This 28-Year-Old Wrote a Show About Rape Vigilan
The new MTV series Sweet/Vicious follows Jules and Ophelia, college campus vigilantes who target rapists. The show isn't light, obviously, but it's at turns charming and funny despite its dark storyline. How did it come to be? Cosmopolitan.com spoke to the 28-year-old creator, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, about writing the series, deciding how violent it would be, and exploring such a sensitive topic.
Sexual assault has become such a hot-button issue over the past several years. Did that contribute to the show idea?
I actually wrote this two years ago, before I think the social consciousness caught up to an issue that has been around for decades and decades - since the dawn of time, there’s been sexual assault. When I first started writing the show, I really wanted to write something that was empowering for women, especially for young women. I so rarely see myself represented on television … there just needs to be nuanced female characters out there who aren’t one thing or one stereotype or one cliché.
And then the tone of the show kind of walks that Tarantino, Shane Black line of humor within darkness, and that’s really what I respond to most in entertainment. I’ve seen a lot of shows where they talk about a hot-button topic, an issue that’s hard to deal with, but it’s done very dramatically. And I think that’s wonderful - it’s just hard to watch and it’s not something that I wanted to do. I wanted to try and get an issue out there but in a way that felt digestible and fun so that it could potentially reach more people.
How did you wind up becoming a TV writer? What was your trajectory?
I came to L.A. when I was 16 to be an actress and in my early 20s, or at 21, realized that it wasn’t for me. I was terrible at auditioning. I was gaining some traction, but it’s so hard and what I realized was that I really wanted to create and be at the helm of something. So I started writing when I was 21 and wrote a pilot and it was about five girls in Los Angeles and it was around the time Lena Dunham sold Girls. And at that time, everyone was like, “Oh, we don’t know if that will work, so we’re not going to also buy this show that’s very similar.” And then a couple of years ago, I sat down - I was 25, 26 - and thought about what I wanted to see on TV and what I thought was missing, and that’s when I wrote what was originally called Little Darlings. It’s now Sweet/Vicious.
How easy was it for MTV to sign off on this?
It was immediate. I actually didn’t pitch it anywhere else. MTV just bought it.
Did you ever get pushback on storylines?
They never told us we couldn't do something when we wanted to go for it. Never. And we really do go for it, we really do tell this story in a way that’s respectful and not exploitative. But we felt it was important to tell this story objectively. You are on Jules’s journey, but we wanted to get the perspective of her best friend, of Ophelia, of her assaulter. We really wanted to tell this story from all points so that it paints a full picture of what is happening out there.
Can you tell me more about what are those things are?
Without giving out any spoilers, a lot of things come to light and in episode 7. We go back and we show everything that happened to Jules. We show her pre-assault, we show her assault, and then we show how the school handles it and what she does with that and how it got her to being this vigilante that she is now. We show what happens when the news comes out, what that does to her friendships, what that ripple effect is. And we really took the time to make sure to flesh this story out so that it isn’t convenient. We wanted it to feel true to the stories we read and the research that we did.
How did you figure out how violent these women should be when going after assailants or rapists? Because in shows like Jessica Jones, for example, they’re really violent. It can get really dark.
Jessica Jones is a lot older and also, she’s a true superhero. These are regular women. And, yes, it’s a very heightened environment and we tried to make it as Gotham-y as we could. But you do want it to feel a little bit like it’s something that anyone out there could potentially be doing. Don’t do it. Let me say that first. No one should do it. But I never wanted it to feel like so crazy and out there that you wouldn’t be able to buy into the concept.
A lot of the alleged rapists on the show are athletes or former athletes or in fraternities and, obviously, one of the main characters is in a sorority. Is that a commentary specifically on fraternity and sorority culture?
It’s not a comment on the institution as a whole because I do think there’s a lot of good that comes out of it. But I also think there’s a lot of bad. It’s the “Be a man, be a man, be a man, take what’s yours” [attitude], and I think that there is a lot of that in the athletic community and in the fraternity community. I have a lot of friends that were in both who are fantastic dudes. My brother was a football player and he’s the best guy I know. But they are communities that this is very rampant in, and it would’ve been foolish of us to not go there because we thought maybe it would feel clichéd or like we were picking on a certain institution. When you see these stories, the pattern is there.
Do you have any thoughts on how rape is currently portrayed in TV? And are there any shows that get this right?
I definitely think that rape on TV has been a taboo and I don’t understand that. I don’t think that rape should be a taboo subject and I think that part of the reason there’s a stigma attached to it is because people put that on it and it’s portrayed in entertainment as this really dark, terrible menacing thing. And, like, yes it is dark and terrible and menacing. But I think that if you only show the trauma, if you only show the rape and it’s just used a plot device, you’re doing a disservice to what you’re showing. Why do it? Why do it at all? So I have yet to see someone explore the subject to the extent that we have and unpack someone’s trauma and show how to heal yourself. There are so many different things that no one shows. They just show rape - and that’s not how this is.
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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Sweet/Vicious airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on MTV.
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