Frankie Shaw knows the title of her new show is problematic. “I just hope it doesn’t make people not want to watch it,” she tells me.
This Sunday night at 10 p.m., Showtime will premiere the first episode of SMILF — short for “Single Mom I’d Like to Fuck” — written, directed and produced by its 36-year-old star. What started out as a pilot script about Shaw’s life as a struggling actress and single mom from Boston has taken a winding road to television, with a notable stop at the Sundance Film Festival, where her nine-minute film of the same name won the short fiction jury award in 2015.
“Basically, for a short film that’s nine minutes that goes to Sundance, it’s a good title,” Shaw says about the mini-controversy. “There was a discussion that I brought up about possibly wanting to change it because of the implications,” she adds, but the powers that be at Showtime ultimately decided that they wanted to keep what they viewed as a “memorable” and “catchy” title. For a while, Shaw wanted to call the show “Dirty Bird” instead.
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But the reason she stands behind it now — besides having no other choice — is that she feels like it’s an opportunity to “reclaim” the word. It’s a point she expressed in a tweet to a woman who called the title “pathetic and misogynistic” that’s now pinned to the top of her Twitter profile.
“My apprehension about it is that people are just going to blow off the show as something silly or surface or just not what it is,” she says.
Those who do watch might be surprised. Despite its title, SMILF is anything but “silly or surface.” Rather, based on the first three episodes made available to critics, it’s one of the most honest and revealing portraits of a female protagonist ever produced on television.
When we speak by phone on a recent Saturday morning, Shaw is three days away from wrapping her first season on location in and around the Southie neighborhood of Boston. Her voice is almost completely gone. “There was a lot of yelling in a scene earlier in the week,” she rasps on the phone from her hometown. “And I haven’t fully recovered.”
Rachel Francis Shaw grew up in nearby Brookline and like her character Bridgette in SMILF, she straddled two separate worlds. Her family never had a lot of money, but she was exposed to an entirely different strata when she enrolled in the tony Milton Academy.
“I definitely have drawn on that feeling of not fitting in anywhere with Bridgette,” says Shaw, who was also raised by a single mom. “We had no money. My family was in Southie, I was in affluent Brookline. I don’t know if it’s my personality or the circumstance, but it all kind of led to this feeling of being an observer on the outside.”
Shaw describes Milton Academy, which she attended for her last two years of high school, as a “life-changing experience.” She was working as a short-order cook at a country club during summer break when a member, who happened to be a student there, told her, “You should come to my high school.”
“So then I became obsessed with the idea of going to Milton and essentially stalked my way in,” Shaw says. “That was the first time I saw the opportunity and privilege without being aware of it. I was totally lost and all I cared about was wanting my mom to buy me a J. Crew peacoat so I could fit in with everyone. But then it led me to going to school in New York City. And I’d never even been to New York and I was exposed to the arts. I had no idea that this was any sort of career I could have.”
Before starting at Barnard College in New York, Shaw wanted to be a professional basketball player. The very first scene of SMILF shows her character playing a pickup game with a bunch of guys. “I was going to try to walk on the team at Columbia,” she says. Instead, she realized, “Holy shit, there’s so much more out there.” She started taking photography classes and working at a video store and just “feeling so excited by movies.”
“Because I’d grown up with this singular focus on sports, I just kind of did that with acting,” she says. “That became an obsession. How am I going to make it? How am I going to figure that out?”
Then, she got pregnant. Nearly a decade later, she says she still has a good relationship with her son’s father, fellow actor Mark Webber.
“I moved to LA, because I didn’t want to be in New York anymore,” she says. “And I knew if I wanted to act it would have to be in one of those places.” She describes her life in those early years as “the typical struggling actress, but with a toddler.”
When her son was two, she got her first series regular role on Spike TV’s short-lived Blue Mountain State about a college football team. “That took me out of being broke,” she says. “It was my first taste of maybe I can do this. It kept the dream alive.”
Her big break came just a few years ago when Sam Esmail cast her as Elliot Alderson’s drug-dealing neighbor and love interest Shayla in Mr. Robot. When they were shooting the pilot, she says she had “no idea” how big a deal the show would become, mostly because of the network it was on. “The only thing USA had was like Suits or something,” she says. “But it was exciting because I was having that feeling of people appreciating something that I’d done when for so long I was like a guest star on a show that was terrible.”
“When it sort of blew up, I was already in development with SMILF,” she says. Because that project was in the works, she had to turn down new offers that were suddenly coming in. “I couldn’t really ride that wave at all.”
But Mr. Robot did give her an opportunity to learn what it takes to run your own television show from another firsttime showrunner. “Sam is really wonderful at having a very specific vision and also collaborating,” Shaw says of Esmail. “He made us feel like we were so good, so it creates this kind of freedom on set in your performance to explore and breathe and live in it.”
Esmail let Shaw stand by the monitor and pepper him with questions about why he was shooting something a particular way. He also gave her some much needed advice about how to navigate studio and network politics. “I was like, Sam, I’m not a six-foot-two Egyptian man, I can’t just say I’m not going to write outlines!” she remembers telling him.
Like so many other auteurist shows on television these days, from Jill Soloway’s Transparent to Donald Glover’s Atlanta to Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, Shaw describes SMILF as “not a straight comedy and not a straight drama” with a mild dose of “absurdism” sprinkled throughout. “I love the comedy in tragedy,” she says, naming Zach Galifianakis’ Baskets as her favorite show of the moment. “It’s exciting that there are shows that have gone before SMILF that give me permission to go for what I’ve found interesting.”
Shaw’s favorite show when she was growing up was Roseanne, another story about a “brash blue collar” family, as she puts it. “I remember watching it being like, ‘Oh my god, it’s like my family!’”
The short film version of SMILF has just two characters in it — Shaw and her son. But in expanding her world into a full series, she knew that the character of her mother would be an important one. And she couldn’t have found a stronger performer to play her than Rosie O’Donnell in her first-ever series regular role.
“She’s beyond my perfect dream. And I’m not exaggerating,” Shaw says of O’Donnell. “She was randomly suggested to us. We had someone else sort of in mind. And that fell through.” Shaw ended up FaceTiming with O’Donnell, who told her that her agents never send her material like this. “I don’t want to be Rosie O’Donnell,” she told Shaw on that first call. “I just want to disappear into the part.”
And that was before O’Donnell’s longtime nemesis Donald Trump, who singled her out for ridicule during his first Republican primary debate and continues to troll her as president, won the election.
“When I first saw the short, which did not have the character of Tutu in it, I was blown away by how genius and unique it was, and what an original voice,” O’Donnell said in a recent interview with W magazine. “I said yes right away, and then we went and shot the pilot.”
As luck would have it, they began shooting the day after the 2016 election when O’Donnell says she was “in shock” over the fact that “the man who had abused me so viciously and with impunity for over a decade was now running the country.”
“It was the first day of my pilot on the biggest thing I’d ever directed,” Shaw says. “Everyone was crying. The network, producers, everyone was around the monitors watching Hillary’s concession speech. It was a nutty day.” At one point, someone in a bakery in Southie started screaming at O’Donnell, “I don’t need to listen to you anymore, Trump won!”
“Honestly, it didn’t really hit me until I was done editing in January what happened,” Shaw says. “Rosie really held it together until Friday of that week. She came to my hotel room in the morning to go over stuff and just started sobbing. Because it’s really painful the way he’s talked about her publicly. Calling her out on her appearance. It’s so nasty. And so I think to be the brunt of the leader of the free world’s criticism, it’s just a lot. It’s really painful. She was even afraid to get on the plane and fly to LA.”
Once the series got picked up, O’Donnell apologized to Shaw for what she felt was a “bad” performance and asked to reshoot her scenes from the first episode.
“She saw the pilot and was like, ‘I can do better!’” Shaw says, playing down the idea that O’Donnell demanded reshoots. “She was great and we could have kept that, but I wanted to change her look a little bit more. She’s so hard on herself. She was great.”
On her last day of shooting, O’Donnell posted on Twitter that it was the “best job” she’s ever had.
The third episode of SMILF opens with a sequence in which Bridgette is filming a shower scene for a local PSA as the director and other men behind the camera make crude and inappropriate comments about her body. Later in the episode, strapped for cash, she dips her toe into the Craigslist private escort arena and — without spoiling too much — becomes the victim of a sexual assault.
“I mean, it’s not like I didn’t have ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ in mind when I wrote the scene where he grabs her pussy,” Shaw says of Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood boast. But she had no idea that the cavalcade of allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men would make sexual harassment and assault the biggest story in the entertainment business just as her show was about to premiere.
“It is so interesting, the change in public discourse right now,” she says. “It’s so fascinating that something that has been so silent and shameful to talk about, everyone coming forward with their stories are sort of undoing the shame of it all. So I can’t tell you how overwhelmed with hope I’ve been by the communities that are coming together over it, by people sharing their stories.”
“What I was interested in exploring was the fantasy of prostitution, the fantasy of selling yourself as a depiction of being wanted as a human. It’s almost the opposite of The Girlfriend Experience,” she says of the Starz series, “which is such an erotic show, but it’s so far from the reality of what it is to sell yourself for sex.”
“I have that fantasy myself,” she continues, “but the reality of it, if you were actually to follow through, is that you don’t exist. If you were to sell yourself for sex, it’s not really sex, it’s a man jerking off inside of you, not to be too graphic. Real women do this because they’re desperate for money. That’s the reality.”
When I ask if the revelations about Weinstein and other powerful men in Hollywood have made her rethink any of her own experiences, Shaw pauses before saying yes. “I re-read some emails from a producer recently,” she says. “And I remember him being a creep, but I never thought anything of it. He would send me these inappropriate emails and I would ignore them. And then I read them again and was like, ‘Oh, this is actually sexual harassment.’”
“I’ve seen some pretty terrible things,” Shaw adds. But she also believes that having her young son on set has protected her from the type of harassment that many actresses face from producers or crew members. “I’m thinking of this one show I did in Canada. And Isaac, my son, came with me,” she says. “The guys were pretty gross but once they knew I had a two-year-old, I found a safe position.”
Now, as a female showrunner, she feels a responsibility to foster a safe environment on set, something that begins with the hiring process. “Women will hire women. That’s the big thing,” she says.
When Shaw started production on SMILF, ABC Studios, which is co-producing the show, initially sent her a list of all white men for various department head jobs. She told them, “I’m actually not going to consider anyone unless half these people are not white and not male.”
The political climate, from Trump to Weinstein and everything in between, has galvanized Shaw to use her platform to push forward her feminist ideals. “There’s such an air of altruism or fight in people that it also just gave me this feeling of no-holds-barred,” she says. “Let’s just say what we want, because what else can you do?”
