Women’s progress in TV engagingly documented

We hear you, straight white guys: You hardly see yourselves on television anymore.

Seems like the medium is packed with black people, LGBT people, chubby chicks, prison inmates and female butt-kickers.

Television used to be dominated by the “universal” worldview of “ordinary” people — as defined by the mostly male series makers. This cultural norm left “different” people on the outside looking in.

That is, until those “other” perspectives managed to get a foot in the door, most notably during the past 15 years.

This expanding focus is chronicled by TV critic Joy Press in “Stealing the Show” (subtitled “How Women Are Revolutionizing Television”), published recently by Atria Books (311 pages, $26).

Press builds her chronological chapters around talks with female show originators who have helped redefine TV “normal” with characters who are women/gay/etc. at the forefront.

Shows can now evoke “how it feels to be a woman instead of what it’s like to look at them,” said Jill Soloway, creator of the Amazon’s series “Transparent,” a tale of fluid identity, transsexual and otherwise.

The idea of a woman as the center of her own universe got its network TV kick-start from the late 1980s sitcom “Murphy Brown,” Press writes. Candice Bergen’s TV reporter was living “without any man in her life helping her out,” said series creator Diane English.

Roseanne Barr’s “Roseanne” took that attitude home as her working-class wife battled, Press writes, “to be a decent mom while making a living and not entirely letting go of her sense of self.”

“Roseanne” writer Amy Sherman-Palladino would go on to create “Gilmore Girls,” reclaiming the term “girls” to describe its core relationship between a BFF mom and teenage daughter. Their ultra-literate chatter upended what Press calls “a presumption that relegated a female-driven show to the cultural margins.”

(Here’s the impact: “Gilmore” has been revived by Netflix; the “Roseanne” cast on March 27 will pick up 20 years later on ABC; and “Murphy” is due back on CBS in the fall.)

With her 2005 stealth hospital hit “Grey’s Anatomy,” creator Shonda Rhimes kicked the doors wide open, casting women, blacks, gays and more “others” in lead roles.

Meanwhile, female writer-actors demanded attention, too — Tina Fey on “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock,” Mindy Kaling on “The Mindy Project.”

Cable and streaming offered even greater freedom, Press writes.

On HBO, “Girls” stormed the “last frontier,” explicit female sexuality. Creator-star Lena Dunham’s average body, often seen casually naked, shocked male viewers. That subversion multiplied on Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer” and girl-buddy comedy “Broad City.”

Press — who has worked at the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times and Salon.com — neatly nestles her TV revolution in the context of its times: These shows aren’t made by women for women; they render a wider range of experience.

Once you’ve stolen the show, it’s yours to shape.