It’s no joke: women rule the Emmy comedy series category
LOS ANGELES (AP) — When the winner of the best comedy series Emmy Award is announced Sunday, odds are good that a woman will be giving the acceptance speech.
An unprecedented number of the seven nominated comedies are from female creators: defending champion “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” ‘’Fleabag” and “Russian Doll.” Count in “Veep,” with Julia Louis-Dreyfus both its star and an executive producer, and women are ruling the comedy party.
There have been other peaks for female-led shows, most notably in the mid-1980s and ‘90s when hitmakers included Susan Harris (“The Golden Girls”), Diane English (“Murphy Brown”) and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (“Designing Women”). Roseanne Barr (“Roseanne”) and Marta Kauffman (“Friends”) were a critical part of the comedies they co-created with men.
The notion that men are the funny sex is a stubborn one. Christopher Hitchens, the late writer and intellectual provocateur, devoted a 2007 Vanity Fair essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” to the topic. Then a media growth spurt forced an attitude adjustment, at least by the entertainment industry.
The addition of streaming services to cable and broadcasting generated a “desperate need for content,” said Amy Sherman-Palladino, who created Amazon’s “Mrs. Maisel” and produces it with husband Daniel Palladino. “Whether or not they wanted to keep it a boys’ club or not, it makes it impossible.”
That’s especially true given the worldwide reach of streaming services and cable channels, she said.