The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Photos and text from wire services
“It’s a completely different world than when I was pitching” a network pilot just a few years ago, Headland said, 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?’”
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 to 22 percent for dramas, the study found, while 42 percent of comedy producers were female vs. 38 percent for dramas.
“These numbers are interesting within the larger context of women and the history of comedy,” said professor Martha M. Lauzen, the center’s executive director, citing skeptics Hitchens and the late Jerry Lewis, who in 2000 declared that a woman doing comedy “sets me back a bit . ... I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.” Tina Fey offered several retorts in her 2011 memoir “Bossypants,” Lauzen said, including: “It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good.”