When journalist Gia Lombardi (Shailene Woodley) announces her intention to pen a magnum opus on “sex in America,” the brief sounds overbroad — more about the author’s ambitions than any particular findings or interest in the subject. That was this reader’s issue with “Three Women,” the 2019 bestseller by writer Lisa Taddeo, which drew sweeping conclusions about feminine desire and trauma from a small handful of case studies.
But while the television adaptation of “Three Women,” also created by Taddeo and airing on Starz after a vexed, half-decade-long path to the screen, may begin with Gia’s grandiose mission statement, the show soon outgrows — though doesn’t quite move beyond — this inauspicious start. The change in medium, it turns out, rewards both the specificity of Taddeo’s own reporting and the multiplicity of perspectives necessitated by a collaborative form. We no longer experience the namesakes of “Three Women” through one writer’s prose, but through the actors who play them and the directors who construct the visual language of their entanglements, among other contributors. And how better than through sight and sound to explore a topic as inherently tactile as sex?
Gia’s subjects share their names, often pseudonyms, with those in Taddeo’s book: Lina (Betty Gilpin), an Indiana housewife who separates from her emotionally withholding husband and reconnects with a married high school ex; Sloane (DeWanda Wise), a beautiful and successful entrepreneur on Martha’s Vineyard whose own spouse likes to watch her get physical with others; and Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy), a North Dakota twentysomething who decides to report her former English teacher for an affair while she was underage. (“Three Women” uses both Maggie and teacher Aaron Knodel’s real names. Each episode featuring Maggie opens with the disclaimer that Knodel was never found guilty and the series represents her side of the story.)
The most significant changes Taddeo and showrunner Laura Eason make are to Sloane. All three characters in Taddeo’s book are white, one of many obstacles to her goal of extrapolating universal themes from individual stories. (Sloane and a single, unnamed lesbian in Lina’s women’s group, for instance, are the series’ sole examples of queer representation.) Both the show’s Sloane and her husband Richard (Blair Underwood), with whom she co-owns a catering business as well as a magazine-worthy house, are Black. It’s a shift with all kinds of implications for her portrayal as an aspirational figure with an emotional life more troubled than her prosperous surface suggests. To the series’ credit, it follows through on all of them, particularly with respect to Sloane’s family history. Other tweaks, like Sloane’s building attraction to both halves of a local working-class couple, have more of an eye toward injecting active plot into what would otherwise be a static portrait.
Across Lina, Sloane and Maggie’s stories, the standout element is the use of intimacy. There hasn’t been a show this formally rooted in female pleasure since Joey Soloway’s “I Love Dick,” a cerebral take on the cult classic novel-slash-memoir from 2017 that now reads like a relic of the streaming era’s pre-austerity largesse. “Three Women” itself has been a victim of the subsequent contraction; Starz picked up “Three Women” in February 2023 after it had been axed by Showtime amid the network’s ongoing struggles. Thanks to Starz, audiences can now witness sex scenes that often unfold over 10 minutes or more — enough time to transition from initial attraction to hesitant engagement to total abandon and back again, with room for the clumsiness and slip-ups that characterize encounters between actual people rather than idealized bodies. (A particularly shocking exchange involving the contents of a Kinder egg survives the transplant from the book.) The all-women directing team, with Louise N.D. Friedberg, Cate Shortland and So Yong Kim helming multiple episodes apiece, offers hard proof of the storytelling potential sacrificed by those reflexive cuts to black.
Another unifying factor is the use of Gia’s voiceover and, eventually, her physical presence. Like the Netflix series “Inventing Anna,” “Three Women” turns a proxy for the original reporter into an active character, juxtaposing her drive to finish the soon-to-be book with her interviewees’ drive to satisfy their erotic and emotional needs. Gia even makes pilgrimage to the townhouse of legendary New Journalist Gay Talese (James Naughton). (The two share an employment history at Esquire magazine.) She draws an explicit parallel with her book-in-progress and “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” Talese’s own yearslong attempt to understand what goes on behind closed bedroom doors. Yet Gia’s narration proves cliché-ridden — “We are all in this together” — and excessive. I was reminded of “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” the FX limited series that retained much of the novel’s prose even as other aspects of the show, like the acting, performed the same function.
Gia is better used as a sort of fourth woman, with her own parental baggage (she lost both her mother and father by her early 20s) and chaotic relationships. Taddeo co-wrote the fifth episode with her now-husband, Jackson Waite, and the show fictionalizes their relationship, an impulsive hookup that grows more serious as Gia gets pregnant and Jack (John Patrick Amedori) follows her around the country. But Gia’s arc feels less complete than the others, ending abruptly and leaving some key details unclear. Rather than more fully reorder itself around her research process, “Three Women” largely retains the structure of the book, with each lead anchoring her own installments comprised of her backward-looking memories. As a result, Gia’s own storyline is nonlinear, and therefore somewhat jumbled.
But what Gia, and before her Taddeo, has found on her cross-country voyage is worthwhile. Gilpin, so great on the cruelly cut-off “G.L.O.W.,” enlivens Lina’s sense of self-discovery, making clear her journey is more about reawakening a personal sense of pleasure than her callous, philandering dud of a partner. Maggie’s experience is treated with all the delicacy the material demands. “Three Women” takes her desire for Aaron (an insidiously charming Jason Ralph) seriously, even as it’s careful to assume the vantage point of an adult Maggie who’s come to grasp the power dynamics at play. Sloane may lead the most exotic lifestyle on paper, but just as the Vineyard enters a wintery offseason when most of her drama plays out, no one is always at their camera-ready best.
“Three Women” makes its impact by digging deeper into these complicated lives, not by zooming out into generalities or working to tie them together. There’s more than enough insight into how women relate to sex under patriarchy in Lina fumbling with a vibrator as her kids play outside the laundry room, or Sloane walking out of a tense family confrontation straight into her next bad decision. Gia makes the introduction, but the eponymous trio are each a world unto themselves.
The first episode of “Three Women” is now available to stream on the Starz app, with new episodes releasing weekly on Fridays.
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