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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.