Serial repetition, imperfection and the time loop narrative in women-centric US TV

Some of the millennial women to have recently emerged in half-hour US TV shows navigate not only their already messy lives, but also find themselves time-travelling, transcending the boundaries between parallel realities or stuck in time loops. Programmes such as Undone (Amazon Prime Video, 2019–2022), Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019–2022) and Slip (The Roku Channel, 2023) question the millennials’ messy but ultimately successful character trajectories through their recursive narrative structures. Characters’ repetitive experiences foreground the effort that goes into constantly improving oneself and one’s relationships within the context of what Angela McRobbie calls p-i-r, or ‘perfect-imperfect-resilience’, where resiliently working on oneself balances imperfection and perfection. In contrast to other contemporary women-centric programmes on television and streaming services, the excessive recursiveness in Undone, Russian Doll and Slip spectacularly concretises the neoliberal imperative to turn one’s flaws into recovery and success stories. The analyses in this article will thus focus on excessive repetition via the time loop trope in Russian Doll and Undone, and parallel realities in Slip to consider how these programmes and their female leads question feminist resilience on television and embody Orgad and Gill’s notion of the bounce-backable woman. These characters all eventually return to their more flawed, ‘original’ selves, but they take the lessons they learned and the ways they have improved themselves or their relationships with them, offering an ambivalent outlook on the messy millennial’s relationship to the idea of self-optimisation and resilience.