In the early to mid-2000s, the coolest main character was a female spy. brought TV AliasSydney Bristow for Young Adults and Kim possible to children. Charlie’s Angels was rebooted for film. And in games, Joanna Dark became the heroine of Perfectly darkthe spiritual successor of Golden Eye 007. The era swam in female James Bonds. Even Die another day bucked the trend and introduced Halle Berry as Jinx, Bond’s NSA counterpart.
The genre was open to new imaginations, at a time when representations of women on screen were evolving from damsels in distress to action heroines and protagonists. We recently spoke to some of the key people involved to learn more about how the trend came about and how its legacy has continued.
Jeff Pinkner, writer and executive producer Alias, credits the moment the show was more than anything else. Although he says the Alias The writing team didn’t set out to create a show about women’s empowerment, but he points to a media shift following the male-centric spy stories of the ’60s and ’70s.
“It was too late,” says Kim possible co-creator Robert Schooley. With a few decades removed from the height of Cold War espionage media, the team wanted to subvert their old tropes. The over-the-top, fantastic villain schemes, like shark tanks and mountain caves, could stay, but Kim, as a new face to a new generation, wouldn’t be shy about saying how played-out they were.
“We looked at the spy and hero characters [we had] when we were growing up and it was the ‘Jims,'” says Schooley. In other words, in addition to James Bond, Star Trek’s James T. Kirk and The Wild Wild WestJim West’s were the blueprint. Schooley and co-creator Mark McCorkle were also tasked with creating a series for the Disney Channel whose audiences were primarily female. (The show’s mix of action and comedy eventually made it popular with boys, too, boosting Disney Channel’s overall male audience.)
“[Our daughters] didn’t have that kind of character where the action part is ridiculously easy for her,” says Schooley. By switching the classic hero’s gender, they wanted to create a girl who could do anything but keep it away from supernatural abilities. says McCorkle.
In particular, James Bond’s action-oriented, espionage-in-the-name antics became the basis for many of these early 2000s properties. Kim possibleIts cartoon character and younger audience meant it could have been more comedic, but Pinkner says Aliasalso avoided mimicking real spycraft. It was “intended to take place 3 feet above the ground,” he says.
As for why this Bond-inspired resurgence included so many women, the 2000s was an era where the landscape began to open up beyond Bond girls or femme fatales. As McCorkle puts it, “The world was just kind of ready for female characters who could kick ass.”
Both Pinkner and Schooley bring it up Buffy the vampire killerwhich premiered in 1997 and had a huge influence different ways about pop culture. An important one was the wave of evil-fighting heroines that followed Buffyis awake. The show was a direct influence on kim possible, according to Schooley, while Pinkner says it opened the door by being directly about “female empowerment.” although Buffy may not have been a spy himself, but the path was paved for the action-oriented female agent.
Buffy was also notable for its entrenchment in the emotional life of its heroine, and there was a similar movement to focus on the inwardness of these spies. Of Kim possible And Alias, the high school and college settings, respectively, allowed for an exploration of the spies’ personal lives. In Kim possible it also played on the undermining of the earlier espionage media. Everyone at Kim’s school knew if she had disarmed a nuclear bomb over the weekend—she didn’t have to keep it a secret, but it wouldn’t earn her a social reputation either. “They consider it no big deal,” says McCorkle.
On the other hand, Sydney’s double life in Alias and the connections between her family and her job allowed for a nuanced exploration of her character. “I’m shocking, incredibly capable, valuable and important,” says Pinkner, summarizing the character’s arc:[but] I am someone who has no control over my own life.” Digging into that tension gave Alias its emotional center.
Also in games the idea arose to give female heroines more complexity. In a interview with Eurogamer, Perfectly dark animator Brett Jones said the team was trying to create a less “two-dimensional” Lara Croft. And it returns to the reinvention of James Bond – Rare’s earlier game, Golden Eye 007didn’t really need to give Bond much emotional depth.
Female spies continued to pop up after the mid-2000s and may even be experiencing a resurgence in film now, thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s elaboration of Black Widow in recent years, along with standalone films such as Atomic blond And Red Sparrow. But as Pinkner points out, Alias was “remarkable” at the time for its female lead – something that is now “just part of the landscape, as it should be.”
The sudden concentration of female spy characters was something of a “lightning-in-a-bottle” moment, McCorkle says. “Sometimes storytellers have that idea that just happens to create a jitter that the audience didn’t know was there. […] For those of us who have benefited from it [the trend]you can only call it a happy accident.