Woman of the Month: Michaela Pratt

Michaela Pratt from How To Get Away With Murder

I recently finished up the second half of How To Get Away With Murder's first season, a show that contains the staple elements of any Shonda Rhimes drama: a twisty and – let's be honest here – melodramatic plot (almost too twisty and melodramatic at some points) and a diverse, complex cast of characters.

Now, a part of me feels like the Woman of the Month should go to Viola Davis as Annalise Keating – after all, she's the protagonist of the show, described in the actress's words as: "a sexualized, messy, mysterious woman".

But as compelling as she is, I've got a soft spot for Aja Naomi King's Michaela Pratt.  Shonda Rhimes gets that female characters don't have to be nice to be interesting; that they don't have to be likeable to be sympathetic, and Michaela is a high-achieving, somewhat neurotic, completely driven law student with a set of goals for the future that she's dead-set on realizing. Anything in her way will simply get bulldozed.

Naturally, that's the universe's cue to pull the rug out from under her. She has her ugly moments (her homophobic rant when she finds out her fiancé might be bisexual) and her moments of grace (deep concern over the fate of a black man who's been set up to take the fall for Professor Keating's death), not to mention her comical fixation on the trophy awarded to the best student in Annalise's class, but out of all the characters she's the one I find the most unpredictable. And that's saying something compared to the wild cards she's surrounded by!

There are so many defining beats to her character, from her awed "I want to be just like her" when she sees Annalise win a court cause, to her switch from catatonic wreck to composed actress when she spins a convincing tale to a campus security guard about why they're lugging a rolled-up carpet out of Annalise's house, to her final confrontation with her appalling would-be mother-in-law in which she suddenly slips into a pronounced Southern accent to tell her: "[Your son] doesn't love me. But I love me."

I've always enjoyed the development of characters who start off as spoiled brats and gradually learn compassion and humility from others (Cordelia Chase, Prince Arthur) but Michaela is already more than that. Clearly she came from humble beginnings and her current "princess" demeanour is just a façade to conceal her background – so going into season two, finding out more about her interests me more than whoever killed Rebecca.