Looking back at PHYSICAL Season 1. Interpretive ambiguity

Before I start discussing Physical I have to say that I fully understand why, after decades of entrenched social inequality—decades in which men were free to pursue professional ambitions while women were assigned only a narrow set of roles unrelated to anything beyond being wives and mothers—a breaking point eventually came. Many people still believe it’s necessary to support women in their pursuit of self-determination and the right to shape their own lives free from conservative prejudice. There’s nothing wrong with that; however, it has become increasingly clear that, in the arts, the quality of the argument often matters less than the clarity of the message.

In other words, viewers and critics frequently overlook narrative details—such as how a heroine actually pulls herself out of trouble and succeeds—and instead focus on whether a work’s message aligns with their worldview. Within this context, moral questions about a female protagonist’s brutal actions toward men are no longer discussed as long as those men are portrayed as sexists. If they don’t respect women, then extreme punishment seems justified. That’s precisely why revenge narratives are thriving today: for some, art has become a form of sublimated retribution.

We’re seeing fewer and fewer productions in the spirit of For All Mankind, where women’s emancipation is framed chiefly as a positive phenomenon emerging from historical change—one that fosters equitable cooperation between genders rather than destructive rivalry. Yes, the sexists in that show also lose, but it happens through steady, almost positivist shifts in perspectives on gender relations, not sudden revolution.

It’s worth pointing to Judy Berman’s piece for Time, written in the context of her review of Physical, in which she examines the evolution of 21st-century television—from the era dominated by self-assured girlbosses climbing the ladder of success to the inevitable moment of reckoning, when audiences began to recognize the deeply narcissistic tendencies that had been hiding beneath those supposedly feminist narratives.

Against this backdrop, Apple TV+’s Physical is a very different kind of series. It doesn’t cater to the trend of stories about strong, morally spotless women battling omnipresent sexism. Yes, Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne), living on the 1980s West Coast, is pushed by her husband Danny (Rory Scovel) into the role of a housewife—even though he sees himself as a tolerant hippie—and yes, Sheila once possessed the intelligence and potential for a thriving career.

But she is not a role model whose picture you’d hang on your wall. Showrunner Annie Weisman rightly assumes that years spent in suffocating circumstances must leave a deep mark on Sheila’s psyche. Add to this a traumatic event from her past that shaped her future, and Sheila emerges as an anti-heroine of a kind we haven’t seen on television in quite some time.

Sheila is bulimic. Living in a society where a woman is, above all, her appearance, she obsesses over maintaining her weight. She doesn’t eat around others—only secretly in rented hotel rooms. Though she’s thin, she treats herself with horrifying cruelty. The writers let us into her mind through a steady stream of internal monologues. From them we learn that she hates herself and often despises others as well. Her constant self-attacks reveal the duality of her nature: she is boiling with anger inside, while on the outside she is polite and says the opposite of what’s raging in her head.

Sheila’s temperament resembles that of heroines in other contemporary dramas—she wants to tear down the sexist, patriarchal world—but Weisman never portrays this desire as purely noble. Although Sheila fights real injustice, her methods are far from admirable. She may well win her war, but that doesn’t mean the ends justify the means.

It’s precisely this contradiction that makes her such a fascinating character. You can’t help rooting for her because she is right on many levels; at the same time, it’s hard to take her side when she lashes out at other women. And she does so on two fronts—emotional and economic.

Emotionally, she targets women she envies. For Sheila, a sense of self-worth must be built in opposition to others; she feels better when she cuts them down. We see this clearly when she speaks to the wife of her former lover, implying that pregnancy is pleasant compared to the daily torture of motherhood.

Economically, she exploits Bunny (Della Saba), using her to build a lucrative business. Weisman skillfully documents how deeply Sheila has internalized the paradigms of the Reagan era. Sheila becomes an almost archetypal self-made woman, walking over others to get ahead, relying on hollow coaching jargon to attract clients and drain their wallets.

How does one live “well” when driven by self-destruction, when incapable of self-love, when sabotaging oneself just to prove how terrible a person one is? Fueled by aggression, Sheila is one of the most compelling TV characters of the year. Her Berkeley degree and youthful hippie ideals have transformed into either making dinner for her husband or becoming a turbo-capitalist money machine. Even emancipation turns into a commodified product—properly packaged, it can be sold for a hefty price. In that sense, aerobics isn’t just a sport or a way to work on the body; it becomes another arena for reinforcing existing social structures.

Symbolically pulling women out of the kitchen frees them from marital captivity, but squeezing their bodies into spandex places them in a different machine—one that is paradoxically harsher and touches every layer of existence.

From its ten episodes, Physical makes one thing clear: the aerobics boom of the Reagan era was no accident. Its popularity was another expression of the belief that the body is a tool harnessed to the capitalist engine. The more we train it, the more useful we become. It’s no wonder the show’s characters regain their spark once they commit themselves to exercise mania. It’s not just about endorphins or a slimmer figure—Sheila herself proves you can be thin and still fight desperately to maintain your weight.

Her bulimia highlights how hard it is to build self-acceptance in a world shaped not only by the male gaze but by an increasingly unforgiving economic gaze. Aerobics appears to offer women the chance to build autonomy within the system. Physical suggests that this kind of emancipation was never more than a revolution contained inside the existing order.

You could write academic essays about Weisman’s series, but you could just as well focus on its aesthetic charm. The creator pays meticulous attention to visual detail—from neon-soaked color palettes to precise costume and set design—and especially to the soundtrack. There are many more hits in the vein of “Space Age Love Song” and “I Need a Hero.” I appreciate this approach: time and again, when new films and shows rooted in (or inspired by) 1980s aesthetics premiere, we sigh nostalgically, forgetting how much ugliness lurked behind the catchy music and shimmering colors.

It’s this interpretive ambiguity that gives Physical its power. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a character we can simultaneously like and dislike so intensely. The Apple TV+ series is aimed particularly at viewers who care less about political slogans and more about how important ideas are explored and articulated.