5 Reasons to Set Your Sights on Killer Women

ABC’s new limited series, Killer Women, is fun. Good, clean, shoot-em-up, justice-every-time fun. This isn’t high-art sub-textual Top of the Lake or The Killing. It’s just good. Good because both the good guys and the bad guys aren’t guys at all, but women, and good because Tuesday nights are more or less a TV drama wasteland. And also good because Emmy-winner Sofia Vergara is executive producing it and Hannah Shakespeare is writing it. So...watch what the NY Post calls the hottest new show of 2014.

5. It’s as Big as Texas.
Texas gets a bad rap for being anti-woman, because...it is. But when the producers, including Vergara and Latin World Entertainment, took the Argentine drama Mujeres Asesinas and revamped it for an American audience, they moved it just far enough across the U.S. border into Texas so that what happens on the other side still matters.  

4. This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Texas Rangers.
Single-mom Molly Parker (Tricia Helfer) is following in her Daddy’s footsteps. Her daddy being the Sheriff… Molly becomes the first woman in the elite, all-male Texas Rangers. She’s got a sixth sense for murder. And plenty of it comes her way.

3. Dial Mujer for Murder.
Women kill for different reasons than men, according to Parker. Domestic violence and abuse. Obsession and revenge. Their victims are always someone they love–or loved.
　

2. We Love a Woman in Uniform.
What can we say? In her Texas Rangers uniform and hat, gun slung over her hip, Helfer’s Parker can pull us over any day. When her buddy FBI Agent Linda Clark (Aisha Hinds, who last played lesbian Carolyn on Under the Dome) helps her out, we can’t help wishing for more collaboration.
　

1. The Killer Women Are Killer.
In the Jan. 14 episode "Some Men Need Killing,"  Parker takes on Leverage’s Parker (Beth Reisgraf) who may or may not be the assassin who is killing off abusive husbands. Not since Basic Instinct has there been such a leg-crossing scene.
　
Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Post and a contributing editor for Curve magazine and Lambda Literary Review. She won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for historical/cultural fiction for From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth. Her novella, Ordinary Mayhem, won Honorable Mention in Best Horror 2012. Her novel, After It Happened will be published in fall 2014. @VABVOX