For women, peak TV still has many pitfalls
One morning last fall in Los Angeles, comic and actress Kate Micucci sat chewing over a pitch for a television series with her writing partner, Felicia Day. How conventional would the gender roles have to be, they wondered, before a studio would bite?
Their basic premise was “manic pixie dream girl grows up”: Suppose you took a quirky-but-adorable female character, a staple of small films like Amélie and Garden State, and showed what she and her best friend would be like pushing 40.
The role was not a stretch for either woman. Micucci has played her share of manic pixies on shows like The Big Bang Theory and Scrubs. Day built a following as the creator of the web series The Guild and as the love interest in Joss Whedon’s antihero sendup, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
When they pitched the concept around town, though, they got a typical Hollywood response. Producers told the pair they loved the idea — but that they’d love it more with just a few changes.
The series that excited the producers would indeed feature two women in their late-30s. But there would be a younger man at the center of the show, who would be a source of inspiration and self-knowledge.
Micucci began to muse about this new version of the show, tentatively called Hot Guy in the Basement. They still hadn’t committed to the producers’ notes. “If we changed the title, we could get rid of the hot guy,” she said.
And yet the appeal of the younger man was undeniable. “The hot guy is more network salable,” Day countered. “A lot of people are keen on the idea of this young person invigorating a bored person’s life.”
If a manic pixie lacked a man to behold her, was she still a manic pixie? A network executive might begin to wonder.
Their dilemma pointed to a paradox of the recent television renaissance. Clearly, the advent of prestige cable and streaming services has supported a proliferation of nonmale voices. Creators like Jill Soloway (Transparent), Jenji Kohan (Orange Is the New Black), Lena Dunham (Girls) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) have achieved an iconic status that might not have been possible a decade earlier.
But for all the ways that the Netflix era has expanded opportunities for certain auteurs, the entertainment industry is still a forbidding place for many female show creators. That’s because the economics of streaming are starting to resemble traditional broadcast television more than most highbrow viewers realize.
According to industry reports, the two most-watched shows on Netflix last year were The Office and Friends, hardly graveyards for gender stereotypes. HBO, long the capital of small-screen tastemaking, is under orders from its new corporate parent, AT&T, to add more shows that appeal to Middle America. Last year, Amazon revealed it was canceling three newer shows, including Soloway’s self-consciously feminist I Love Dick and One Mississippi, by comic Tig Notaro, because it reportedly sought “bigger, wider-audience series.”
“They are trying to have massive, breakout global hits,” Rich Greenfield, a media industry analyst formerly at BTIG Research, said of Amazon.
The effect has been to keep the overall percentage of female series creators stable in recent years, at roughly one-quarter.
Women created about 20 percent of the shows that have aired on HBO so far this year, or will return to the network before the end of 2019, according to a Times tally reviewed by the network. HBO said that nearly half its directors are women, and it has said that its standards for shows haven’t changed since the acquisition. At Amazon, women created about 15 percent of current shows, but about 40 percent of the new programs the company has ordered since a leadership change last year.