The Empty Girlboss Fantasy of “Physical”

We come to “Physical” knowing the score. By now, we’re all familiar with the tale of the startup gone bad, the process by which some enchanted object—period underwear, a hard-shell suitcase, a granny-chic casserole dish—turns into just more stuff, and a rising-star founder becomes your garden-variety boss. (Or worse: the stuff never really existed, and the boss gets tried for fraud.) So from the moment our protagonist, Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne), the mother of a home-exercise fad, strides to center stage in a high-cut leotard, imperiously tossing her Walkman at a set assistant, we are wary of enjoying her success. The series takes every opportunity to confirm our jaundice. Before it even occurs to Sheila to try aerobics—much less start a workout empire—it’s clear that her story isn’t going to be an uplifting one. In the pilot episode, she discovers that her go-to ballet studio seemingly shuttered overnight. “They sold out?” Sheila asks a passing employee. He shrugs: “Everyone does eventually, right?”

It’s a disillusioned mise en scène: nineteen-eighties San Diego. Reagan’s California has become Reagan’s America, yet Sheila and her husband, Danny (Rory Scovel), former Berkeley radicals, are still clinging to the aesthetics of their activist heyday. Danny is a political-science professor; Sheila is a mom trapped at home and inside her own head. We are trapped in there with her—the show constantly erupts with voice-over narration, through which Sheila airs her disgust for everyone around. “She can’t control herself at all,” we hear her think, of a woman who deigns to eat a cheese puff at a work party. “She’s a lonely old lesbian without a shred of self-respect left.” She hates other people’s habits and their bodies; she especially hates her own. When she can’t get her husband to weigh in on the menu for an upcoming dinner party, she tells herself, “You’re the only one who thinks about food this much, you fucking freak.” At various times, she refers to herself as a “fucking loser” and “the world’s first fat fucking ghost.” The daily texture of her life is so mean, so low-grade miserable, that it makes you want to believe in empowerment.

In the first episode, Danny is fired from his teaching job, and Sheila suggests that he run for local office. (He’s the Tom Hayden to her Jane Fonda, but infinitely more unctuous.) He launches a bid for state assembly, but doesn’t realize how financially unsustainable it is: Sheila has drained their savings on clandestine jaunts to drive-throughs and motels, where she strips naked, binges on fast food, and then throws up. Sheila tries to make up the difference by schmoozing with San Diego’s corporate liberals, coaxing them into writing checks to Danny’s campaign. She also takes up another activity to replenish their funds: teaching aerobics classes, and ultimately selling videotapes of her lessons. Sheila grasps the format’s allure, seeing the financial potential in converting every household rec room into an extension of her studio. She and aerobics are meant for each other: the first time she tries out a routine, she swoons, and the color scheme of the show shifts from faded yellow tones to flushed magentas. Something about the routine silences her punishing voice—or, rather, externalizes it, transposing it into an upbeat key. “You uncomfortable? . . . You wanna stop?” she asks her students. “Good. That’s the sweet spot. That’s where the change happens.”

“Physical,” now streaming on Apple TV+, joins a sisterhood of #Girlboss period pieces about the nature of capitalist talent. “Joy,” a 2015 film starring Jennifer Lawrence as a fictionalized Joy Mangano, imbued its story with a fairy-tale glow. Its entrepreneur is, at heart, an artist; the movie takes seriously the notion that the design and manufacture of a self-wringing mop could be a personal, expressive act—as is hawking it on a shopping channel. Another recent example, “On Becoming a God in Central Florida,” a Showtime series cut short by the pandemic, played more like a horror flick: Kirsten Dunst’s entrepreneur was the Final Girl, fleeing the tentacular reach of a multilevel marketing scheme only to become the monster herself. This microgenre posits that business—not work per se—is the path to self-actualization. In the end, you make yourself into the product.

Unexpectedly, these narratives can be comforting. Their world view is orderly. Every person has their niche in an ecosystem of investors, customers, and competitors. The obstacles in front of the heroine can be relatable (a toddler on her hip, an oblivious spouse) or exotic (the technical specs of Betamax), but she’s a quick study. She knows how to make the trappings of her life—her house, the tolerance of her family and friends, her looks, the tragedies in her backstory—into tradable assets. It’s fun to watch a woman become “self-made,” to watch A-listers sink their teeth into playing streetwise up-and-comers.

As Sheila, Byrne gives a performance that can only be called excellent. Even her most casual gesture radiates with tension, barely contained under the skin but allowed full expression in voice-over, her tone ranging from the jarringly tender “If he’s nothing, what are you? Worse than nothing” to a gleefully percussive “Fuck!”

Byrne has clearly absorbed what it means to embody this character—someone whose compulsions are indistinguishable from the routines meant to discipline them—but the script doesn’t let her do much more than go through the movements. The show keeps supplying us with new information: Sheila was a budding academic before she shelved her studies for Danny’s career; she was the best dancer in ballet class but abruptly quit. Now she’s a preternaturally gifted fund-raiser and campaign surrogate, married to a candidate who skips events to get high. Sheila, in short, stands in for the idea of thwarted feminine potential. But what does she want, and why? When, once in a while, she makes some you-go-girl declaration—“Fuck the campaign video. I’m ready to make a fortune”—it sounds like the show’s tagline, not dialogue.

That’s not for lack of exposition, spoon-fed to us in the later episodes. As it turns out, Sheila’s exercise mania doesn’t simply stem from an eating disorder—which is “never really about food; it’s about control,” a party guest pipes up helpfully, in Episode 7. Then, in the following episode, it emerges that her need for control arises from a childhood sexual assault and her parents’ denial of that abuse. Like so many origin stories, this one feels both belabored and cheap; the revelations arrive too neatly, like clockwork, as the season winds down. As a result, Sheila’s decisions don’t feel motivated, merely triggered.

The same can be said of the supporting characters, who lack real, three-dimensional longings of their own. Each comes with a demon: Sheila’s foil, a mall magnate named John Breem (Paul Sparks), who has thrown his support behind Danny’s rival, is haunted by his dad’s mysterious death; her business associate Bunny (Della Saba) is mysteriously estranged from her immigrant family; her friend Greta (Dierdre Friel) fears her husband’s mysterious habits. These prefab scenarios, though glancingly sympathetic, barely amount to subplots. It often seems as though the main function of these characters is to give us a break from Sheila’s inner monologue. Their secondary function is to give Sheila more people to steal from, extort, and otherwise exploit. She blackmails Bunny into giving her a thousand dollars; she nabs a state-of-the-art camcorder from Greta’s basement and a housekeeper is left to take the fall.

The show does offer one theory of Sheila’s interest in building a franchise: it’s sexy to betray your professed politics. Both her greed and her superficiality run counter to her sixties credo. “Isn’t it strange, that you can believe one thing and still be drawn to something else?” Breem taunts her. In the finale, he and Sheila consummate their attraction inside his shopping mall, while standing on separate levels of the complex. Sheila starts masturbating; Breem, like yet another one of her students, copies her movements. Their climaxes get intercut with a Busby Berkeley sequence of Sheila’s spandex-spangled body multiplying on a stage, then a series of hands grabbing VHS tapes. This affair is meant to feel sordid, but its animating idea is tidy. For some people, the show suggests, commercial instinct is as primal, as hardwired, as libido: a fixed trait so bedrock—and thus depthless—that it doesn’t yield to further exploration.

There’s a lot left unexplored, and underimagined, in “Physical.” Period pieces often appeal to us precisely because of their safe remove from our moment. The past doesn’t embarrass us with our contemporary predicaments, precarity, or tastes; any ugliness is hygienically sealed off in a long-gone decade, made into a teachable diorama. (The racial etiquette practiced by characters in, say, “Mad Men” doesn’t make us squirm like it does in “The Good Fight.”) This, perhaps, is where “Physical” had the most potential, and most fell short: you could imagine it having a lot to say about what draws people to group exercise, ecstatically repetitive movement, or the distant gurus we crush on. Other themes, too, are broadly evoked and then dissipate—working motherhood, sex positivity, the growth of conservative Christianity, suburban sprawl. The show cleaves too closely to Sheila’s pathology to take a broader perspective.

It’s funny: characters in “Physical” often urge one another to admit to their desires. In Episode 9, Greta describes her marital breakthrough: “We talked about, like, who we really are, what we really”—and here, she gives a self-conscious little eye roll—“like?” The moral is almost too sweet to be trusted. But a better, bolder version of this show would follow that advice. “Physical” relishes the imagery of bingeing—shooting Sheila from the container’s point of view, camera gaping as she plunges wrist-deep into a jar of honey or scrapes up sheet cake. It doesn’t try to get to the bottom of our appetites.

New Yorker Favorites