Shiv Roy's Normal, Totally Realistic Pregnancy

A pregnant woman who is neither wacky nor written primarily for male character development. Really!

It’s rare to see character in film or TV who is pregnant and isn’t Pregnant, Wackily or Pregnant, Vulnerably. That’s why Shiv Roy’s pregnancy in this season of Succession is both refreshing and jarring. 

[Let me warn you now that there are some very mild Succession Season 4 spoilers contained in this piece, so if you’re extremely spoiler-sensitive and yet cannot be bothered to keep up with the current event TV du jour, you may want to wait and read this when you’re all the way caught up.]

The Pregnant, Wackily TV and film trope makes me weary. It’s so overdone, and yet, it will carry on forever, as long as there are screens and writers and execs who have no idea what pregnancy is like but try to write it, anyway, without talking to anybody who’s experienced it.

A character who is Pregnant, Wackily usually appears in comedies, although sometimes she’s a side character in a drama, her discomfort offering moments of levity. She may not have been wacky before becoming pregnant; the pregnancy itself is played as a wacky state of existence. She displays only a few symptoms– wacky ones like throwing up in the middle of a work-related conversation (and that’s when I stopped watching Emily In Paris), complaining about feeling “huge” even though she’s gained weight only around her belly region such that she appears that she has swallowed a basketball, wacky cravings like pickle milkshakes, totally wacky mood swings. Her pregnancy is all-encompassing. Her pregnancy is disruptive. Her labor is hilarious. Birth takes like two minutes and afterward everybody is fine.

In which one character looks up a laboring woman’s skirt to see if her cervix is fully dilated. The cervix is located at the end of the vagina, which is not viewable unless your eyes are located on a speculum. (Community/NBC)

It’s a shame- pregnancy is fucking weird, and a lack of curiosity on the part of writers falling back on tropes deprives their work and their audience of stuff that could be much funnier than a character puking at inopportune times. Not everybody gets morning sickness early in their pregnancies. Some pregnant women just feel nauseous all the time but never experience the relief of vomiting. Some people are very tired. Others have Boob Pain from Hell. Some are irritable, or can’t deal with the smell of certain foods. Pregnancy is more than just puking! It also doesn’t have to be completely life-derailing at every stage. 

For example, I had what’s sometimes referred to as a “unicorn pregnancy.” I didn’t throw up, and I only experienced mild symptoms compared to what other people have to endure. But I did have one kind of funny-weird symptom that was a little disruptive: my gums bled a lot. I know that there must have been encounters where I flashed what I thought was a friendly smile at people I met on the sidewalk, only to realize when I got home and looked in the mirror that I had beared bloody teeth at them, like a warlike simian who has just slaughtered an enemy. Now that’s wacky. 

There’s also that trope of the woman who is Pregnant, Vulnerably. These characters are often married to cops who are about to work on the most dangerous case of their careers– Gwyneth Paltrow’s ill-fated character in Seven is probably the most dramatic example. They don’t really have any dreams or desires beyond their own pregnancy, rather, they give us a sense of what another, more male character has to lose. Sometimes Pregnant, Vulnerably characters exist so that we can get a sense of just how Bad the Bad Guy is– the answer is he’s so bad that he’ll threaten a lady who is Pregnant, Vulnerably. The sweeter and more saintly a Pregnant, Vulnerably woman, the greater the likelihood that she’s going to end up experiencing or being threatened with violence before the credits roll. These women never puke. They probably don’t poop, either. Their pregnancy and their moral goodness is entwined; it is their main character trait. 

Uh oh… looks like a cop had a pregnant wife. (Se7en/ New Line)

Unlike her Pregnant, Wackily and Pregnant, Vulnerably counterparts, Shiv displays no symptoms of pregnancy at all, beyond a brief call with a doctor that mentioned scheduling a twenty-week scan. Standard prenatal screening schedules have patients seeing doctors once every four weeks early on in the pregnancy (more often if a pregnancy occurred with the aid of fertility treatments or is designated “high-risk”). However, her doctor mentioned that everything looked normal, and that they should go about scheduling a 20-week scan, which means Shiv’s most recent appointment was likely her 16-week appointment, which means Shiv is likely around 17 weeks’ pregnant at the beginning of Episode 4 of this season, just into her second trimester. 

So, is Shiv Roy having a “unicorn pregnancy”? Is it truly far-fetched that she’d display no physical symptoms? Actually, it’s possible that Shiv did go through months of puking and hating the smell of raw meat; we just didn’t see it. The entire series of Succession spans a little more than a year, November-to-November– a truly wild fact that was pointed out to me by J. Smith Cameron, who plays Gerri on the series– and so one might think that the early days of Shiv’s pregnancy must have probably played out onscreen without anybody knowing it, BUT! Season 3 ended after a summer wedding in Italy, and Season 4 picks up in the weeks leading up to a presidential election, in late October, which means that we didn’t see the early days of Shiv Roy’s pregnancy. The Succession writers really thought of everything.

What we may have seen was when Baby Shiv Roy, Jr. was conceived, at the aforementioned Italian wedding, when Shiv told Tom that she wanted to have a baby, and then as a form of fucked up foreplay told him that she didn’t love him. And then he had sex with her anyway. 

Succession S3 E8/ HBO

Shiv-Tom Let’s Play Bitey dynamics aside, what we’re seeing, then, is a realistic depiction of second trimester pregnancy that often is missing from the Pregnant, Wackily or Pregnant, Vulnerably tropes. Shiv is going about her business, doing most of the things she would have done before (except snort cocaine and gulp down whisky to fit in with the guys; I am of the mind that she faked it with Lukas) as the pregnancy becomes gradually and unignorably more significant in her body and, soon, in her life. But for now, Shiv is able to keep her condition under wraps, because most normal pregnancies don’t totally take over a person’s life during the second trimester.

Shiv is a person who happens to be pregnant, among other things. She is not primarily pregnant. She is everything she always was, and also, on top of it, gestating a human. The existence of a pregnant character as complicated and fully-realized as Shiv is rare, and appreciated. 

Now I just have to hope that the last few episodes of the series don’t go all Game of Thrones on me and end with Shiv Roy burning down the WayStar Royco building and, I don’t know, banging Cousin Greg. If that happens, I’ll eat my words in a pickle milkshake.