Meet the women leading TV
Times are changing, say female executives in the industry, although gender parity is still a long way off
Melissa Rosenberg had a modest goal: For the second season of her Netflix series
Marvel’s Jessica Jones, at least 50 per cent of the directors would be female.
But in conversations with Allie Goss, vice president of original series at Netflix, they established a new mandate: All 13 directors would be women. “I’ve been on 25 years of shows, and nine times out of 10, those directing staffs are all white men,” said the showrunner, whose long list of credits dates back to Party of Five.
“So why not all women?”
Had she simply turned to the usual industry gatekeepers — typically agents with a tried-and-true Rolodex of names — the task might have seemed daunting: “You’re always handed a list with all the white guys,” Rosenberg said.
Instead, she reached out to fellow showrunners, did a lot of Googling and quickly discovered that “it was really not at all difficult to find 13 terrific female directors.”
The drama, which puts a feminist spin on the typically male-dominated superhero genre, is the latest television series to make the hiring of female directors a priority. For two seasons now, Ava DuVernay’s Queen Sugar (OWN) has been directed entirely by women, while on shows as disparate as The Deuce (HBO),
Feud (FX), Jane the Virgin (CW), Transparent (Amazon) and The Handmaid’s Tale
(Hulu), at least half of all episodes have been directed by women.
While a recent study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that women directed only 7.3 per cent of the top 100 movies in 2017, 21 per cent of all episodes in the 2016-17 television season were directed by women, according to the Directors Guild of America, up from 17 per cent the year before. TV may still be far from achiev- ing gender parity, but it is trending that way; women also accounted for 32 per cent of first-time episodic directors in 2016-17, an 8 per cent increase from the year before.
These gains coincide with a rising awareness of systemic discrimination and abuse within the business, and a growing willingness to speak out against Hollywood’s power imbalance.
But they are also the result of changes within television specifically. Individual Alist producers like Rosenberg, DuVernay, Shonda Rhimes, Jill Soloway and Ryan Murphy, increasingly recruit women and people of colour. Meanwhile, in response to media scrutiny, guild pressure and, more important, the success of the folks listed above, networks are realising the value of inclusive storytelling.
And of course, the sheer number of shows being produced in the age of “Peak TV” has led to greater demand for talent.
“I feel like the times are definitely changing,” said Gail Mancuso, a two-time Emmy winner for her work on Modern
Family. “It took a while but we’re seeing this normalisation that it’s not only OK to hire a female, it’s necessary.”
Arthur picked up an Emmy for directing Cagney & Lacey. Numerous women have since repeated the feat, including Reed Morano for her work last year on The Handmaid’s Tale.
But for many years, women who wanted to direct were dependent on powerful producers and stars willing to buck tradition and give them a shot.
Mancuso came up through the ranks as a script supervisor, eventually becoming an assistant director on Roseanne learning the ropes from male mentors: “I say male because they were all male at the time,” she said.
When a directing slot became avail- able during the fourth season, however, Mancuso approached the show’s star, Roseanne Barr. “I said, ‘Hey, look, he’s leaving and I’d like to direct that spot.’ And she said, ‘Well, go ahead.’ After I directed that episode, she whispered in my ear at curtain call: ‘I’m going to give you the whole next season.’”
Jamie Babbit had similar support from a big female star; she was hired as a director in the fifth season of Alias after star Jennifer Garner voiced frustration that only six out of 105 episodes were directed by women.
“The producer I met with was like, ‘Hey, I decided to meet with you because Jennifer Garner keeps complaining that we’re not hiring any women,’” Babbit recalled. “And I thought, ‘Good for her. Good for her for ‘complaining.’ Her being persistent is the reason I got hired.”
Following escalating complaints about Hollywood’s diversity problem, more recent progress has come thanks in part to the concerted efforts of influential showrunners like Rosenberg, an Emmynominated producer who wrote all five blockbuster Twilight movies.
Two years ago, Ryan Murphy launched the Half Initiative with the goal of providing more opportunities for women and people of colour behind the camera. DuVernay, an Oscar nominee and forceful advocate for industry change, has turned
Queen Sugar into a launching pad for untapped talent.
‘FIND, PROMOTE, HIRE’
Bethany Rooney is a veteran TV director (NCIS) who got her first break on St.
Elsewhere from producer Bruce Paltrow. As co-chair of the Directors Guild of America’s Diversity Task Force, she’s spent years meeting with studios and networks to encourage them to do better. While Rooney said they once “had a big chip on their shoulder,” she has witnessed “a huge attitudinal shift.”
“Now they really are responsive. They’re saying, ‘Give us lists of directors that you know. Give us lists of people who’ve been through the programme and we will hire them,’” she said.
In 2014, the guild secured an industry first: an agreement that all the major TV studios would establish or maintain training programmes for diverse directors.
The sheer volume of television programming — 4,500 episodes were produced in the 2016-17 season, according to the DGA — has certainly created an unprecedented opportunity, and women directed 955 of those episodes, 253 more than in the previous season. Whereas the total number of episodes increased by 10 per cent from the previous season, the total number of them directed by women increased by 36 per cent, indicating that women are benefiting substantially more from Peak TV.
For cast and crew, having women in a leadership position on set can also feel revelatory.
The title role in Jessica Jones includes filming a lot of technical intimate scenes and star Krysten Ritter says she feels “more comfortable being very raw and vulnerable with a female director.”
“There’s just a shorthand with another woman when you’re talking about where you’re going to put your leg so they can see this much of your [backside],” she said.
Still, it’s hard to shatter a glass ceiling when the industry operates on a Must Have Experience loop. The biggest hurdle female filmmakers face is a reluctance to provide the so-called “first” credit.
As simple and obvious as it may seem, part of the solution lies in eliminating what Jane the Virgin creator and showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman described as the “Can a woman do this?” filter.
“I have the opposite filter,” she said. “I apply the one that says: ‘Of course women can — women do everything.’”
Television is currently in the throes of pilot season — a time when experience and familiarity tend to win out. Even as their numbers increase, it’s only a small group of female directors who swim in the pilot season pool. “It’s the same group of six or seven experienced women directors who have opportunities to direct on 450 things,” Urman said.
This year moved the needle. Last pilot season, four women were hired to direct 10 of the 70 broadcast pilots in 2017. This season, 18 women directed 23 of 75 broadcast pilots.
As television has gained prestige, so too has the role of director, once viewed as a hired gun in a writer’s world. TV’s creative renaissance has led to a rise in cinematic storytelling and inventive visuals and increasingly entire seasons of a series helmed by a single filmmaker.
The trend began with men like Cary Fukunaga on True Detective and Steven Soderbergh on The Knick. But lately, women such as Mary Harron (Alias
Grace), Pamela Adlon (Better Things) and
Andrea Arnold (season two of Big Little
Lies) are also being viewed as auteurs. Still, for every Queen Sugar or Jessica
Jones there are far more examples of shows like Game of Thrones or Kevin Can
Wait where the women directors are scarce or non-existent.
Martha Lauzen, a professor at San Diego State University who has been monitoring women in Hollywood for more than 20 years, said what we’re seeing today is a “piecemeal approach.”
“We have pockets of progress due to the individual efforts from people like Ava DuVernay or Ryan Murphy or whomever,” Lauzen said. “That’s great. But again, it’s a handful of individuals. We would need to see an industry-wide commitment to move the numbers significantly.”
In the end, said many of the women who spoke to The Times, the goal is for gender to be immaterial. “There is a wealth of directors out there and a lot of the great ones are women,” said Jessica
Jones director Jennifer Lynch. “But you don’t walk up to Spielberg and say ‘You are a great male film director.’”