It’s a challenging time to be a woman in America, as a certain segment of the population seems all too eager to roll back the hard-fought gains of the women’s rights movement. Laws restricting bodily autonomy and reproductive healthcare are being passed at an alarming rate. The threat of gender-based violence is steadily rising. So, on paper, it’s the absolutely perfect time for a show like Prime Video’s The Power, an adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s bestselling novel of the same name, a simultaneously empowering and dystopian tale about gender, oppression, and violence that asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of humanity and the societies we’ve built for ourselves.
Sadly, The Power isn’t quite the show this moment requires. It’s pretty clear that Prime Video was hoping to create something akin to its own version of Hulu’s award-winning drama The Handmaid’s Tale, with its unflinchingly feminist point of view, uber-detailed depictions of oppression and violence, and simmering rage. But while it’s easy to see Margaret Atwood’s influence in Alderman’s original novel, the two television series have little in common, most notably because The Power almost goes out of its way to avoid having to commit to a specific point of view about what sort of story it’s telling.
Alderman’s novel deconstructs everything from the idea of the female revenge thriller to the empowerment fantasy, and is at its queasiest and most uncomfortable when it’s forcing its readers to confront and wrestle with the ways in which we unthinkingly gender power. That doesn’t translate nearly as well to the screen in the Prime Video version, which seems to want everyone watching it to still generally like the majority of the main characters, even as they make increasingly dark and uncomfortable choices.
The basic premise of the series is simple: What if, one day, teenage girls all over the world suddenly developed the power to emit electric shocks from their hands, like an electric eel? If those girls could then transfer that same power to older women? If a group that had long been oppressed in many parts of the world suddenly gained the ability to fight back? If women no longer had to be afraid of the threat of physical violence from men? What would the world look like then?
The answers to these questions are both varied and complicated, and The Power addresses them through a sprawling story that’s spread across a half dozen major characters and almost as many countries. Allie Montgomery (Halle Bush) has spent her life struggling to survive in the foster system of the southern United States, dodging abusive caretakers along the way. Her gift—and the voices she begins to hear in her head—send her on a journey of reinvention as a faith leader. Roxy Monke (Ria Zmitrowicz) is the illegitimate daughter of a London crime boss who revels in the power of her new abilities, hoping that they will both help her avenge a devastating loss and finally earn her father’s respect. Tatiana Moskalev (Zrinka Cvitešić) is a former gymnast turned wife of an Eastern European dictator who longs for freedom and agency of her own. Margot Cleary-Lopez (Toni Collette) is the Democratic mayor of Seattle, whose daughter Jos (Auli’i Cravalho) is one of the first young women to develop the titular power. And Tunde Ojo (Toheeb Jimoh), one of the story’s primary male characters, is a Nigerian journalist traveling the world to report on the seismic shifts taking place in countries that are traditionally oppressive to women, whose female citizens are rising up to forge a different sort of world.
The series’ sprawling setting is obviously meant to reflect the global nature of the story it’s telling, but often it simply feels exhausting. The story drags badly in the series’ early episodes as the revelation of the women’s new abilities is parceled out in painfully slow chunks. The pacing is such that certain major characters can often go for entire episodes without appearing, and while there are several disturbing and high-tension sequences—a roundup of teen girls rumored to “have it” at a local high school, a tragic catastrophe caused by a young girl’s fear, crowds of women shouting at armed men—big chunks of the narrative drag interminably for no clear reason. And while the series is interested in exploring the effect of this new power in countries where women are traditionally seen as second-class citizens or freely trafficked between the elite and powerful, it remains largely unconcerned about how the trans community would be impacted, despite the presence of both trans and intersex characters in the story. (This was also one of the novel’s failings and something I think many hoped the show might find a different way to address, particularly given the anti-trans panic currently at work in the world.)