Throughout the 1980s, Roseanne Barr had been working her way up the stand-up circuit with the persona of the Domestic Goddess, a personality that elevated the status of the housewife as a role that could be just as feminist as a working woman. After doing sets that appeared on the multitude of stand-up specials that littered basic cable, and getting booked on The Tonight Show, Roseanne finally landed her own sitcom, Roseanne, in 1988. An acerbic look at the life of working-class families, Roseanne focused on a family where both husband and wife worked outside the home, one of te first in an era where that existence was increasingly becoming the normal.
Susan Seidelman had broken through the Hollywood system in 1985 with the surprise smash hit, Desperately Seeking Susan, Madonna’s breakthrough film. Following that film with a couple of middling flops – Making Mr. Right, Cookie – Seidelman finally found a kinship with Roseanne Barr. They set out to adapt Fay Weldon’s highly acidic novel, The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. About an ugly woman who loses her husband to a beautiful romance novelist, The Lives and Loves, follows the extremes Ruth goes through to reform her life in the vision of her novelist rival, Mary Fisher. Weldon would continue to assert that her novel was about envy more than revenge, with Ruth’s final act to get extreme surgery to look like Mary Fisher, buy her mansion, and own her ex-husband as a sexual servant.
She-Devil, the American cinematic adaptation, chops the novel into pieces and remolds it into the tale of vengeance that lurked underneath the surface. Roseanne Barr’s Ruth starts as a nervous housewife intent on making her husband happy. After her husband Bob (fairly-everyman-looking Ed Begley, Jr.) leaves her for Mary Fisher (Meryl Streep!), Ruth loses it and seeks to remake herself as a success intent on ruining Bob’s life.
With the edges completely shaved off, fans of the novel see She-Devil as a disappointment, a limp sitcom-dark comedy with far too much Go Girl! attitude. Others see She-Devil as a black comedy about the societal damage resulting from feminist attitudes. In reality, She-Devil walks a tightrope of ludicrous satire and hilarious revenge, where a woman wronged by a patriarchal society exacts her revenge, ultimately raising the role of all women in society.
Ultimately, She-Devil flopped in theaters, putting the final nail in Seidelman’s Hollywood career. Roseanne would continue for years, Meryl Streep would never be heard from again, and Seidelman would find her final success in directing the pilot episode of Sex and the City (though, in the oddest footnote of her career, she would direct a segment of the compilation film, Tales of Erotica, alongside Melvin Van Peebles, Ken Russell, and Bob Rafelson). But, She-Devil would continue to have a cult following, becoming a basic cable staple throughout the ’90s.
She-Devil airs at 3pm PST on MGMHD.