More women of the year

As Lainey said earlier this week, it’s “of the year” time, when media outlets name their best/favorite/most notable people “of the year”. We’ve had GQ’s Men of the Year and Glamour’s Women of the Year, and now it’s Harper’s Bazaar’s Women of the Year—one thing we’ll never run out of is interesting women to fete at the end of the year (sincere). 

Harper’s list (you can read the full thing here) includes two of television’s biggest stars of the year, The White Lotus’s Aimee Lou Wood and Adolescence’s Erin Doherty. Ncuti Gatwa showed up for Aimee Lou: 

…and Adolescence’s young breakout star, Emmy winner Owen Cooper, turned up for Erin. They look like a sibling duo dressed as their parents for Halloween. 

America Ferrara was there with Reese Witherspoon, whose dress looks too much like springtime for November. I generally don’t get bent out of shape about seasonal dressing but the minute I saw this dress I thought “wrong”. 

Maybe it’s just a lackluster outfit overall, but this dress is irking me like velvet in summer. 

Meanwhile, Rosamund Pike doesn’t look sure that she wants this fancy paperweight at all.

Gillian Anderson also wore yellow, but with power shoulders. She’s the “Entrepreneur of the Year” for her “wellness soda” brand, G Spot. Cute name but the minute you start talking to me about adaptogens, all I hear is bees buzzing. 

Anderson also has a new series coming to Netflix, The Abandons. It co-stars Lena Headey and Michiel Huisman. The trailer came out a couple days ago and I am intrigued.

 

Ever since the abrupt cancellation of Santa Clarita Diet, I really don’t trust Netflix anymore and am hesitant to invest in their original series unless I know it’s a limited series and Netflix can’t cancel it and leave me hanging (again). The Abandons is a limited series, but it might still be messy because there was significant creative upheaval on this series. It was created by Kurt Sutter of Sons of Anarchy fame, but he ended up leaving production with just weeks to go before wrap, and the series was technically completed without a showrunner. 

Kurt Sutter has never been the most diplomatic producer in television, but The Abandons was caught up in the streamer’s post-strike budget cutting measures. Its original ten-episode order was cut down to seven, then bumped back up to eight when they couldn’t make the pilot make sense in a single hour. So, you have a showrunner who is spiky under the best of circumstances working under pretty sh-tty circumstances, is it a wonder there was a meltdown?

It does make me curious to see how it all turns out. Were they able to pull the frying pan out of the fire and make something coherent and cohesive out of the truncated story? I am willing to find out because I already know there won’t be a second season and I’m expecting a certain level of mess. I literally cannot be disappointed.