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Nielsen’s: ‘Firefly Lane’ Puts Katherine Heigl Back On Top

Katherine Heigl's flameout as a movie star was due to gender-based double standards and the paucity of rom-coms and melodramas in which she might star.

Netflix’s Firefly Lane was tops on Nielsen’s SVOD ratings for the first week of February, registering 1.308 billion minutes viewed. If you add up all 498 minutes over ten episodes, that’s arguably 26.2 million viewings of the first season of the Katherine Heigl/Sarah Chalke melodrama. The show, based on Kristen Hannah’s novel, tracks two childhood friends as they try to remain close through adulthood and its various challenges. That it was successful in its initial weekend is no surprise (it’s still in Netflix’s top ten for television shows as of today), and it adds another chapter to the notion that Katherine Heigl never really stopped being a star or a somewhat bankable name.

With all the chatter about Britney Spears thanks to a Hulu documentary detailing both misogynistic treatment by the press and her eventually being placed under her father’s conservatorship (it’s a rare streaming doc that’s arguably too short), we’re almost certain to see a slow-burn reckoning in terms of how certain female celebrities were treated by the press (and by the industry) in the 2000’s and 2010’s. Heigl is certainly among those held up as a victim of society. Her quick flameout as a feature film star may have been due to gender-based double-standards, but it’s just as much due to Hollywood ceasing to make the kind of movies in which she would star.

She headlined Knocked Up which made Seth Rogen a bankable lead and earned $220 million on a $30 million budget in the summer of 2007. She followed that up with the underrated-in-its-day (but arguably justly appreciated now) 27 Dresses, which she opened by herself in January of 2008 to $23 million toward an eventual $163 million on a $30 million budget. The Ugly Truth, which paired her with Gerard Butler during that skewed time when Butler was being groomed as a rom-com lead instead of an action star (think reverse Patrick Swayze), was a monster hit in summer 2009, earning $88 million domestic and $205 million worldwide on a $38 million budget.

Alas, with her high-profile comments about whether or not Universal’s Knocked Up was sexist for letting its male characters have more fun and her declaration that she was withdrawing herself from Emmy consideration in the fourth season of ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy allegedly due to her disaffection with her character’s material making headlines, the failure of Killers was almost a set-up. As I wrote way back in 2010, Killers was an inexplicably expensive Lionsgate release ($75 million) back when the House That Jigsaw Built was mostly succeeding with horror movies and Tyler Perry flicks. With poor reviews and an R-rating, the violent action comedy (co-starring Ashton Kutcher) earned just $98 million worldwide.

As much as we like to talk about Heigl’s flameout and the notion of societal and internalized misogyny playing a role in branding her “unlikable,” she still headlined Life As We Know It to $106 million on a more reasonable $38 million budget in 2010. She was part of the New Year’s Eve ensemble in late 2011 to the tune of $142 million on a $56 million budget. It wasn’t as big as Valentine’s Day ($217 million/$56 million in 2010), but it wasn’t a belly-flop. Alas, true failure came with One for the Money, which earned $38 million on a $40 million budget in early 2012.

The poorly-reviewed adaptation of the first of several Stephanie Plum novels could have been Heigl’s own franchise had it performed better. Alas, it didn’t, and the reviews were inexplicably dire. Look, it’s not a good movie, but it did serve as an example of how bad female-led movies are treated like glorified war crimes (by male and female critics) compared to their male-led counterparts. It’s a small-scale, pulpy little private eye comedy that will certainly shoot to the top of Netflix’s “most-watched” movies should it ever arrive there. It’s no more or less a glorified television pilot than Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg’s record-breaking Netflix original Spenser Confidential.

And that was it for Heigl as a feature film lead. While I’m absolutely sure that sexism, gender-based double-standards, tabloid media coverage and everything else of that nature played a part, it’s arguably as much because Hollywood stopped making the kind of small-scale, star-driven rom-coms or female-led melodramas that allowed the likes of Nicole Kidman, Sandra Bullock and Julia Roberts to become long-term movie stars. The Ugly Truth came at the tail-end of the modern Hollywood romantic comedy, with A) Hollywood shifting toward male-led global-friendly action fantasies and male-led bromance comedies and B) the next generation of actresses growing up with a society-influenced disdain for stereotypical “chick flicks.”

By 2015, the female-led romantic comedy was such a rare bird that Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck (starring Amy Schumer) was treated as a cultural event. I have argued that Apatow, unintentionally mind you, helped kill the female-led rom-com with male-led variations like The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, which led to an emphasis on the likes of Role Models and I Love You Man. Point being, when Hollywood no longer makes movies like 27 Dresses, Practical Magic, Something to Talk About or The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, it’s quite challenging for any actress to have a mainstream Hollywood career without indie flicks and television.

Since flaming out with One for the Money, Heigl more-or-less returned to episodic TV, where she starred in ABC’s State of Affairs (as a CIA analyst advising the President played by Alfre Woodard) which lasted a single season in 2014. Her legal melodrama Doubt flamed out and was pulled after just two low-rated episodes in 2017. She starred in the last two seasons (eight and nine) of USA’s Suits in 2018/2019, which brings us to Firefly Lane. So, yeah, if you’re someone who only followed Heigl when she was on Grey’s Anatomy and during her brief run as a movie star, it’s probably been awhile.

Without letting everyone off the hook for the whole “She’s unlikable because she speaks up” thing, Heigl never really went away. I’ll even defend Denise Di Novi and Christina Hodson’s Unforgettable (starring Rosario Dawson as a stepmom and Heigl as the scorned first wife), which is a pulpy but grounded thriller very much about how quickly women reach the “expiration date” that only goes camp right at the end. In today’s entertainment landscape, there’s little downgrade to being the star of a major Netflix show, especially if that show is successful because of you, versus being a lead in mid-budget movies. Oh, and Sarah Chalke is pretty great on Firefly Lane too.

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