If your beef is simply that the woman isn't womanly enough and isn't the romantic pairing with the male lead (as would have been done in the past) and hasn't sexed it up then there isn't much of a discussion to be had as the need for this in a story died out a long time ago
It’s not that this show fails for not follow cliches, but that it isn’t blazing new trails.
Not all cartoons or comedies require romance. (There is no “love” in Family Guy or South Park, or Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny), but LD goes out of its way to create a very specific dynamic between Mariner and Boimler which, I think, is playing a game of sexual politics in its own right which has me scratching my head.
Remember: there are four people in the friend group, and Mariner and Boimler are clearly a dyad just as Rutherford and Tendi are. But Rutherford and Tendi are mirror images of each other. Both are chipper as chipmunks and love their work. They don’t have strong personalities of their own like Mariner and Boimler, and are really there just to give M and B two other people to exchange dialogue with.
So it’s pretty much the Mariner and Boimler show. But as many have pointed out, Mariner gets on people’s nerves. Well, why is that? I think it is exactly because she isn’t “womanly”, because a lot of modern TV writers think that if you don’t write your female lead as unnaturally agro, the only thing left to do will be to focus on her dating life as she rotates through one man after another.
The show wants her to be interacting with a guy, however, and so Boimler becomes our show’s male lead. But once again, the writers don’t know how to write a subordinate male who still has something approaching his dignity , and so Mariner is always pulling Boimler’s underwear over his head, which is why I began by saying that were Mariner a guy, she’d be as likable as Biff Tannen.
I really think that the proper dynamic between our leads would have been to make them partners in crime, with Mariner instigating reckless hijinks and Boimler reluctantly being dragged along for the ride. As it is, I more often get the sense that Mariner wants to scrape Boimler off her shoe.
(Also, am I the only one who thinks it was a missed opportunity not to make Boimler a Vulcan? A fidgety Vulcan who is always losing his cool thanks to the wild n’ free Mariner would be a much better premise.)
