Just as women’s lives become more complicated, precarious, ridiculous, and worth watching, film and television stop putting us at the center.
There is a particularly insulting thing about becoming a woman in midlife: just as your life gets complicated enough to finally be worth writing about, the culture starts treating you like the story is over.
Mine isn’t.
I’m an actress, writer, director, producer, single mother, and lifelong maker of independent work. I am also at an age when women are expected to become a little “tamer”, a little more grateful for whatever parts remain, and a lot less demanding about being at the center of the story.
UGH! I have never been especially good at that and don’t ever plan on it.
I’ve acted on ER, 2 Days in New York, and Netflix’s On the Verge. I created Motherhoodlum, one of the first original comedy series made for YouTube. Long before everyone carried a production studio in their pocket, I was finding ways to make things without waiting for someone to give me permission.
And yet, here I am in midlife, looking for complicated, deeply human, genuinely funny stories about women my age and realizing, once again, that apparently I’m going to have to make the fucking thing myself.
SO I AM.
I created Emily Is a Magnet for Miracles, a new comedy series for Instagram.
It’s about a woman who looks like she has her life completely together. Her social media is filled with health, wellness, gratitude, strength, and alignment. It may be the best performance of her career.
Privately, she’s broke, out of work, raising two teenagers, and desperately trying to work out who she is now. She’s a people-pleasing, lovable disaster who tries incredibly hard to do the right thing while somehow making everything substantially worse.
Then, in a stunning lapse of judgment, the universe gives her miraculous powers.
This should improve her life.
It does not.
Emily has spent years reading the books, writing in the journals, listening to the podcasts, repeating the mantras, making the vision boards, and trying to manifest a better life. Literally nothing has worked.
When the miracles actually arrive, she has exactly the wrong idea: monetize them.
The series is funny, human, uncomfortable, and comedically tragic. It’s about the contradiction between the polished life we present and the much messier life happening just outside the frame. It’s about parenting, work, money, attention, ambition, friendship, and the profound indignity of attempting personal growth while everything around you refuses to cooperate.
Most of all, it’s about a woman who is suddenly capable of performing miracles for everyone except herself.
Because the one miracle Emily can’t manifest is the one she needs most: belief in herself.
I want to make a series with a woman in midlife at its absolute center. She isn’t the mother standing beside someone else’s story. She isn’t the wise friend who arrives with a bottle of wine and two lines of exposition. She isn’t gracefully fading into a tasteful beige retirement.
She is the story.
She is complicated, contradictory, totally lost and barely holding it togrther, and still 100% still becoming someone.
We have an incredible director, cast, and crew ready to make the first season. We’re raising $10,000 by September 15th to pay the people doing the work and shoot the series professionally.
This is independent filmmaking, which means there is no mysterious organization waiting in the wings with a check. There is just an idea, a group of talented people ready to make it, and the terrifying moment when I have to ask other people to help us do it.
So I’m asking.
If you want to see funny, complicated women in midlife at the center of their own stories, please support Emily Is a Magnet for Miracles.
Give what you can. Choose one of the rewards. Share the campaign. Send it to a friend. Send it to one wealthy person with excellent taste.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.