Entertainment

Your New Favorite Channel: Wifey.TV

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Too often, "television for women" means sappy, Lifetime-style movies or vapid reality TV shows. A new website aims to combat that with original and aggregated video content "that shows women as actual human beings, not caricatures." The site, Wifey.TV, was created by writer and filmmaker Jill Soloway and gURL.com founder Rebecca Odes. The women envision Wifey as a sort of anti-Oxygen or We network, where "women's interest" isn't defined exclusively by our relationships to men, beauty, and weight.

"You’ll never find something on Wifey that is designed to make you feel bad about yourself so that you buy something to solve an imaginary problem," Soloway told FastCo. "That’s the thing about Esquire Channel that I’m jealous of — sure there are great fashion ads or shoes for dudes — but the assumption is you’re smart and you want your brain stimulated first."

So far original Wifey content is scarce, but Solloway and Odes plan to produce more of it once they raise the funds. For now, they've been curating outside content ranging from music videos to Saturday Night Live clips to scripted series.

Some of it comes from female creators, but not all — the important part is that it shows women as subjects, not objects, the women say. "Ultimately, Wifey is a brand that will produce brilliant, hilarious, dark, real, nuanced media for women without having to argue for the integrity of our characters or the validity of our audience."