The name on everybody’s lips these days is M3GAN. And that dancing doll should have your attention. (Be warned: spoilers for M3GAN follow.) The titular character from mega-producers Jason Blum and James Wan’s new venture into horror-comedy has had a vise grip on a specific corner of culture—let’s just say it, gay culture—for the past week, and for good reason. M3GAN’s mastery of the English language makes ChatGPT look like AIM’s SmarterChild. Her cover of “Titanium” blows Sia’s version out of the water. The precision of her eye work would impress legendary film acting coach Bob Krakower. 

But the best part of the very well-reviewed M3GAN is not actually M3GAN the doll. No, M3GAN’s secret weapon—the reason the film is as frightfully silly and devilishly campy and works in any capacity—is its very human lead, Allison Williams, who stars as toy inventor Gemma. Not only did Williams make M3GAN with her stellar performance, she inadvertently invented an archetype entirely of her own while doing so. Introducing, The Allison.

The Allison™ is the polar opposite of the long since disgraced cliché Manic Pixie Dream Girl. MPDGs (Kirsten Dunst’s Claire Colburn in Elizabethtown, for whom the phrase was coined, Natalie Portman’s tap-dancing Sam in Garden State; and Zooey Deschanel in, well, a lot of things) were easy, breezy, and beautiful female characters who delight, amaze, and inspire the (always) male protagonists without necessarily having complex inner lives of their own. On the contrary, The Allison is all too serious and neurotically intense. On top of that, she’s usually super-ambitious, pretty, meticulously styled, rather Type A, and often a bit of a perfectionist. She knows what she wants and has the wherewithal to go get it. 

Credit where it’s due, Reese Witherspoon’s prickly overachiever Tracy Flick in Election (1999) was an early inspiration for Allisons everywhere. Flick is hyperintelligent, ruthless, and dogged in her pursuit of her goal—to win student body president—often to her own detriment. All these traits coalesce to create the blueprint we’ve seen time and again in film and television, like Leighton Meester’s Blair Waldorf on the original Gossip Girl, and of course, Lea Michele’s Rachel Berry on Glee. Allisons, and their fictional foremothers, will sacrifice anything and anyone to get what they want.  

In M3GAN, Williams’s Gemma is a total Allison. She’s a genius toy roboticist who becomes obsessed with creating an artificially intelligent doll that’s able to comfort, protect, and provide companionship to her recently orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), who has come into her care. Gemma means well, and her reasons for engineering a robot babysitter-slash-overlord (what could go wrong?) seem valid—she has a demanding job and an overbearing boss, and feels out of her depth taking care of a child with serious trauma. But as the film progresses, it’s clear that Gemma, accidentally or not, has designed a doll to take care of a traumatized child primarily so that she herself can get back to work.

Williams expertly and believably juggles the tricky humor and high stakes of the situation, nailing her punch lines and keeping the campy tone of the film aloft while never sacrificing the emotional stakes necessary to drive the plot forward. Gemma’s clear frustration when Cady forgets to use a coaster is, at once, understandable yet funny. Sure, it’s annoying to get rings on your hardwood table, but hey, didn’t that nine-year-old girl just lose her parents in a horrific snowplow accident? Maybe let her off the hook?

And when Gemma delicately pressures her clearly suffering niece to perform in a make-or-break work presentation at her toy company (“I mean, there are people who flew across the country for it, but if you’re not up for it, I’d rather you tell me now”) it’s both an earnest request and a howl-worthy punch line. It’s a total Allison move that Williams pulls off perfectly.

None of this should come as a huge surprise if you’ve been paying attention to Williams’s career. She’s been delivering terrific Allison performances for over a decade now, ever since she power-walked onto the screen as Marnie Michaels, the high-intensity best friend to Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath on HBO’s Girls in 2012. In an interview with Glamour during the height of Girls, Williams revealed that Dunham told her that the character of Marnie was partly inspired by Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick. (Glee’s Rachel Berry was also inspired by Tracy Flick, by the way.) “Lena says ‘Tracy’ a lot when she’s directing me,” Williams said. “That’s Marnie’s thing.” Marnie’s thing is being a Flick acolyte—i.e., an Allison—albeit a messier version of one. And as for Williams’s mastery of M3GAN’s tone, that also can be traced back to Girls. People incorrectly treated Girls as if it were a documentary when it came out, but it was, inarguably, a horror-comedy, in which Williams excelled—I’m still hard-pressed to think of a scarier, more hilarious scene than Marnie’s acoustic rendition of “Stronger.” Six seasons on Girls undoubtedly laid the groundwork for Williams to land the humor rife in M3GAN.

Even when the part doesn’t necessarily call for it, Williams’s acting can sometimes seem Allison-adjacent anyway. While she was definitely not to blame for the myriad of problems with 2014’s Peter Pan Live!, some reviewers noticed a seriousness and an intensity in William’s portrayal of the titular role that didn’t entirely fit the bill, especially considering Peter Pan’s whole thing is rambunctious, carefree youth, and the ability to take to the skies like, say, a manic pixie. “Williams had the grave air of a woman who would boldly wear a somewhat mannish haircut to achieve a childhood dream,” wrote Sarah Larson in her review of Peter Pan Live! for The New Yorker. “She seemed to be daring you to watch her perform. There was nothing playful about it. She had taken over that pirate ship, and now it was hers.” If that doesn’t sound like an Allison playing Peter Pan, then I don’t know what does. 

But Williams seemed to have gotten the last laugh, leveraging those stretched-thin nerves to their greatest dramatic power. Oscar winner Jordan Peele told Business Insider that seeing Williams in Girls—and “the wonderful risk she took with Peter Pan”—inspired him to cast her as the female lead in his directorial debut, Get Out: “She felt cosmopolitan but also undeniably Caucasian.” 

While an Allison-esque character can obviously be any race—we salute you, Sandra Oh as Dr. Cristina Yang on Grey’s Anatomy, and Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope in Scandal—for many of these characters, whiteness is a crucial part of the formula. There’s often a through line between their perceived entitlement and their lack of self-awareness. Anyone who even cracked open Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility in 2020, or paid attention to conversations surrounding race and privilege in America the last few years, should be willing to stomach the notion that privilege is largely inextricable from whiteness. 

Williams was able to weaponize her Caucasian-ness and her innate Allison-ness to deliver a crucial, highly calibrated performance in the now iconic Get Out. As the duplicitous Rose, Williams played a racist woman who knew exactly what she wanted, but this time, had to convincingly hide her nefarious intentions from her boyfriend, Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris, as well as the audience, until the cinematically perfect moment. As the tension builds and Kaluuya’s panic rises, Williams keeps up the act until the great reveal: “You know I can’t give you the keys, right, babe?” In that moment we discovered that Rose is, to borrow another hallmark of 2020, a “Karen”—a white woman who feels entitled to whatever she wants—even if that means her Black boyfriend’s life. 

Let’s be perfectly clear: Allisons are not Karens. But Allisons can have a few Karen-esque qualities—an unshakable conviction that their goals are just, coupled with a lack of interest in other people’s thoughts or feelings. When Rose pulls out those keys, she reveals herself as someone scarier than anything up M3GAN’s satin-lined sleeves. She’s an evil nightmare mash-up of an Allison and a Karen—which Williams sells completely. 

In the past month, versions of The Allison have taken Hollywood by storm. Aubrey Plaza’s smart and sexually repressed lawyer, Harper, on HBO’s The White Lotus finds it nearly impossible to befriend her vacation mates because they’d rather watch Ted Lasso than keep up with news, an inclination she just can’t comprehend. Savannah Lee Smith’s cutthroat and punctilious Monet de Haan on the current reboot of Gossip Girl—lovingly created in Blair Waldorf’s image—will do whatever it takes to clinch the queen bee slot at Constance. And Claire Danes’s striving and struggling divorcée, Rachel, in Fleishman Is in Trouble is about as prickly as they come (albeit for devastating and legitimate reasons). While they’re each unique in their own ways, Harper, Monet, and Rachel are also all smart, successful, thorny, difficult, sometimes manipulative, and serious women—some of the most compelling characters we’ve had on television this season—and there’s more than a little bit of Allison in all of them.

In his admiring review of M3GAN for Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson writes that Williams “is perhaps not an actor of vast range (at least, not that we’ve seen yet), but she works perfectly in a project like this.” It’s true: Marnie, Rose, and Gemma have a lot in common, and Williams is great in the film. But while range is touted as the thing all actors must aspire to, finding your niche is just as important. And what’s even better than finding your niche? Creating one as a paragon of the mesmerizingly tightly wound. And when that niche so perfectly embodies the fears and anxieties of a particular cultural moment, maybe there’s something to be said for depth versus breadth. 

God bless Allison Williams. May she never unwind.