When Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl was adapted for the big screen, a minor debate emerged about whether its female lead, Amy Dunne, represented a misogynistic portrait of a woman. In one of the book’s most notorious passages, Amy targets her bile at the cliches of “cool girls” (though crucially, also at the men who claim to love them); there are false accusations of rape and domestic violence. Amy is amoral and barbaric and unapologetically so. Does that make her author somehow sexist for inventing her?

Of course not, obviously, in the same way that Stephen King is not an advocate for murderous clowns because he wrote It. “To me, that puts a very, very small window on what feminism is. Is it really only girl power, and you-go-girl, and empower yourself, and be the best you can be? For me, it’s also the ability to have women who are bad characters,” Flynn said in response to the criticism in 2013.

Now Flynn’s debut novel, Sharp Objects, has been turned into a blockbuster HBO series, starring Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson. On the basis of the early episodes, it promises to be very good indeed, offering the depth of character that is made possible by affording the story eight weeks rather than three hours in the cinema. It is dark, deeply unsettling and once again shows women making bad choices, and worse. Mother-daughter relationships are particularly tense; at times, it makes Mommie Dearest look like a parenting manual.

In an interview with BBC News last week, Flynn was asked once again about why she chooses to write “bad” women and about criticism she faced around Gone Girl. Again, she replied succinctly: “I think it’s misogynist to say it’s misogynist to write about bad women. Anytime you tell a woman what she can and can’t write about, that’s misogyny. I mostly ignore it. It’s such an insane thing to say, as if you’re too delicate to bear the idea of a negative portrayal of a woman.”

In that respect, television is becoming more inventive, as the “difficult woman” evolves into something more nuanced. From Girls to Fleabag, Killing Eve to The Girlfriend Experience, the door has been opened to odd, gripping stories that ask more of the viewer than we have been used to providing. Some of the most original shows of recent years have done exactly what Flynn does, which has been long overdue anyway – they have thrown the notion that a female protagonist must be likable up into the air and shot it to pieces.

Mark Boon, a first-class nitwit, comes off the rails

For another tale of amoral actions and questionable characters, Hollywood might look to Govia Thameslink’s head of operations, Mark Boon, after a picture of him with his bag and coat on a spare seat in first class went viral and became a lightning rod for the entire country’s fury at overcrowded trains and incompetent rail services. It was a gift of a story, almost comically off in judgment. According to travellers on this busy, late-running Southern train, Boon asked passengers sitting in first class without a ticket to leave. Technically, he wasn’t in the wrong. They did not have first-class tickets and a spokesman later said standard seats had been available at the back of the train. Rules are rules.

But what an image it leaves of Southern Rail, voted the UK’s worst train service for the third year in a row in a Which? survey in January. The image of Boon and his bag (which had a first-class ticket, I’m sure) against a backdrop of passengers standing was the flame that ignited the emotional tinder of every cancelled or delayed train, every time you’ve had to stand on a journey for which you’ve paid a lot of money in the vain hope that you might be able to sit down for some of it.

I’m no corporate mastermind, but I would imagine that, in a week when Southern was criticised in the Commons by Caroline Lucas, who said that for her Brighton constituents who rely on its services, “the last seven weeks have been a new level of rail hell”, the idea of being a jobsworth over the class of seat that’s been paid for might not have been worth all the fuss.

Ah, Keanu Reeves has found the joy of text

There has been such a rush of 90s nostalgia lately that I’m starting to wonder if, in order to cope with the state of the world, there’s been an unspoken agreement to pretend the last 20 years never happened. Alanis Morissette has been on the road with songs from Jagged Little Pill. Alicia “Cher Horowitz” Silverstone has been staging a steady comeback, adding a TV series, American Woman, to her growing number of movie roles; she even reprised her Clueless character for a spot on Lip Sync Battle. And now the ultimate 90s movie stars, Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, are to appear in the new romcom, Destination Wedding.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Reeves said that he and his co-star had stayed in touch over the years. “It’s nice. She’s a friend,” he said of Ryder, but it’s what he followed it up with that made me think Reeves might still be languishing at the back of the Speed bus, wondering when he can catch his next big wave. “I text Winona and write, ‘Hey, Winona, what are you doing?’ ” he added. “It’s awesome.”

If the Sad Keanu memes failed to revive any lingering teenage feelings for Reeves, then his sheer wide-eyed wonder at the mechanics of texting has certainly done the trick.

• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist