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  • The Atlantic

    The Cheap Thrills of <em>The Kitchen</em> and <em>Why Women Kill</em>

    A new TV show and film tell similarly shallow stories about mistreated wives finding empowerment by getting revenge on their husbands.
    by Shirley Li Aug 19, 2019 5 minutes
    Source: Ali Goldstein / CBS

    This story contains spoilers for The Kitchen and for the first episode of Why Women Kill .

    Many pop-culture antiheroines, whether the bunny-boiler of Fatal Attraction or the cell-block sirens of Chicago, embody the woman scorned—a type of character so infuriated by betrayal that she turns violent. This month, two projects join the female-revenge-fantasy subgenre. The film The Kitchen adapts the graphic novel of the same name, about three mob wives in 1970s Hell’s Kitchen delivering payback after their husbands are carted off to jail. The TV series Why Women Kill, which debuted Thursday on CBS All Access, takes a soapy look at three wives from different eras—the ’60s, the ’80s, and the present—who, it is hinted, murder their partners by the end of the season.

    Both works aim to evoke the catharsis of seeing mistreated women

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