s book. The women are the reason to check out Three Women, and to wish they were in a more successful show.