This Women’s Month, we shine a much-deserved spotlight on the women who’ve brought us award-winning shows on Showmax.
Big Little Lies
Boasting a stellar female cast and a plot that thickens with each episode, this show captured viewers from the get-go and we’ve been hooked on the lies and deceit in both seasons. Five women who live in Monterey, California, all share a secret – but as we all know, if two people know, it’s no longer a secret. Produced by Nicole Kidman, who also stars alongside Meryl Streep, Zoe Kravitz and Reese Witherspoon.
Little Fires Everywhere
This Emmy-nominated series is produced by two Hollywood A-listers, Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, who also star as the two lead actors. Based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Celeste Ng, this eight-part mini-series explores hard-hitting themes of race, privilege and class. Reese plays Elena Richardson, a perfect suburban mom with perfectly curated family pictures on display in her big mansion – except the mansion has just gone up in flames. Meanwhile, Mia Warren (Kerry Washington) is a homeless mom who sleeps in her car and the two women’s lives intersect in an unexpected way.
Watchmen
In an alternate universe of the United States where the internet is outlawed and masked vigilantes are hunted because of their violent solutions to problems, a group of vigilantes band together to mutiny against law enforcement. Nicole Kassell, executive producer of this superhero drama, has also directed fan favourites like The Americans, Castle Rock and Westworld. Academy Award winner Regina King leads the cast as Angela Abar in a series that received 26 Emmy nominations.
Films directed by Shirley Frimpong-Manso
‘Until the lion learns how to write, history will always glorify the hunter’. This African proverb resonates with Shirley Frimpong-Manso, the Ghanaian film director, writer and producer. When she became increasingly irritated at how Ghanaian films portray women as weak-willed, glorified passive slaves, Frimpong-Manso set about changing this narrative by writing and producing work with female leads who can hold their own in the real world.
In her thriller Potomanto, we see Susan entangled in the criminal world of illegal organ harvesting and investigating bizarre murders.
In Potato Potahto, Lulu (played by Joselyn Dumas) and her ex-husband Tony (O.C Ukeje) have decided to live in the same house even though they’re divorced. While the idea seemed good at first, Lulu soon realises that whatever a man can do, she can do even better. Shakespeare’s words, ‘the villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction’ is Lulu’s mantra.
The devil really is in the detail in Frimpong-Manso’s 2014 psychological thriller, Devil in the Detail. Ben and his wife are both leading double lives and with infidelity from sides, the couple find themselves at a crossroads of wanting to have that proverbial cake and eat it too.
Even though they can’t escape the patriarchal society they live in, the three female characters in The Perfect Picture have vowed to chart their own courses.
Shampaign is a series about Nana (Jocelyn Dumas), an ambitious single mother of a teenage boy who’s on her way to becoming Ghana’s first female president.
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