Hillary’s Gutsy, Meghan’s Archetypes, and the rise of irrelevant feminism

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, are sitting on a park bench on the grounds of the Palais Royal.

The former secretary of state and US presidential nominee turns to her daughter and asks: “Do you know what happens if you drink too much tea in Paris?”

Chelsea, an International Relations DPhil who is also a children’s author and global health advocate, appears bewildered.

“You’re-a-peein’,” her mother – once the most powerful woman in politics – tells her with a guffaw.

Except the real punchline is that this is a scene from their new Apple TV Plus series called Gutsy. The joke, if you think about it, is that this is what one of the savviest and most successful people in American life has been reduced to doing for work.

Across the eight-episode series, which made its debut on Friday, the Clintons tour the globe speaking to different kinds of “gutsy” women, some of whom are so much gutsier than others it makes a mockery of the #girlboss-era watchword. In the first episode, for example, the “gutsy” women are stand-up comics, including Wanda Sykes and Amy Schumer, who talk about performing to hostile audiences, among other topics. In the second episode, they are women who escaped violent lives of political extremism or lost their own children to hate crimes. The point is to explain all the different, inspiring ways that women can be bold. The audience for this show, I fear, is what little is left of the Pantsuit Nation, the zeitgeisty Facebook group of HRC supporters that formed during the 2016 election.

Gutsy is a lot like the Duchess of Sussex’s new Spotify podcast Archetypes – another show in which a powerful woman speaks to other powerful women about the labels they’ve overcome on the way to becoming so powerful. So far, three episodes have been released: Serena Williams on “ambition”, Mariah Carey on “diva” and Mindy Kaling on “singleton”.

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Don’t get me wrong: these aren’t terrible shows. It’s sort of fascinating to watch Hillary and Chelsea Clinton figure out what useful thing they can do with the resources they have – namely, fame and good intentions. It’s more or less the same journey Meghan – whose mellifluous speaking voice I found profoundly calming – is on following her exit from royal life.

But neither are they the energising calls to action they strive to be. The guests – as accomplished as they are – can’t distract from the fact that the Clintons and Meghan aren’t particularly suited to their new line of work. They don’t have the journalistic instincts to challenge their guests or Oprah’s uncanny ability to extract tears and secrets. The sad takeaway at the end of every episode is that show business, much like the rest of the world, doesn’t know what to do with these women – women who’ve been tagged as “unlikeable” despite having few obvious flaws.

And a fixation with “unlikeability” is, at the end of the day, these series’ shared weakness. Instead of grappling meaningfully with misogyny and inequality in its most pernicious forms, they give us conversations about name-calling. Meghan wants to stop being labelled unlikeable not simply because it’s sexist – which it is! – but because actually she really is very likeable, if only you’d get to know her like her friends do. In her conversation with Williams, Meghan alludes to the text message conversations they’ve already had concerning the issues they’re chatting about on-air. Archetypes isn’t just a chance to get to know Williams more, but to be her. Which is to say, to be the person who gets to hear Meghan’s innermost, highly likeable thoughts.

Because it’s as impossible to ignore the transparent reputation rehab at work here as it is to believe that celebs interrogating feminist buzzwords can change a regular person’s real experience. The appeal of these shows isn’t the content. It’s the peek behind the curtain at the women asking the questions and (selectively) making personal revelations. When Meghan hosted Williams, it was the previously undisclosed story of a fire that broke out in her son Archie’s nursery that led the next day’s news coverage. The most compelling part of Gutsy is Chelsea’s frequent discussion of her childhood, which was marked with a pervasive sense of hatred unique to the White House jungle gym. Feminism may be the shows’ shared theme, but it’s not what the shows are about.

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Some people are born to host – mostly Oprah. But others have lived too much of their extraordinary lives in the public eye to disappear into the role. Every question these women ask about womanhood feels as pointedly thrilling as the answers they get. Some people, no matter how far they’re willing to go to host the interview – like, say, to Paris, with their daughter, to interview clowns – don’t know how to stop being the talk show’s guest.