Oh, The Agony! The Ratings!

By Richard Zoglin

Anita Hill didn't know how easy she had it. Compared with the women being manhandled every week in made-for-TV movies, Clarence Thomas' accuser got kid- glove treatment from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Consider just a few story lines from recent or soon-to-air network films:

-- An unmarried mother of three is sent to prison after being wrongly convicted of selling cocaine. There she grapples with the problem of trying to raise her kids from inside the slammer.

-- A female surgeon is raped by a man posing as a hospital employee. The police can't find the culprit, but she does -- when he turns up on her operating table.

-- A woman plans an extramarital affair with the help of her best friend. But the one-night stand goes awry, and when her friend is found dead the next morning, the adulteress is charged with murder.

-- A dental hygienist marries her boss, who turns out to be a class-A sleazeball. He beats her nearly to death on their honeymoon, finishes the job a few years later, then battles the woman's sister for custody of the couple's infant son.

Women certainly can't complain that TV is ignoring them. They are, in fact, the dramatic focus of an increasingly large proportion of prime-time fare. According to Nielsen figures, the adult audience on a typical fall evening is more than 58% female. For drama shows, the figure rises to 61%. Result: with a few hairy-chested exceptions (NBC's upcoming The Return of Eliot Ness), the vast majority of network movies and mini-series -- particularly during November's important ratings "sweeps" -- are aimed squarely at female viewers.

But such attention comes at a daunting price: the rise of the victimization drama. We're not talking about glitzy, Danielle Steel soap operas, or the traditional disease-of-the-week tearjerker. These are more "serious" dramas, frequently based on real-life news events and dealing with important issues. Stripped to their essence, however, they are about one thing: extravagant, glorious suffering.

The formula is depressingly familiar: a happy woman has her life shattered by a senseless crime, family tragedy or miscarriage of justice. From then on, society conspires against her with the intensity of the manhunt that pursued Thelma and Louise. Her enemies are smart and conniving, her allies weak and ineffectual. Her husband may try to help, but he is typically unreliable. Children, though loving, can be cruel. And everybody yells at her.

Even when misfortune befalls others, it is the woman who seems to bear the burden. In ABC's Stranger in the Family, a teenager is stricken with amnesia after an auto accident. But the drama focuses on his mother (Teri Garr) and her efforts to recapture her "lost" son. In CBS's My Son Johnny, Rick Schroder plays a small-time hood who has brutalized his younger brother from childhood. Again, Mom (Michele Lee) is the star sufferer: she is forced to recognize that she has raised a bad boy.

Then there is the woman as surrogate victim. In NBC's She Says She's Innocent, Katey Sagal is the mother of a teenager wrongly accused of murdering a classmate. In one scene, Mom pays a consoling visit to the dead girl's parents. "Your daughter murdered my baby!" screams the mother in reply. "Now there's only one thing I'm living for, and that is to watch you suffer!" Thanks, and have a nice day.

The more virtuous and successful the woman, the more precarious her position. In NBC's Deadly Medicine, Veronica Hamel plays a pediatrician with a loving husband who is building their dream house. Her downfall begins when she hires a nurse (Susan Ruttan) who turns out to be a baby killer. The doctor, naturally, is accused of the crime, and the result is a witch-hunt that would have done Salem proud: patients leave her, crank callers pester her, and her husband turns icy.

Jaclyn Smith goes through a nearly identical cycle of abuse in CBS's The Rape of Dr. Willis. The former Charlie's Angel plays a doctor who performs emergency surgery to try to save the man who raped her. Fat lot of good it does. The creep dies anyway, and the doctor is forced to defend herself against charges that she purposely let him die. Snarls a prosecutor: "What happened to your thirst for revenge?" So much for professional ethics.

The hysterical classic of this genre may be False Arrest, a two-part ABC drama this week. Donna Mills, TV's most heart-wrenching sufferer, plays a businessman's wife who is falsely accused of ordering the murder of her husband's partner. It's all downhill from there. In jail she is brutally raped. Out on bail, she gets vicious phone calls ("Murderer! You're gonna burn in hell!"). At her trial, she is framed by lying lowlifes. Once in prison, she learns that her husband has emptied her bank account and disappeared. Her kids stop coming to visit. Even her lawyer drops her case without explanation. And Job thought he had bad days.

Are these masochistic dramas expressing women's insecurity about their feminist-era advances? Or simply the exploitative shrewdness of the mostly male producers who concoct them? The films smartly cover all bases. They put women in the time-tested role of victim, yet focus on strong characters who, for all their troubles, triumph in the end. The dramas become parables of feminist self-realization. For Mills, things start to turn around in prison when she learns to depend on no one but herself. "You wanna get out of here?" an inmate tells her. "Grow up!" Fine for her to say. But for TV's women sufferers, the next rapist, murderer or slimy attorney is just around the corner.