NEW
WESTMINSTER, B.C. (CUP) – Only days after the explosive fireworks display that
was New Year’s 2012, Global TV premiered their latest series, Bomb Girls.
Bomb
Girls focuses
on the Canadian women who worked in munitions factories during World War II while
the country’s men were on the battlefront. Although Bomb Girls began as a six-part miniseries,
it found enough of an audience to be renewed for a second, 12-episode season –
which was announced to the public one day prior to the season finale on Feb. 8.
With
the combination of heavy self-promotion, the casting of an Academy
Award-nominated actress (Meg Tilly), and the public’s need for some fresh TV
drama, a second season was inevitable – not to mention well prepared for, if
the onslaught of episode six’s cliff-hangers were any indication. But can the
success of Bomb Girls be attributed to simple logic, or is there more to this story?
A
WOMAN ON THE INSIDE
Following
the overwhelming popularity of AMC’s Mad Men and HBO’s Boardwalk
Empire, ABC
and Global managed to jump on the period-piece bandwagon just in time. But
while both ABC’s Pan Am and Global’s Bomb Girls entered the ring as shows focusing on the
then-modern woman, only Bomb Girls seems to have survived, as Pan Am is doomed for cancellation.
What
made the significantly smaller production come out on top? A better story?
Interesting characters? Canadian pride? Co-creator/director/executive producer
of Bomb Girls,
Adrienne Mitchell, opens up about some of these inquiries.
“Makeup
artist Debi Drennan and author Maureen Jennings approached Janis Lundman and I
with [the initial] concept,” Mitchell says, on the topic of the show’s history.
“What struck us immediately in their research was that if it weren’t for
thousands of women like Mina [Ribble – Drennan’s grandmother] and Hilda [Lyall
– Drennan’s godmother] who traveled across Canada to work at the factories, the
Allies would have never won the war.”
“We
didn’t even know the extent to which Canadian women played such a pivotal role
in turning things around for the Allies,” she continues. “And all this was
happening even before the Americans joined the war. So it was a slam-dunk for
us that this story had to be told and had a populist appeal.”
That
settles the question of Canadian pride, but is that pride based on favouring an
original Canadian series, or on our actual history?
“What
astounds me is how many people didn’t know about this part of our Canadian
history, ourselves included,” Mitchell says. “The Canadian women munitions
workers were on full alert – no one knew if the world would be the same. So
they lived in the moment, pushed boundaries, and experienced a kind of
independence they had never experienced. There were stories of women crying
over their first paycheque because they had never in their life earned one.”
“I
have been totally touched by the audience response from viewers discovering
that their grandmothers or great aunts worked during the war in munitions
factories, and how they were learning about their family members in a way that
they never knew before,” she explains.
For
someone as close to the show’s production as Mitchell to express such gratitude
towards viewers influenced by our otherwise little-known past, there is relief
in knowing where the show’s audience stands. However, one glaring question
remained, if only because most young women often forget the answer: is there a
place for a series like Bomb Girls to exist in a time and nation where men and women
are supposedly equal?
“Well,
I guess it’s all about how you define ‘equal,’” says Mitchell. “One has to ask
if women are truly equal to men if current statistics reveal that women still
earn 74 cents for each dollar a man earns for work of equal value, which
qualifies them for less social security and pension; women are five [times]
more likely to encounter domestic abuse; women continue to be vastly
underrepresented in politics. Bomb Girls is trying to show that women can make
important strides forward, [and] that men played an important role in that, but
as it reminds us about the struggles in the past it also alerts us to those
same struggles in the present. So yes, I feel [Bomb Girls] is incredibly relevant
now, in spite of the gains that women have made.”
SHE
STANDS ON HER OWN
Bomb
Girls’
popularity isn’t based on history alone. While it’s important to keep our
country’s past at the heart of it all, awareness can’t be raised without a
compelling story to push things forward. Part of what made Bomb Girls’ season one viewers return
week after week were the characters’ own battles.
One
character in particular, Betty McRae (portrayed by rising B.C.-based starlet
Ali Liebert), attempted to shed light on the topic of homosexuality during that
period. While in Los Angeles on the day of Bomb Girls’ season finale, Liebert
offers a few words via phone.
“Initially,
I liked her survival skills – her tough exterior, her tactics, [and] her
breathiness,” Liebert says of being drawn to Betty’s character. “I found the
way she functioned in the world to be pretty interesting.”
To
paint a clearer picture, Betty is a high-ranking worker at the munitions
factory where Bomb Girls takes place. Over the course of the first season, Betty’s
tough-girl attitude is gradually revealed to be an aspect of her closeted
lesbianism, something that grows to be more difficult to hide as she falls for
a fellow munitions worker named Kate Andrews (Charlotte Hegele). Liebert, who
has portrayed lesbian characters before in works such as The L Word and Sook-Yin Lee’s Year
of the Carnivore (2009),
said her experience working on Bomb Girls has been “creatively fulfilling.”
“The
producers and creators of the show really made sure to treat all the actors
respectively, and they respected our opinions in terms of character
development,” she says. “I’d just never worked on a show where they were so
open to our suggestions and our feelings.”
You
can catch Liebert later this year in the films In the Hive, Foxfire, and, of course,
in season two of Bomb
Girls.
//Angela Espinoza, The Other Press (Douglas College)
//Angela Espinoza, The Other Press (Douglas College)
|
