Women rule Emmys’ comedy series category

‘Mrs. Maisel,’ ‘Russian Doll,’ ‘Veep,’ ‘Fleabag’ among nominees Sunday

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 were created by women: 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 mid1980s and ’90s when hitmakers included Susan Harris (“The Golden Girls”), Diane English (“Murphy Brown”) and Linda Bloodworth-thomason (“Designing Women”).

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.

Going global

The addition of streaming services to cable and broadcasting generated a “desperate need for content,” says Amy Shermanpalladino, who created Amazon’s “Mrs. Maisel” and produces it with husband Daniel Palladino. “Whether or not they wanted to keep it a boys’ club, it makes it impossible.”

That’s especially true given the worldwide reach of streaming services and cable channels, she says.

“You need different people to tell those stories because, suddenly, you’re not just pitching to one demographic. If you want to go global, you gotta go global,” Sherman-palladino says. “And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot of women in the world.”

Leslye Headland — cocreator of Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” with its star, Natasha Lyonne, and Amy Poehler — says creative opportunities for women are expanding and improving.

“It’s a completely different world than when I was pitching” a network pilot just a few years ago, Headland says, with the expectation the main female character would be appealing and not overly complex. “Now it feels like you’re going into projects thinking, ‘How much more challenging and exciting can we make this?’ ”

Making progress

The Emmy-nominated comedies are an indication of progress for women, not outliers. Women are getting more behind-the-camera TV work on comedies than dramas, according to new research from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at

San Diego State University. Women represented 32 percent of the creators of comedy shows on broadcast, cable and streaming platforms in 2018-19, compared with 22 percent for dramas, the study found, while 42 percent of comedy producers were female versus 38 percent for dramas.

Women were more than ready for their close-up when the marketplace relented, says Rachel Bloom, star and co-creator (with Aline Brosh Mckenna) of The CW’S musical comedy “Crazy Ex-girlfriend.”

“The question of whether or not women are funny, whether or not women can do stuff — women have been doing stuff in alternate comedy venues, live comedy venues, theater, for years,” Bloom says. But when they tried to pitch a project, “no one gave a (expletive).”

Bloom’s popular online videos led to her partnership with Brosh Mckenna on “Crazy Ex-girlfriend.” “Fleabag” creator and star Phoebe Waller-bridge originated her dark comedy on the British stage. Headland also is a playwright.

“I feel like our show, sadly, wouldn’t have been made a handful of years ago,” says Anna Konkle, co-creator of “PEN15,” a coming-of-age comedy about two middle school girls. “We started writing it seven years ago, and it took probably five years to get made. So,

I think it’s a moment that I hope lasts forever, and keeps growing.”