Dames Nationals, today we received news that left us feeling… well, exactly as follows:
What news, you ask? Merely the news that Lionsgate has purchased the rights to Tamora Pierce’s 22-book Tortall series in hopes of making them into an epic fantasy TV series. If you are a feminist fantasy reader of a certain age, we know you’re cheering juliantly right along with us.
If, however, you’re a feminist-leaning fantasy fan who’s somehow unaware of these books-- oh my friends, what a treat you’re in for. From Alanna, who ICONICALLY pretends to be a boy to steal her twin brother’s place in night school, to Daine, whose animal-specific “wild magic” made her beloved of horse girls everywhere, the books Tamora Pierce produced in and around the imaginary medieval kingdom of Tortall will take you right back to the feeling of being 11, reading under a quilt with your flashlight, so well-plotted and engrossing are they. It is a rich, complete world, detailed in three quartets, one trilogy, and two duologies, extremely well-suited to audiobook narration and widely available for digital library borrowing in that form from many libraries. Given the breadth of the world and the number of different stories it already contains, it is ideally suited to birth a sprawling set of intricate and interrelated TV shows, and it’s truly shocking that it’s taken this long for someone to attempt to manifest that particular glory. So, whether you already love Tortall or are just learning of it, rejoice with us. These are our golden years.
Halloween is over, which means Winter Gift Giving Season is nigh. Our humble suggestion:
Ask Two Bossy Dames Extravaganza!
Take our hand and let us lead you to enlightenment
It is that beloved time again when We Your Dames collect questions (this round from just our paying subscribers) and share with you, our deserving readers, the wisdom for which we have fought so long and so hard. This week our subjects are ones near and dear to our hearts: television and stationery. Without further ado, may the answering commence!
Hullo, Dames!
I need a viewing recommendation for my husband now that Elementary has finished. He doesn’t appreciate soap operas and I am done with men’s hero complexes. No need for Miss Fisher; what I want to watch when I get home is something comforting that has an A story and a B story. We have loved Fringe and Person of Interest. We limped through Colony and I was a hard no on Legion and Mr. Robot after Season 1. We’ve done ER, The West Wing, The Wire, Justified, Breaking Bad, and The Americans and are looking for something of that ilk. Help me out of the nightmare of a “What do you want to watch tonight?” conversation!
TV Without Guidance
Oh, friend, we have so many good options for you! We just hope you haven’t already made your way through all of the shows we’re about to share with you.
The door to The Good Wife is wide open-- listen to Diane. Run through.
Dame Margaret: The very first thing that popped into my head was The Good Wife (seasons 1-7 stream for free with an Amazon Prime subscription) and its companion, The Good Fight (3 seasons available for purchase or with a CBS All Access subscription). I sometimes think of The Good Wife as the last really great network TV drama-- balancing a really light, delicious amount of serial plotting with absolutely perfect single-episode arcs. It also does a really good job of mixing tones-- it can be extremely funny sometimes, as well as suspenseful, moving, and romantic. The beginning is a little rough, and will seem soapier than your husband wants, but I promise it doesn’t stay in that mode for long. It is not quite as good as The West Wing but it’s close, and it’s definitely pleasurable in the same way Elementary is, with the same large cast of charming characters and warm tone, while also being a little more ambitious and a little less formulaic.
Again, we cannot stress enough the level of quirk you’ll be contending with.
After that, depending on your collective tolerance for quirk, I recommend first Pushing Daisies (an excellent and charming procedural mystery with light fantasy elements and absolutely devastating levels of quirk; widely available for purchase but sadly not streaming anywhere for free) and Slings & Arrows (a broad-yet-snooty dramedy about a Shakespearean theater festival in Canada afflicted with lots of wacky actors and a smidge of comedic haunting that returns THIS WEEK to Acorn TV’s streaming platform). Both are high on the A plot/B plot structure you prefer, and full of endearing characters to enjoy, but they are not for the quirk-averse.
You, fully ready to fall in love with Better Call Saul.
Dame Sophie: I believe that based on your enjoyment of Breaking Bad, you’ll dig its prequel, Better Call Saul. For my money, Saul is a better show. although the arc of a man descending from law-abiding citizen to criminal mastermind is not dissimilar to Breaking Bad’s, the rendering of it in Saul is both more tender and heartbreaking than its parent series, because Jimmy McGill starts out as a fundamentally good person who, by inches, relinquishes the decent, upstanding, respectable man and lawyer he’d like to be to the wildly funny but broken, tragic crook who takes his name from a shitty pun (‘s’all good, man).
You cannot comprehend what these six words will come to mean to you after 5 seasons in Dillon, TX.
Friday Night Lights (all five seasons streaming free with Amazon Prime) is a back list classic we both adore that should scratch your itch for characters you’ll root for and strong A & B plotting (with the exception of one extremely out-of-place murder plot in S2, about which the less said, the better. I hereby issue a blanket authorization to fast forward through those scenes altogether, and promise that it ends both relatively quickly and cleanly). All that I know about football I know from this show, and that was no handicap at all. The show’s naturalistic aesthetic and lived-in character performances drew me in and never let go. If this turns out to be a rewatch for you, I can guarantee a satisfying viewing experience falling back in love with Coach & Tami Taylor and the whole town of Dillon, TX. Clear eyes, full hearts: you truly can’t lose with FNL.
Call the Midwife’s Chummy cool replying to our assertions that we WOULD die for her.
Both of Your Dames are devoted to Pose and Call The Midwife (both available on Netflix)), and it’s pretty easy to see why: both are historical dramas that capture very particular moments and celebrate the lives of people often ignored by historical dramas. Pose conjures Manhattan’s drag ball scene of the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s, bringing queer and trans people of color into the spotlight, while Call the Midwife is about the lives of the women who care for their neighbors in a neglected district of East London as it moves from post-Blitz poverty to relative prosperity in the 1960s. Both shows feature strong performances and compelling story lines, and the music selections in Pose are perfect.
We hope these fit the bill for you -- happy viewing!
Dear Dames,
I didn't think I had anything I needed advice with, but when I saw you suggested paper goods as something we might need help with, I PERKED RIGHT UP. What sort of stationery are you enjoying right now and how can we start a Dames postcard exchange so that I can use up my stash and have an excuse to write more?
Still Writing Letters After All These Years
Materials for when you feel this fancy.
Dame Sophie is on a stationery-acquiring moratorium because she has too many notecards and occasion cards BUT we are in a golden age for lovely stationery, both mass-produced items and more high-end, small-batch letterpress options. I’m really glad you took us up on our offer to offer some guidance; I’ll be shopping vicariously through you!
Rifle Paper Co’s cheery yet matte floral aesthetic is ubiquitous thanks to their voluminous output and their collaborations with other brands like Keds. Many folks want something less popular. I respect that, and also want to make a case for leaning into the ubiquity. For those who worry about their things looking dated after a few years, that’s inevitable. Everything is of its moment. That’s why we like vintage shopping so much; it helps us conjure a feeling from the past, while also finding a new place for older things among our current stuff. For those who want to focus on unique stuff, by all means, do that! But you probably also have correspondence occasions that don’t call for a $7 letterpress greeting card printed on hand-cut cotton-linen mix paper. For those occasions you want your writing wardrobe to look pulled together, but not necessarily super-swanky. Rifle Paper Co and Kate Spade’s selections are here for you. You’ve got lots of strong options, widely available, in a category I’m calling Elevated Preppy Basics. These lips notecards are a bit cheeky but not too flirtatious, while these Christmas cards feature static confetti(or tipsy polka dots? Either way, they’re charming). Thanks to having grown up receiving many newspaper clippings tucked into notes from my paternal grandmother, I have a strong affinity for correspondence cards, and these gilded florals on really pale backgrounds call out to me.
Naturally, Etsy has a dizzying array of options. I was taken by this set of Vintage Text Message notecards and by these actual vintage thank-you and blank notecards. But, on the other end of the spectrum, so does Target. From their boutique-y Meant to Be Sent line to their more affordable lines like Mara-Mi and the eco-conscious Green Inspired, you can get some very fetching paper goods for not much money. And if your interests extend to wrapping paper, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a line more cohesively cute than Sugar Paper Co.’s collection for Target. And, perhaps best of all, there’s Red Cap Cards, a wholesale company that works with illustrators, allows you to shop by artist, features work from Caldecott winners like Christian Robinson and Jon Klassen, and also sells perhaps the most romantic card that Dame Margaret has ever received from anyone.
Dame Sophie’s last picks aren’t strictly stationery, but are well within the category of paper goods: table setting items. I am obsessed with these thematically bundled table runners, place mats, and place card sets from Horchow. Naturally, they have a lot of Thanksgiving and Christmas-themed options, but the ones that really catch my eye are these blue, white, and red florals and beachy coral-and-mermaids set. Horchow seems to run sales on top of discounts, and it looks like you can buy each element separately if you don’t want a fully-coordinated LOOK for your table.
Dame Margaret, meanwhile, is at that point in her year when, on some level, she is convinced that all she really needs to get her life in shape is exactly the right planner. As a result she has been spending far too much time on the dangerously informative Jet Pens website, where you can not only buy planners (and all manner of elite-but-workaday paper and writing utensils) but also read thorough guides pertaining to them. It is a great place to lose an hour.
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
And Dame Sophie’s ferociously talented child’s handmade Halloween costumes!
We appreciate you, readers of Dames Nation!
Every time you tell a friend to subscribe, some woman, somewhere, finds EXACTLY the right costume for her dog.
Help us build Dames Nation by upgrading to a paid subscription on Substack
Share your saucy opinions with us on Twitter whether jointly as your @twobossydames, or in single size servings as @MrsFridayNext & @sophiebiblio!
And! You can catch Bossy Extras on Tumblr.