The Feminist AF ‘Good Girls Revolt’ Is Not ‘Mad Men’—And That’s A Great Thing

Don Draper is gonna want to sit down for this one. Amazon’s new original series Good Girls Revolt premieres this week and is drawing many comparisons to Mad Men, which is both fair and entirely unfair, and so wildly on the nose, considering the entire series is about justice.
So yes, Good Girls Revolt takes place in 1969, making it nearly impossible to not compare the two series. There are a few musical cues and a handful of wardrobe choices that could be swapped between either show, and then that’s where the similarities end.
Good Girls Revolt follows a group of women working at a magazine, News of the Week, that boldly band together to stand up for themselves and demand equality at work. The pilot is based on Lynn Povich’s book The Good Girls Revolt, which chronicled the discrimination charge that women in 1970 brought to the EEOC. Think if Mad Men was about Peggy and Joan, and really about them, and you’re starting to see where Good Girls Revolt is going. The show covers women’s issues in the workplace, at home, and out in the ever-changing world.

I recently sat down with the stars and creators of the show in New York City, and the former AMC drama was impossible to avoid, but they had an interesting perspective on the comparison.

“I think that the comparison is flattering. If it gets a conversation started about people watching the show, then I take it and I think it’s not wrong to compare, but I think the comparison begins and ends with the era hand-off,” star Chris Diamantopoulos, who plays the magazine’s editor, Finn, explained. “So where one show ended an era, we are picking up. The main difference I think is that while Mad Men was this mellifluous and morose tone, we are embracing the new decade and all of the vibrance and color and the explosive momentum is what makes our show so very different. I don’t know that it’s exactly accurate but I think we would be more analogous to like a dramatic Sex and the City period piece than we are to Mad Men. I think that the crossover is era-specific. I think the crossover is also from a socioeconomic standpoint, because of that era you can see certain actions are very similar. I love the notion that Patti (Genevieve Angelson) is Don Draper and I am January Jones. But I believe that our show is gonna give audiences that still have a taste and hunger for that, it’s gonna satiate the appetite with a new flavor. And thusly, I think it allows us less to be voyeuristic and peering into the world and more to ask ourselves questions as we’re watching. [Patti’s] character almost becomes the moderator of past and present. It’s like she’s talking to us in many regards. So, I think it’s more inclusive that way.”
Executive producer Dana Calvo agreed, noting, “I loved Mad Men. I was a huge fan. Matthew Weiner is a genius. The only thing that, to me, is similar is that it’s a period drama set in New York. But, Don Draper, to me, is the American Marlboro Man, this isolated, brooding, misunderstood guy who probably could use a couple of years of therapy. I feel like our show is sunnier and more optimistic. Women process and share things and form a sisterhood and they move forward together, so I think tonally it’s different. I also just think when you’re shifting the point of view to the female gaze, a revolution or evolution looks a lot differently.”
“In the 70s, everything was happening all the time,” executive producer Lynda Obst continued. “Women were changing overnight. You never see that in Mad Men, people don’t change overnight. Some of them never changed at all. You could argue that Don Draper finally changed in the last episode. He changed very gradually. But here, in this era, change was so dramatic. People were taking acid and becoming leather pants-makers the next day. Really, I would wake up one morning and one of my friends would become Jesus and the other would become a leather pants-maker. People were just changing overnight.”

Ok, so speaking of pants though, can we just touch quickly on the wardrobe? Some of the pieces are just so beautiful, both time-specific and timeless at the same time. So what stood out to the people actually working on the show?
“I just loved wearing the suits. I got to wear a casual outfit like one or two scenes,” Hunter Parrish reminisced. Diamantopoulos enjoyed seeing him wear the suits too, chiming in that, “He looks like Robert Redford, I’m not kidding.”
“Killin’ it!” Joy Bryant exclaimed.
“I like the ties, there were these great vintage handmade ties that were just a blend of manmade and God knows what synthetic materials, just put together the great 1970s ties,” Diamantopoulos offered.
“Finn was incredibly well-dressed, too. His suits were just cool,” executive producer Jeff Okin observed.
Executive producer Darlene Hunt admitted, “It was usually Patty’s [looks] that stood out to me. But Jane (Anna Camp) has a green plaid dress that I was obsessed with.”
“I liked Jane’s black sweater with the spider leg strands and the high-waisted Kelly green skirt with the Santa Claus belt. I thought that was so sharp,” Calvo said. It should be noted that we were all in agreeance about a beautiful white coat Jane wears in episode 5. You won’t be able to miss it!
Bryant had fun with a different part of the wardrobe, the stunning afro she got to wear, which stands out from the moment she enters the story. Also noteworthy is that Bryant plays one of just a few real people portrayed on the show, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the ALCU attorney that leads the ladies in the first class-action sexual discrimination case in the country. Bryant described her first meeting with Norton, explaining, “I met with her two days before I filmed by scene for the pilot. We were shooting the pilot in New York, I took a train to D.C., I had an hour with her, and I was so nervous to meet her. I just wanted her to love me. I’m sitting in the reception area, looking at my notes and I’m joking around with her staff members, and when she opens the door, she’s just like ‘Ahh! Ahh!’ and I’m like ‘Ahh! Ahh!’ and then we just hugged and embraced and then it was on. I don’t remember the rest. But yeah, it was a nice icebreaker. I saw her again some months later I went down there, she invited me to do a panel discussion for the congressional black caucus on diversity in Hollywood and stuff so I got to see her again. Then I saw her again when I was down for International Women’s Day, I was lobbying on behalf of Oxfam and I was like, Oh I happen to know Eleanor Holmes Norton so I’ll take that meeting, and we lobbied her on behalf the legislation on disaster relief and got her support.”

The other noteworthy real person depicted in Good Girls Revolt is Nora Ephron, played by Grace Gummer. Hunt explained how it worked with two real characters among the fictional ones, explaining that, “The only things that were bound to real-life were characters, Nora Ephron, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, being that she’s alive, we wanted to do her right. But, legally, she was very happy to sign off and say, ‘Godspeed. Yes, use my name, and my likeness and I understand that things will be dramatized,’ but we also sent her pages from the scenes that she’s in and get feedback. Sometimes she’ll say, ‘I wouldn’t use that word,’ and that type of thing.”
So between the story of these women, and the female lawyer that represented them in such a landmark case, does it feel like we’ve made progress? Or does it feel like we’ve got sooo much farther to go?
“If we were now where we were then, it would be a massive tragedy given that these women were the pioneers and they were brave enough to put everything on the line,” Diamantopoulos noted. “We’ve gotten to a place that is much better than it was, but it’s shocking that half a century later we’re still fighting the fight. It’s a more concentrated fight, and it’s a fight that we don’t have to do in the shadows.”
Parrish agreed, saying of his character, “Doug is always intrigued about just starting the conversation. If he was watching the show, I think he’d find it captivating. I think he’d find it challenging, but I think he’d find it captivating.”
Hunt went on to explain, “All the conversations that are happening right now with the election, all of it fits in nicely to the conversations that come of watching our show and it’s cool and exciting. What I feel is a little bit new or relevant is that we’re just continuing the conversation about feminism, talking about where we are and where we need to go from here so it’s exciting. But sometimes it does make me a little sad, I feel like we’re not as far along as where it would be nice to be.”
But Obst, having the perspective of working in the 70s and today, has a much more positive outlook on all of it, reminding us that, “We have human resources departments now and we have a vocabulary for sexual harassment now. In our kinds of jobs there are really neat guys who are as appalled by what’s going on as we are. The guys we raised are much more enlightened than the guys that I went to work with. There are so many guys raising their children, there are so many guys who wouldn’t consider not going to a PTA meeting, or something like that. So I think from a sociological point of view, we’ve come a very long way. But there are pockets of America that hasn’t changed. And there are aspects of workplace that still need a tremendous amount of reparation. Clearly, Silicon Valley and Wall Street are not as enlightened as the newsroom or not as enlightened as Hollywood. Where we at least have close to equal pay, or we can get to the point where we can get equal pay eventually. So I think we’re much better off than we were. But at the same time what this election has done, is show us that there’s a backlash going on and women are the victims of it, and they basically would like us to stay pregnant in the kitchen. So there’s a lot more to be done.”

In speaking about his character, Diamantopoulos perhaps summed it up best, offering, “The tragedy for me of you can have it all, you just can’t have it all at the same time. That for me, that’s Finn. That’s where I realized the writers did a great job for the male characters. The women are struggling, and their struggle is real, and revolution is important. But, for a guy that’s the editor of a magazine, there’s no way that he can keep his marriage alive while keeping the magazine alive. And it’s so tragic to realize that you’ve gotta pick one or the other. He tried to pick both and both failed, and then you have to pick up the pieces to one and let go of the other. And that saying, ‘you can have it all you just can’t have it all at the same time,’ so you’re gonna have to sacrifice something.”
While the concept of having it all is certainly nothing new to any modern woman, it is eye opening to realize what the women of 40 years ago had, and more importantly, didn’t have. Good Girls Revolt hits on the topics we hear about every day in 2016: equal pay, birth control, race relations, etc., but they do it in a way that is much more hopeful and optimistic than we are used to seeing in a show like Mad Men, or even seeing in our current lives. It’s an important show for the time we are living in, just days away from a gigantic election. Good Girls Revolt will make you think about where we were, where we are, and where we’re going— and what it will take to get us there. This Amazon original shines a light on important topics, helping us to examine our own thoughts about those topics in the process. Good Girls Revolt will make you feel intrigued, introspective, and inspired to be the nasty woman you are.
[Watch Good Girls Revolt on Amazon Prime]