It’s hard out there for television’s fictional female spies. They’ve got to be just as smart, cunning and one-step ahead as their male counterparts. Plus, they usually must do it in heels. Sadly, the TV Academy has a hard time taking notice of this. Sure, Barbara Bain had a good run of it in the 1960s when she won three back-to-back lead drama actress Emmys for her work as fashion model/covert op Cinnamon Carter in the “Mission: Impossible” series on CBS. And Claire Danes won the category twice for her work as the troubled and trouble-finding Carrie Mathison in Showtime’s “Homeland.”
Sandra Oh never won for playing an MI5 agent in BBC America and AMC’s “Killing Eve,” even if Jodie Comer did take home one lead drama actress Emmy for playing her assassin counterpart. And Keri Russell never won for playing Elizabeth Jennings, the smarter half of a team of KBG operatives living among us in FX’s “The Americans.” The actresses from Apple TV’s “Slow Horses” have never even been nominated, even though the show and some of its male talent have.
Funnily enough, the Academy’s history of minimal recognition is an almost meta nod to the whole plot of “Ponies.” Peacock’s 1970s-set spy show puts two unassuming American women (Emilia Clarke’s studious Beatrice “Bea” Grant and Haley Lu Richardson’s street-smart Twila Hasbeck) right where our government thinks they’d be least suspected: Cold War-era Moscow. These characters are young widows and are thought to be “persons of no interest” to anyone running surveillance. But, thanks to some spy 101 training learned on the go and a bit of accent work from Clarke’s Bea — this is a show where a British actress plays an American who sometimes poses as a Russian — they uncover dirt about both countries, dabble in art forgery, meet some new paramours and maybe even save some lives.
