“I’m not trying to be Tolstoy”: Women’s Authorship in Selected Television Series

Abstract

Authorship in television series is a complicated and self-contradictory notion, particularly given the collaborative nature of such texts. At the same time, the growing recognition of television as a significant art form has entailed the search for an artist to whom it can be at-tributed, and auteur theory has, in recent decades, become increasingly prominent in television criticism. Notably, the rank of auteur, and the prestige it confers, has been applied predomi-nantly to men. The present article attempts to consider this context while analysing three ac-claimed television series depicting women writers, namely Sex and the City, Girls and I May Destroy You, noting their thematic similarities, including self-referentiality and consistent pre-occupation with autobiographical writing and its ethical dimension. In addition, the article ad-dresses the ways in which the three series interpret and deconstruct the figure of the woman artist