Mrs. America is an acclaimed new nine-episode series on Hulu and FX that tracks how archconservative Phyllis Schlafly led a grassroots movement to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) championed by 1970s second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, and Bella Abzug. It features thoughtful scripts, excellent production values, and a fine cast. Sophie Gilbert of the Atlantic calls it “maybe the first great television series of 2020.”

I hated it.

The show is structured as a series of studies of key women involved in the political struggle for equal rights — those for, and those against. Almost every episode title takes its name from the woman under consideration: “Phyllis” (Cate Blanchett), “Gloria” (Rose Byrne), “Shirley” (Uzo Aduba), “Betty” (Tracey Ullman), “Bella” (Margo Martindale), and so on. In each case, there’s a hunt for the hidden pain and vulnerability of the woman in question, and this hunt invariably moves the show away from its fact-based content about the women’s public actions, which historians have praised for being largely accurate, toward its frequently made-up content about their private lives.