There is a phrase that has done both enormous good and quiet damage to women on television, and it is this: the strong female lead. For years it functioned as a promise, a little flag waved over the listings to say this one is different, this one swings a sword or fires a gun or solves the crime herself. But strength, as anyone who has lived a life knows, is the least interesting thing about a person. What television slowly figured out, across three decades and three very different women, is that a heroine becomes unforgettable not when she is strong but when she is fully, contradictorily, gloriously herself.
The Myth Who Laughed
Xena: Warrior Princess arrived in 1995 looking like a toy commercial and turned out to be something stranger and richer. Lucy Lawless played a former warlord trying to outrun a trail of bodies, and the show wrapped that genuine moral weight in leather, slow motion, and a battle cry that sounded like a turkey gargling marbles. The campiness was not a flaw to be forgiven. It was the whole point. By refusing to take itself too seriously, the series bought itself the freedom to take Xena seriously, to let a woman be ridiculous and mythic and grieving in the same episode.
What lasted was not the choreography but the relationship at the center, the bond between Xena and the bard Gabrielle that the writers let breathe and complicate until it became the emotional engine of the entire run. Here was a strong female lead whose real arc was about devotion, redemption, and the slow work of becoming better than your worst day. The sword got the posters. The tenderness got the loyalty of a generation.
The Girl Who Took Notes
Veronica Mars, a decade later, swapped the sword for a hatchback, a camera, and a tape recorder. Kristen Bell played a teenager in sun-bleached Neptune, California, doing detective work in the wreckage of her best friend's murder and her own assault, and the genius of the show was that her power was attention. She watched, she remembered, she connected the dots that the adults were too comfortable or too guilty to follow. Her weapon was being underestimated, and she spent it ruthlessly.
The teen-noir framing did something sly. By placing a young woman inside the hard-boiled tradition usually reserved for trench-coated men, the series exposed how much of that genre was really about reading a corrupt town and surviving it with your wit intact. Veronica was not strong in the way a fist is strong. She was strong in the way a question is, sharp and patient and aimed exactly where it hurts.
Strength was never the point. The point was a woman allowed to be as complicated as the men who got there first.
The Women Who Wanted Each Other Dead
And then Killing Eve tore the rulebook into ribbons. Sandra Oh's Eve Polastri is a bored intelligence officer who becomes obsessed with the assassin she is meant to catch, and Jodie Comer's Villanelle is a stylish, giggling killer with the emotional range of a cat playing with something not yet dead. Neither is a role model. Both are riveting. The show understood that the morally tangled antiheroine, long the engine of prestige drama for men, could be even more electric when the cat and the mouse keep forgetting which one they are.
What Killing Eve proved is that the franchise of the strong female lead had finally earned the right to be amoral, funny, and unflattering, to want terrible things and be granted the screen time to want them out loud. Eve and Villanelle are not strong so much as they are unleashed, and the difference is everything. A woman who is merely strong reassures us. A woman who is dangerous to herself and others insists that we actually look at her.
Beyond the Adjective
The trouble with the strong female lead, in the end, is that it was always an apology, a way of explaining why a woman deserved to be at the center of her own story. Men on television were never strong male leads. They were just leads, free to be weak, cruel, brilliant, petty, and beloved all at once. The real triumph traced through Xena, Veronica, and Eve is not that women got stronger. It is that they finally got to be everything else too.
So retire the phrase, or at least loosen its grip. The heroines who endure are the ones whose strength is simply the floor they stand on, not the ceiling they bump against. Give us the warlord with a guilty conscience, the teenager who never stops watching, the killer who laughs at the wrong moment. Give us women allowed to be as large and as flawed as the stories they carry. That, and not the sword, is what made television finally worth watching.