If you’d told me at the start of this decade that I’d end it struggling to remember all the wild, wigged-out shows made by and about women in the past 10 years—because there have been so many—I’d have shot you a fourth-wall-breaking Fleabag look of wide-eyed astonishment. Of course there was no Fleabag back then, and little prospect that such a gloriously damaged and subversive character would ever be given the keys to a whole TV series, let alone trigger a cascade of awards for creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s mold-breaking writing and acting.

Ten years ago Hollywood was patting itself on the back for transforming television into the leading art form of our time. But this new golden age of TV largely limited its gold dust distribution to straight white men: charismatic antiheroes like Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White, created by famously driven and difficult showrunners like David Chase, Matthew Weiner, and Vince Gilligan. There was nothing on the air then that was anything like Fleabag or shows like Russian Doll, Insecure, Unbelievable, Undone, Dickinson, Vida, Shrill, PEN15, Killing Eve, Dead to Me, Back to Life, Jane the Virgin, The Bisexual, The Morning Show, Better Things, A Black Lady Sketch Show, Catastrophe, GLOW, Transparent, Tuca & Bertie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Act, or Broad City. And that is just an incomplete list drawn from the past 12 months or so of television.

In those days you could count the number of powerful female showrunners in network and cable on a single hand. Shonda Rhimes had burst onto ABC at a moment when the network was at ratings rock bottom. Tina Fey likewise launched 30 Rock when NBC was struggling, and she would satirize network exec machinations over the course of the series, starting with fake NBC boss Jack Donaghy’s decision to make The Girlie Show, the comedy’s show-within-a show, less girlie to attract more young male viewers. (That was based firmly in reality; years later, New Girl creator Liz Meriwether told me of meetings where network execs were asking for more male characters and “telling us we basically had to appeal to men.”) Finally, there was Jenji Kohan, whose aim with Weeds was to create a female antiheroine equivalent to Tony Soprano and Walter White in the form of Mary-Louise Parker’s soccer mom turned drug dealer. The dramedy helped Showtime gain traction against the premium-cable experimentation of HBO. Yet when Kohan pitched her next project to the network—a series about women in prison called Orange Is the New Black—it turned her down. So did HBO.

Kohan landed at Netflix, then just beginning to develop original content. Orange—and its uproarious array of female characters—premiered in 2013, and it played a crucial role in establishing the streamer as a hub for experimentation with TV form. Two years later Jill Soloway’s Transparent would likewise forge Amazon’s fledgling reputation as a quality streamer by winning the platform its first five Emmy Awards. (One of the statues was for Soloway as outstanding director of a comedy.) Soon the streamers were awash in female subjectivity, serving up adventurous fare whose emotional and sexual rawness would have once been considered far too challenging and abrasive for prime time television—running the risk of alienating that male 18-35 demographic, as Jack Donaghy could’ve pointed out.

Some of those shows didn’t last long (RIP, One Mississippi, Lady Dynamite, I Love Dick, and Tuca & Bertie). But it soon became clear that in this transitional Peak TV moment, with hundreds of programs competing for eyeballs, it actually made an unexpected commercial sense to locate unusual perspectives that had been largely locked out of the creative arena—people of color, women, gay and trans voices. For a glorious moment, stability and massive ratings seemed less important than risk-taking that would cut through the white noise.

Launching around the same time as the success of 2011’s Bridesmaids, there was a spate of fem-centric TV comedies with “girl” in their titles—Girls, New Girl, 2 Broke Girls—that played with previously prime-time-taboo topics like graphic female sexuality and menstruation. The gynecological repartee proved too much for some in the industry: In 2012, Two and a Half Men cocreator Lee Aronsohn complained to the Hollywood Reporter that “we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation…. Enough, ladies. I get it. You have periods.” But there was no putting that ‘gina back in the bottle. The rogue women of Girls—and soon Broad City, The Mindy Project, Inside Amy Schumer, and Insecure—stretched the audience’s tolerance for “difficult” women. They also paved the way for the new streaming platforms to make their marks.

The current explosion of streaming ought to mean even more room for every kind of programming. But as the decade winds down, industry sources around town have begun whispering that it’s already gotten a little tougher to get challenging women’s shows greenlighted, and that the space for quirky programming is narrowing. It’s not clear that an idiosyncratic series like Orange Is the New Black would get picked up if it were pitched today, and the fairly quick cancellations of Tuca & Bertie, One Mississippi, Forever, and The OA suggest there’s a limit to the streamers’ gonzo willingness to go out on a creative limb.

The last decade has been TV’s version of a Wild West. But as the giant streaming behemoths gear up for existential battle, with so many of them now entering the fray, there’s a strong possibility they’ll switch to playing it safe again, placing their bets on reboots, franchises, and established names to lure and hold a broad mainstream of viewers—just like the big networks did back in the day. Sure, AppleTV+ tethered its launch to two different female-driven shows, seemingly hoping to use the combo of audaciousness (Dickinson) and big-name talent (The Morning Show) to make a splash—a strategy that has resulted in the streamer’s first Golden Globe nomination. But many of the big new streamers like Disney+, the forthcoming Peacock, and HBOMax seem to be leaning toward gobbling up established I.P. and digging deep in their corporate archives for recyclable material. It’s up to the consumers now to refuse to let entertainment corporations relegate female TV to a niche again.

—The 10 best movies of the decade, according to Richard Lawson
—Honest reckonings and joyful romps: the best TV shows of the 2010s
—K. Austin Collins picks the decade’s 30 best films
—The decade reality TV grew up

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