Creative liberties? Amazon takes a few in its new series “Good Girls Revolt,” about a group of women who sue over their treatment at a male-dominated newsweekly in 1969-70.
Genevieve Angelson plays Patti, a young journalist seen in the pilot marching to work through midtown Manhattan … past a fairly large anti-Vietnam War protest. In December 1969? We can’t find any record of such a protest during that month. However, six months later, in May 1970, New York was shaken by the Hard Hat Riot, when hundreds of construction workers attacked students protesting the shooting deaths at Kent State.
Patti works at a magazine called News of the Week. Of course, there never was a major weekly by that name. But there was and is a magazine called Newsweek, which is where the real-life women described in the story (based on the book by Lynn Povich) worked. (Newsweek’s print edition ended in 2012 but was revived two years later.)
Jim Belushi plays Wick, the cranky newsroom boss, who in the pilot, after a lot of arguing and hand-wringing, orders his staff to cover the violence at the Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont track in California. Small problem: Newsweek didn’t cover the Stones’ concert at all at the time, according to a 1970 piece in Rolling Stone (and neither did much of the rest of the mainstream media).
Mick Jagger and the Stones performed at Altamont on Dec. 6. That was a Saturday, which means the news of the violence would have broken over the weekend, and not on a busy workday, which is when the staff on “Good Girls” breathlessly discusses Altamont as if it’s happening in real time.
But then chronology just isn’t a strong suit for “Good Girls.” Wick at one point says that the indictment of Charles Manson happened the day before Altamont. Wrong again. Manson and his fellow cult members were indicted on Dec. 8, two days after Altamont.
Well, at least we have a solid character in Nora Ephron (Grace Gummer), the late writer-director who, it turns out, really did work at Newsweek. Except, oops, Ephron worked there in the early 1960s, and in the mailroom, not as a writer. She had nothing to do with the gender-equality action the show dramatizes. But “Good Girls” does get one detail right: Ephron really did go to Wellesley College.
Even the small details on “Good Girls” require some skepticism. At one point, a character says her boyfriend is going to take her to the “Mark Rothko Retrospective at the Guggenheim.” Nice! Except that art show was a cool thing to do … in 1978, nearly a decade later. Oops, time for a cigarette break.
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