Look, I’ve got nothing against books. Some of my best friends are books. Book clubs, though, are another matter. I’ve always had an almost pathological aversion to joining one. They seem to me to be an excuse to drink wine and be pretentious, and I don’t need an excuse to do either. My antipathy for book clubs means I’m not one of the 68,640 people who, at the time of writing, have joined Emma Watson’s feminist book club. Launched last week, the club is called Our Shared Shelf and is hosted on Goodreads.com. The first book is My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem.

I applaud Watson’s initiative, but I can’t help but wish she had set up a feminist Netflix club instead. Not just because I’m anti book clubs, but because it would serve the greater good. I mean, let’s be real, only 1% of any book club actually read the book. That’s the first rule of book clubs. Meanwhile, 99% of people with a Netflix subscription regularly binge-watch programmes and are actively seeking ways to justify this binge-watching as an important social exercise. Right?

Since Watson is busy, I’ve decided to start a feminist Netflix club myself. It will be called Netchicks. No, no, it won’t. Streaming Feminists? Nah, not right either. Let’s take a leaf out of Watson’s book club and call it Our Shared Netflix Password. While finding a name is easy, deciding on the content is a little trickier. After several hours down a Google research rabbit hole I am depressed, disoriented and dubious. Every show I Googled had been alternately described as both the best thing and the worst thing to ever happen to feminism. I had gone deep into the feminist-pseudoacademic-industrial complex and it had given me a complex. But, after much debate, here is my preliminary list of feminist Netflix club picks. And if there is one discussion point that governs the lot of them, it’s this: have we outgrown the Bechdel test now? And if we have (and I think we have), what do we replace it with?

Netflix’s first female-fronted superhero show is an obvious choice. Jones uses her super-strength to save the world from the evil manipulations of Killgrave, a straight, white man. Right on! But it isn’t Jessica’s strength that makes the show noteworthy; it’s her weaknesses. Forget having it all or leaning in, Jessica is an angry alcoholic loner. Partly, this is a result of Killgrave’s abuse. But Killgrave is too pathetic, too undeveloped a character to be entirely convincing as a villain and the most fascinating element of Jessica Jones is the struggle around agency. How much is Jessica a victim and how much is she clutching at the idea of victimhood as an all-absolving identity? Feminism, like everything else, has its flaws, and Jessica Jones makes no attempts to hide them.

Courtney Cox, Jamie Kennedy and Neve Campbell in Scream. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar/Dimension

Horror movies aren’t known for their feminism. The promiscuous die first; middle-class virgins survive; women are generally slashed, raped and tortured. However, one of the first mainstream, category-defying horror films was 90s classic Scream. The film repeatedly draws attention to misogynistic horror tropes, then upturns them. In one scene, Sidney Prescott, the main character and “final girl” is told: “You’re not a virgin. Now you got to die. Those are the rules.” But Sidney kills her would-be killer and stars in several sequels, becoming a self-help author.

Gillian Anderson plays DSI Stella Gibson in The Fall. Photograph: BBC/The Fall S2/Helen Sloan

In The Fall, Gillian Anderson plays a detective hunting down a serial killer who targets young women. There is a strong female lead, an almost painful peeling back of the layers of sexual and structural violence against women, and a lot of feminist speechifying. Now, speechifying can backfire. Take season four of Scandal, for example, in which Olivia Pope’s intermittent tirades against the wage gap or the words used to describe women seem as if the drama has been paused for a public service announcement. Anderson’s speeches, however, are so brutally matter-of-fact that they make a point without belabouring it, and it’s a joy to watch. When confronted about a one-night stand, for example, Anderson says: “Man fucks woman. Subject: man; verb: fucks; object: woman. That’s OK. Woman fucks man. Woman: subject; man: object. That’s not so comfortable for you, is it?”

Pretty Little Liars stars Lucy Hale, Troian Bellisario, Shay Mitchell and Ashley Benson. Photograph: Everett/REX/Shutterstock

This show revolves around a group of girls who are being tormented by a mysterious antagonist, defying numerous murder attempts in high heels and perfect makeup. There are many reasons why this shouldn’t be a feminist show but – largely due to its excellent depiction of friendship – it is. When one of the girls comes out as gay, it’s a non-issue. She’s a character; she’s not the “gay character”. I wish this show had been around when I was a teenager.

Aziz Ansari as Dev and Lena Waithe as Denise in the Netflix original series Master of None. Photograph: KC Bailey/Netflix

Creator Aziz Ansari follows 30-year-old Dev as he wanders New York doing mundane things with a group of friends. The show also regularly illustrates everyday racism and sexism, with episode seven, for example, juxtaposing a woman’s experience walking home alone at night (terrifying) with a man’s (unremarkable). Unfortunately these points, much lauded by the media, often feel heavy-handed and a recognition of – wow! – a male writer articulating the female experience. Really, the show is on this list for one reason only: Denise. Denise is a black lesbian who is friends with Ansari’s character and frequently nails, deadpan, in one sentence, what every stretched out “feminist” scene completely overstates.