The new Starz series, based on Diana Gabaldon’s hit novels, offers one of the most committed, complicated portrayals of women on television — and there’s no reason men shouldn’t be watching too.
Starz
I first heard about the Outlander books through my best friend: She had read them all through high school, reveling in the narrative, passing them down to her sister, never saying a word about just how incredibly hot all the sex scenes were. She admitted that it was impossible to describe without sounding ridiculous: "A World War II-era woman time-travels back to 18th-century Scotland," she said, "but it's much better than I'm making it sound." Plus, as she averred, "The sex scenes are hotter than anything you'll see on TV."
My friend was right: The sex scenes were super hot, and much hotter than anything on television in the early 2000s, when the only sex you could really see on television was the awkward, neurotic type in Sex in the City, or the violent, exploitative kind on Deadwood and The Sopranos. In the last 10 years, we've seen sexual explicitness spread from network television (The Good Wife bathroom scene) to extended cable (American Horror Story, The Americans, Nip/Tuck, and basically everything on FX), and "sexposition" — using naked bodies, often engaging in sex acts, as a backdrop for other characters to reveal crucial plot information — has become ubiquitous.
But with rare, poignant exception (The Good Wife, The Americans, Masters of Sex) that sex is almost always about gratifying the male gaze, which is another way of saying there are a lot of boobs and very little by means of female agency. In Game of Thrones, Jon Snow may "know something" about performing oral sex on Ygritte, but in a show mostly fixated on sex as a dangerous and powerful tool, it's the exception, not the rule. And as Salon's Lili Loofborrow points out, this issue "isn't just about penises vs. breasts ... it's about situation and camera angle. It's about who has the right to be turned on. It's about whose genitals are worth catering to."
Having now watched the first six episodes of Outlander, I feel like my genitals are, indeed, being catered to. They were catered to in the luscious, if somewhat bizarre, book, and equally catered to in the television adaptation of that book — headed up by Battleship Galactica showrunner Ronald D. Moore — which begins its first season on Starz on Saturday, Aug. 9. (You can now stream the first episode for free here.) But so was my intellectual desire to see a complicated, self-actualized female character in the "quality television" adventure landscape.
Outlander showrunner Ronald D. Moore
Starz
This "catering to" women is at once Outlander's largest asset and biggest challenge. The text is firmly in the adventure mode — with a bit of romance, sci-fi, and historical fiction woven together throughout. But back in 1991, it was marketed as a romance — a designation, as author Diana Gabaldon told BuzzFeed, to which she agreed to only at the urging of her agent, who told her that a science fiction best-seller was 50,000 copies…while a romance best-seller was more like 500,000. But Gabaldon, who worked as a scientist while crafting complicated, genre-bending narratives in her spare time, exacted a promise from the publisher: If the book became "visible" (e.g., it made its way to the New York Times best-sellers list), then they would re-situate it as "general fiction."
Outlander did, indeed, make the best-sellers list — and the first book, along with its seven sequels, have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. Today, you can mention Outlander in a group of women, no matter the age, and chances are at least a quarter will have read it. From the beginning, they were known as "word of mouth" books, meaning that people read them not because of some marketing campaign, but because friends told them to. And it's been in this mode that these books have spread through generations and continents, weaving a web of shared narrative experience that can anchor families, friendships, and relationships. When you find someone who's read Outlander, in other words, you'll always have something to talk about.
Describing this book and its following recalls another literary phenomenon: George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, the first five books of which have sold 24 million copies in North America alone. Like Outlander, A Song of Ice and Fire is complicated to explain and market: While Outlander takes place in historically accurate Scotland, Ice and Fire spans a sprawling world with no semblance to our own. Outlander follows one woman's narrative; Ice and Fire changes from one corner of the kingdom of Westeros to another with every chapter. But both are members of otherwise denigrated, "pulpy" genres — even if we call Outlander an adventure novel, it's still mass market, "popular fiction," "not serious."
All of those designations are taste culture bullshit, but that sort of thing matters when talking about what becomes fodder for a television or movie adaptation. Or does it? The record-breaking success of Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, and Divergent prove that YA, an equally denigrated genre, is now the engine of Hollywood. Good stories, read by millions of people, make good (and blockbuster) movies.
And Game of Thrones proved that similarly "pre-sold" (an industry word to connote a preexisting fandom) books can be translated into television ratings. Granted, Game of Thrones also benefits from a monumental budget (an individual episode has a reported budget of around $6 million), but its ratings, which topped 18.6 million for Season 4, made it the most watched HBO series of all time.
Which is another way of saying that ornate, complex, pre-sold properties are hot. It's thus no surprise that Starz, under the advisement of Chris Albrecht (who, as chairman and CEO of HBO, ushered in the so-called "golden age" of television in the early 2000s), has been attempting to establish itself as a premium cable powerhouse.
Previous attempts have mostly fallen flat; Spartacus is the only Starz series to last more than two seasons, averaging, in its first season, a little over a million viewers per episode. Along with other Starz original programming Torchwood and Da Vinci's Demons, Spartacus always felt like the 21st-century version of the classic Hollywood B-movie: derivative conceits, hokey plot lines, clunky dialogue, and production values that only look shiny from a distance.
I don't mean to rag on Starz so much as identify its production strategy, which, broadly defined, was to emulate the "quality" markers of premium cable on a smaller scale and make the brand visible as a viable competitor. But Starz will never beat HBO at the game that Albrecht himself created: With seemingly infinite resources, HBO's productions will always be lusher, better promoted, and enjoy the "quality" connotations that accompany the HBO brand. (Starz, by contrast, struggles to shake the fact that it has a Z at the end of its name).
Outlander, however, marks both an adoption of HBO's Game of Thrones strategy and, I'd contend, an intelligent deviation from it. As showrunner Moore told BuzzFeed, "[Game of Thrones] blazed the trail in terms of, 'Hey, you can take a series of books, and successfully translate that fan reaction to a general television audience. So absolutely, we all owe a debt to them ... but we made a conscious decision early on that we're not going to play in their backyard ... They own that property," Moore continued, "so we're gonna do something that's specific to ours over here."
Put differently, Outlander is not a Game of Thrones also-ran. Sure, it takes place in a location with keen resemblance to the once-Stark-dominated kingdom of The North, and both Outlander and Thrones escape neat genre delineation, mixing fantasy, romance, action, and sci-fi. But the similarities stop there. In Outlander, honor is paramount; in Thrones, honor signals the swiftness with which a character will meet their death.
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