Timeline Confusion on a TV Show
Timeline Confusion on a TV Show
The scene is a flashback. It’s looking like the 60s because the teen is in a silky turtleneck mini dress and the mom’s hair is up, cocktail hour style. But the song is Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” which came out in 1973, so probably it’s supposed to be 1973 and this group is just rocking their clothes from eight years ago. I mean, that’s how humans are, sometimes. They wear their clothes from the previous decade. Not everyone is in style all the time. And hey, maybe this song isn’t telling us it’s 1973. Maybe it’s later in the 70s and they’ve just chosen this song for this party for its metaphorical value. But judging by the fashion and the music, it’s around 1973. But who are these people?
They’re normally not on this show that is set in the now times. We’ve never seen them before. It’s a flashback, so we have to work out who they are from their names. It turns out, the teen is Jean — who in the now times is played by Gillian Anderson and her younger sister, Joanna, played in the now times by Lisa McGrillis. The scene makes plain some character history but it really confuses the timeline. It has baffled me so much, I have not been able to stop thinking about it for days. Why does this bother me so much? That’s what I’m here to work out.
The TV show is Sex Education and Gillian Anderson is Jean, the mother of the central character. She is a sex therapist and here in the fourth season, she has just had a baby. We assume the show is set in 2023 because all the tech looks like current tech and the fashion looks like extra fashionable current fashion. One of the kids has a backpack just like mine. I’m being particular about the timeline because it is the timeline about which I am confused.
Gillian Anderson, in real life, is currently 55 years old. She is a Gen-Ex icon and a member of our generation. On the show, in the previous season, it was made clear that Gillian Anderson’s character was at least a few years younger than she herself. When this character had this baby, it was a huge surprise because she assumed she was too old to get pregnant but wasn’t quite. I don’t remember how old they said she was supposed to be but I’m guessing it was about fifty. In other words, she was maybe a baby or just being born in 1973. The Sex Education Wiki says her birth year is 1973. So.
To make the time line work, this scene of her past would have to be, like, 1986 at the very least — but somehow it is a 1986 that looks like 1965 and sounds like 1973. And I saw 1986 when it happened. Maybe I even listened to Jim Croce in 1986. Maybe I even wore my mom’s mini dresses from the 60s sometimes — so it’s not impossible for 1986 to seem like another era. But not, like, all at once. It feels like this TV show is trying to imply that Jean — a character who is in her 50s now — was a teenager in the 60s or 70s instead of getting born then. I’m intensely confused by it.
Because all of these choices are on purpose. No one accidentally chooses a piece of music or a costume period. Every one of those choices is there to tell us something and yet what they are telling us is impossible, according to how time works. The show is suggesting that Gillian Anderson’s character (along with her sister) is a Baby Boomer, or at a stretch, a member of Generation Jones — when biological facts (and time) make that impossible. Gillian Anderson cannot be both a Gen X parent in 2023 AND a Baby Boom teen. Those are two mutually exclusive identities. I have tried to work out how this might be possible and it is just not.
And I suppose I’m so troubled by it because the show is otherwise very good and has accomplished this kind of beautiful balancing act of following the lives of the teens and the parents with compassion and perspective. While it is clearly a show about the teens, it treats its adults as full complicated humans, as well. Or at least it did before it decided all parents must be from the previous generations.
On most teen shows, I expect we all relate most to the teens, because we were all teens once and the teens are written to be the center — but this is one of the first shows where it’s possible to relate to the adults on the show in equal measure. They’re not parental “parents just don’t understand” archetypes. They have their own issues. It’s one of the things I really admire about the writing.
But this timeline collapse where a woman in her 50s in 2023 could somehow be a teenager in 1973 is just doing my head in. I don’t understand it. And I don’t understand why they did it.
I watched this scene again to try and make sense of it.
On second viewing, it does look have some more markers of the 70s than I noticed the first time (though a pretty square 70s if you ask me) and there are paintings that suggest the 70s, so I could buy that they are firmly trying to place us in 1973. (I mean, they paid for the rights for that particular song. Those rights can’t be cheap. They’re trying to do something with it.) But I also saw why it felt more 60s — or even 50s at first and that was because they started it all off with a reference to Simone de Beauvoir. Like, they were trying to signal a cheeky feminism in Jean’s mother in the opening moments. But in 1973, Simone de Beauvoir was very old news. To be arguing with her positions in 1973 would be like contemporary feminists arguing with Betty Friedan. Like, we might honor her work or find her problematic in some ways but she’s too of her moment to argue with. Her work is sixty years in the past.
Challenging Simone de Beauvoir sets the time period as much as the set dressing and as it was the first thing we heard, it set the bar for the OLD days. I thought it was maybe supposed to be somebody’s grandmother in the 50s, not Gen X Jean’s mom in 1973.
Ever since I became a self-appointed documenter of Gen X, I have been aware of the Gen X erasure that tends to happen. And this is a kind of erasure as well. It’s erasing Gen X childhoods and turning them into Gen Jones or Baby Boomer childhoods. I preferred it when they were just leaving us out of the lists.
What’s funny is that the 80s — when this character’s teen years actually would have been — are all the rage at the moment. It would have been on trend to place Jean in a realistic time line — instead they created this weird blend which makes it seem like this character somehow lost 10 to 15 years in her youth. Maybe she was abducted by aliens? Not on this show, no. Maybe on the show that made Gillian Anderson famous but not this one.
Anyway — I suppose it is the Gen X erasure that has gotten under my skin. It’s a little bit like the confusion in changing the time period in The Lost Daughter. Things just don’t make sense when people don’t do the math of the moments the characters are living through.
There were plenty of feminists in the 80s that they could have had Jean’s mom argue with, if they were staying true to Jean’s actual age but instead they chose a feminist born in 1908, whose major work was published in 1949, and managed to create the weirdest period drama confusion. Arguing with Simone de Beauvoir in 1973 or 1986 would as weird as arguing with her now. She’s been dead a long time. Her ideas were pretty hot in the 50s but now she’s mostly an historical reference. I catch you arguing with her ideas, I’m going to think you’re from the 50s too if you’re in a period drama. If you’re in a college classroom, okay, historical arguments make sense but at a cocktail party for squares, let me assure you that no one is discussing Simone de Beauvoir.
Anyway, I’d love some explanation for this extremely weird mix of time signals. The only one I can think of is that the showrunners are young and elided their decades or something and no one stopped to ask what the heck was going on with this timeline.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on December 31, 2023.
