Sometimes titles can be deceiving. Such is the case with BBC America‘s Mistresses — essentially a working title that ended up sticking, says series co-creator S.J. Clarkson, “because we couldn’t think of anything else.” The show, which premieres Feb. 20, follows four female characters — three of whom could indeed be classified as mistresses, and a fourth whose life is impacted head-on by infidelity.
There’s Katie, a well-respected doctor who had an affair with a terminally ill patient and now finds herself falling for the recently deceased man’s son; Siobhan, a lawyer whose idyllic marriage suffers from the stress of trying to conceive a child, driving her to seek satisfaction from a colleague; Jessica, a party planner with an insatiable sexual appetite that leads her into trysts with — among others — her married boss and a client whose lesbian wedding she is charged with overseeing; and Trudi, a widowed mother of two who tentatively and awkwardly begins dating again for the first time since losing her husband in the Sept. 11 attacks.
While the Mistresses label is technically accurate, it’s really only part of the story. As much as the series focuses on the relationships between the four women and the men in their lives, the more important bond is the one the ladies share with one another.
“It could be called Friends, couldn’t it?” jokes Orla Brady, who plays Siobhan. “Except that title’s already been used. It could be called Friends in the Middle of Their Lives Just Kind of Dealing With All the Stuff That Relationships Throw Up.”
While Brady’s comments are light in tone, Mistresses is anything but. Because of its four female leads, the show has drawn early comparisons to Sex and the City. Those connections are both unwanted and unwarranted. While occasionally sexy and somewhat stylish, Mistresses possesses a grit and an honesty that HBO’s hit comedy lacked. In fact, sometimes the drama gets downright depressing.
“When you say the word ‘mistresses,'” Brady says, “you think of the French image — stockings in a hotel room and champagne glasses and all that. And, of course, the truth of it is not that. The truth of it is Christmas and birthdays spent on your own, and feeling like your love can’t be declared in public.”
It’s during these down times that having a few good friends really helps. When things go badly for one of the main characters — which they do, because Mistresses is not a show that makes any attempt to glamorize the adulterous lifestyle — the four women provide a support system for one another. Shelley Conn, who portrays Jessica, insists that the spirit of sisterhood among the actresses continued long after the cameras stopped rolling.
“When we got together, it was great. We found very quickly that we had chemistry and we worked well together,” she says. “I’m sure we got on the director’s nerves, because all we wanted to do was to sit there cackling and gossiping.”
To the contrary, says Clarkson, who does double duty as the director in question. Cackling and gossiping were, in essence, exactly what she was looking for.
“What we felt, when creating [the show], was that friendships have become the new family,” she explains. “So it was very important when we put the cast together to find a cast that were going to become like a family, which I think they did.”
