The biggest question of Hillary Clinton's second campaign for the presidency was whether the former first lady and secretary of state could persuade Americans to see her in a new way, escaping decades of narratives that portrayed her as a phony on a quest for power she didn't deserve. When the results came through on Nov. 8, the verdict seemed clear and bitter: Even with a looser style and more progressive message, Clinton couldn't escape the image that had hardened around her.

But if the poll results failed to prepare Clinton and her supporters for this result and for the disappointment of failing to break a centuries-old gender barrier in American politics, maybe pop culture should have. Some of the biggest television shows of 2016 followed women who tried to take power — or had power thrust upon them — but who found themselves constrained, knowingly or not, by the traditions and means of exercising that power proscribed by the men who came before them.

This spring and summer, the sixth season of “Game of Thrones” gave us a troika of women who moved to consolidate their authority with consequences that were more devastating than inspiring.

In King's Landing, Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) blew up the Sept of Baelor with the wildfire a previous king from the Targaryen dynasty had stockpiled, killing all of her enemies with a single, terroristic stroke and bringing about the massacre that her brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) had killed that king to prevent. Across the sea, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) abandoned her efforts to build a more enlightened society in the cities she had conquered in Slaver's Bay and sailed for Westeros, determined to reclaim the realm from which her family had been expelled. And in the North, Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) learned from the cruelty of a husband who had raped and abused her, trapping him in a brilliant, bloody military maneuver and then feeding him to his own dogs.

A surface reading of each of these stories might have felt triumphal. Cersei queened herself after years of marriage to a man who hated her. Dany had spent years dithering in exile. Sansa freed herself from a fate that at its best would have meant mutilation and an early death. But to do so, each woman had to become the thing she hated and that had harmed her. Cersei visited abuse on a nun who had shamed her. Dany left an unstable society, an unfinished social project, in her wake. Sansa, her dreams of chivalry destroyed, adopted the amoral reality that had so disillusioned her.

The first seasons of HBO's science fiction drama “Westworld” and “The Crown,” Netflix's look at the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, offered less-direct parallels, but they were still powerful portraits of women hemmed in by men.

In “Westworld,” those limitations were literal: Androids such as Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton) were literally programmed by men, including theme park founders Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), first to please park visitors, most of them men, and then to develop the consciousness that would allow them to rebel.

In “The Crown,” a young Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy) hopes that she can help her younger sister Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) marry the divorced man that she loves, but finds that her prime minister, Winston Churchill (John Lithgow), and secretary, Tommy Lascelles (Pip Torrens), have been elusive about the limits of her room to make her own decisions.

“The Crown” is a story about a woman learning to play a game designed and dominated by men, accepting the rules and constraints of the contest. “Westworld” is following women who are determined to tear the game to pieces.