What unites the trio of ladies at the center of this haunting and heartbreaking new series about desire and intimacy? “They all had [the] audacity to believe that they deserved more. They were women who needed to be seen,” says Three Women narrator Gia (Shailene Woodley, Big Little Lies, The Fault in Our Stars), who’s traveling the country to write a book about sex in America. Inspired by award-winning journalist Lisa Taddeo’s scorching non-fiction literary bestseller, the series follows three “ordinary” but wildly fascinating women poised on the precipice of radical life transformations whom Taddeo, the series creator, met in her journeys across the country. Taddeo herself, through the character of Gia, became a fourth character in the series and its connective tissue.
As she was writing the 2019 book, Taddeo felt “severely broken” by grief after the death of her parents. As she traveled around the country, she says, “I was looking for people whose understanding of their life experiences was very deep and that I could connect to…Talking to people about their traumas and desires was a road back to healing for me, a road back to a real home, something that felt true.”
In the series, Lina (Betty Gilpin, Glow, Mrs. Davis), an Indiana homemaker stuck in a passionless marriage, embarks on an affair with a long-lost love from high school that threatens to consume her. Sloane (DeWanda Wise, She’s Gotta Have It), a confident, strikingly gorgeous business owner on Martha’s Vineyard in a loving but open relationship with her husband (Blair Underwood, L.A. Law, Quantico), finds herself perilously drawn to an alluring stranger while juggling a budding friendship with his girlfriend and a fraught relationship with her own mother. Then there’s Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy, In My Skin), a young woman who had an affair with her married English teacher as a North Dakota high school student and decides to publicly expose the truth about their inappropriate relationship.
She did not choose the women to focus her book on as much as they chose her, she explains. “They gave me insight into their lived experiences and emotional access to themselves,” she says, “which is the hardest thing to do when telling your story, especially if there’s shame and trauma and desire attached to it.”
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In creating the series, Taddeo, showrunner Laura Eason, and their writing staff created the composite character of Sloane, which she drew from several women Taddeo met in her travels. In the book, Sloane was based largely on one white woman. But before Taddeo met her, she’d been speaking with a Black woman who “ultimately decided she didn’t want her story in the book,” Taddeo explains. “She was an exciting woman with a bright, wild life. For the series, I wanted a woman who was out there advocating for herself, a louder presence.” So Sloane is inspired by both of these real-life people, along with the “lived experiences” of two of her writers, Chisa Hutchinson and Tori Sampson, who she credits as “the main architects of Sloane’s story.”
With Gia, Taddeo and the writers needed to create a character who could best “unite these three women on screen.” But they didn’t want to do anything that felt “contrived” or “inorganic” that could “pollute” the story, since it’s inspired by a work of nonfiction. “So we used the real-life link between the women, the author”—based on Taddeo herself. Not only does Gia seek out and persuade these three women to tell their stories, her relationships with them will change the course of her life, just as she’s navigating a fledgling, tentative new love story of her own with a guy who starts as a one-night stand (John Patrick Amedori).
“At the start of the series, Gia is grieving the loss of her parents, as I was when I started writing the book,” Taddeo says. “Had Gia not been at that place in her life, the women she ended up talking to might never have spoken to her. Other people won’t talk to you about the hard and deep fissures in their lives unless you’re coming from a place of empathy and understanding.”
Eason (House of Cards, The Loudest Voice), who’s also an executive producer, says it was also vital to “harness the visual power of television” as they set out to depict desire from the female perspective. “Stories that might otherwise be dismissed as ordinary or pejoratively labeled as ‘domestic,’ we give a visually stunning, emotionally powerful cinematic treatment,” Eason says. “Shooting in gorgeous widescreen with stunning lens flares and deeply saturated colors, we strove to capture the nature of these women’s inner lives.”
For Taddeo, the series’ main theme is “the understanding that what we all want is to be seen and loved for who we are.” By telling these disparate but interconnected stories, Taddeo says she hopes “to invite more women to tell their stories.”
Three Women, Series Premiere, Friday, September 13, 10/9c, Starz