by Joy Press
Looking for a leadership style that felt comfortable, Soloway considered guys such as Adam Sandler, Zach Galifianakis, and Jack Black, who all “seemed like they had access to their voices in a way I was jealous of, who were just playing. I think that’s a really great way to be in power as a woman: hire your friends, surround yourself with people who inspire you in the same way that Lorne Michaels and Judd Apatow have been doing all these years, and then tell everyone, ‘It’s not brain surgery. We are here to have fun.’ ”
She wanted to tap into the natural comfort these white guys exuded, the feeling men have had “since they were born that it is their job to take up space and run shit,” as Soloway quips. It’s something she thought deeply about as she began creating a second series, I Love Dick. Adapted by playwright Sarah Gubbins from the 1997 experimental autobiographical novel by Chris Kraus and staffed with an all-female writers’ room, I Love Dick plunges into the brain of a married female filmmaker (played by Kathryn Hahn) erotically obsessed with a dickish academic named Dick (Kevin Bacon). “The whole series is about why women have so much self-hatred when it comes to demanding their right to lead and see as a filmmaker,” Soloway explains to me a few weeks before the premiere of the series, an unabashedly feminist artwork dropped into the middle of Amazon’s mainstream marketplace.
This is an emotional and intellectual journey for Soloway, whose ideas about women, and gender generally, transformed between our first interview and when I finished the book. In 2017, Soloway came out as gender nonbinary, indentifying neither as a woman nor as a man, and answering to the pronoun “they” rather than “she”: “One of the evolutions that I have experienced in the past two years is the notion of not wanting to label myself as a ‘gender essentialist,’ someone who would say, ‘Women are X and men are Y.’ ” For many years Soloway spoke as a cheerleader for womankind with exhortations such as “Women can hold space because they have babies.” But, Soloway continues, “I can’t really say any of that anymore. It doesn’t allow us to have the trans and gender-nonconforming and nonbinary people in this conversation, who also do this work beautifully.”
The primary criterion now is finding people who can immerse themselves “in the friction of emotions” and live in the fluidity of the moment. Soloway compares the way they shoot Transparent to a documentary, one that yields constant surprises: “I sometimes watch Six Feet Under now and I see the rigidity with which we approached the work. I feel like I have discovered these keys to the kingdom now: it’s all about not knowing if something will work and showing up to watch it unfold.”
EPILOGUE
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In 1975, Gloria Steinem imagined how aliens from outer space trying to decode America based on TV and movies would see women: as a marginalized servant class who slept in false eyelashes and full makeup. If those same aliens watched television today, they would glean a very different picture.
Contemporary television quakes with women’s sound and fury. Since 2015, a torrent of series created by and revolving around women has shot forth with the explosive velocity of a champagne cork. A very partial inventory includes Insecure, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Jessica Jones, UnReal, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Queen Sugar, Fleabag, Difficult People, Another Period, Grace and Frankie, One Mississippi, Good Girls Revolt, Chewing Gum, Underground, Divorce, Great News, Supergirl, I Love Dick, Harlots, Better Things, and Glow. The subject matter spans sexual exploration and sexual abuse; female camaraderie and artistic emergence; depression and cancer. Among the protagonists are journalists, prostitutes, wrestlers, superheroes, and, in My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a lawyer with a tendency to turn female troubles such as heavy breasts and period sex into musical extravaganzas.
Some shows, such as British writer/actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s brash, booze-sozzled “traumedy” Fleabag, grab you by the throat. What starts out looking like an updated British version of single-girl sexploits (the series opens with a 2:00 a.m. booty text) quickly mutates into something much more barbed and anguished. “Either everyone feels this a little bit, and they’re just not talking about it, or I’m really fucking alone, which isn’t fucking funny,” the main character, Fleabag, utters darkly at one point.
Other recent series, such as UnReal, flip the script on TV itself. “We threw out the word likability really early on,” UnReal creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro told me of her show about two female producers at the helm of a reality TV franchise. Shapiro had toiled miserably as a producer on The Bachelor and wove elements of her own divided consciousness into UnReal’s Rachel Goldberg (Shiri Appleby). A feminist producer on a reality dating show, Rachel finds her job involves manipulating female contestants into compromising situations to satisfy the public’s sadistic gaze. “The first time we see Rachel, she’s wearing a THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE T-shirt,” Shapiro points out. “I really wanted people to know: This is not a lark spoofing reality TV. This is about somebody who lost their mind because they are totally living against their ideals.” The primary love relationship in the series is between Rachel and her brassy, older boss, Quinn (Constance Zimmer): two women in the entertainment industry trying to figure out how to exert their power without being demonized or marginalized.
Shapiro says she struggles with those quandaries on a regular basis—from being told to be nicer to crew members to getting pushback on hiring female directors. “When we were talking about hiring a director for the pilot, I would say a name, and there would be this weird silence. It was women who had done incredible work, but people would say, ‘I’ve heard she’s tough.’ What does that even mean? We just hired an asshole guy who went five million dollars over budget, so should we not ever hire another man?”
Even as women carve out space for themselves as showrunners, directing on television remains a mostly male milieu. Despite directing several independent films, Nisha Ganatra struggled for years to get a foothold in television. “It’s like a catch-22: You can’t do it unless you’ve done it before, and nobody will let you do it!” she says, laughing. It was only after an intervention by Jill Soloway, who hired her to collaborate on Transparent, that Ganatra’s television career took off.
Soloway describes the TV industry as an ecosystem in which men in power traditionally surround themselves with writers and directors who share their basic worldview and make them feel comfortable. “You can picture the older male director who hires the freshman director,” says Soloway. “They are both wearing baseball caps, and he’s got his arm around the kid, and they know how to do this because they’ve both been on teams and they know how men mentor one another. So they are going to be chosen above a woman or a person of color or a queer person or a trans person. If you are a white straight guy who’s lived in the Pacific Palisades for the past twenty-five years and you bring a young trans director of color onto your set, you are not going to get to have that relaxed feeling of ‘Let me throw my arm around you and show you how things go.’ You are going to be forced to confront your privilege.”
Breaking these patterns means dissolving cozy networks; every female or minority or trans hire is one less job for the boys. “You can’t just make more space,” Soloway argues. “So you are asking men to not hire the people they know and trust, people that make it easy for them because they have a shorthand. That is a pretty big ask for a lot of men who don’t consider themselves racist or sexist but have comfortable systems in place for their professional and personal relationships.” This is why a number of showrunners, such as Soloway, Queen Sugar’s Ava DuVernay, American Horror Story’s Ryan Murphy, and Jessica Jones’s Melissa Rosenberg have tried to even up the playing field by publicly vowing to hire female directors for half or more of their series’ episodes.
Increasing the number of female directors or showrunners isn’t going to fix big American problems like the wage gap, and developing more series with female protagonists won’t defeat the assaults on women’s reproductive health, either. We need a grassroots activist onslaught to achieve that. Yet cultural
representation is no small thing. Growing up in a world where you don’t spot versions of your experience reflected in the culture makes you feel small and invisible. It tells you, and all those around you, that your voice is not important. By reflecting the reality of women’s lives, the television creators in this book arguably have helped provoke the current political backlash. That means they could play a prominent role inspiring the resistance.
* * *
There are no fairy-tale endings here. When I began writing this book, Hillary Clinton was sailing toward the White House, assisted by Shonda, Lena, Amy, Abbi, and Ilana. When I finished it, Donald Trump was sitting in the Oval Office emitting misogynist tweets, and Republicans were once again waging war on women’s health and reproductive rights.
Less than a year into the presidency of a man who once bragged he liked to “grab them by the pussy,” though, monstrous revelations about movie producer Harvey Weinstein in the New York Times triggered a kind of mass symposium on sexual misconduct, leading to the ousting of serial harassers and predators throughout the journalism, political, and entertainment industries (among them Louis C.K. and Kevin Spacey). Time magazine made female “silence breakers” its “Person of the Year.” It was as if the squalid underbelly of the patriarchy had suddenly been exposed, and the experiences women had silently suffered were brought into the open in a #metoo moment of painful but cathartic recognition and solidarity.
History is a giant tease: it jerks around our hopes and assumptions, it ebbs and surges and doubles back on itself. The long arc of history may bend toward justice, but when you’re living through a reactionary period, it feels as if progress were being forced treacherously backward. The fact that forces of repression are now emboldened and energized makes the need for a cacophony of diverse and unconventional voices on television even more vital and urgent.
“I think the big breakthrough we had the past couple of years comes from the proliferation of all the venues [showcasing] all these original voices that networks wouldn’t touch,” suggests Lynda Obst, the legendary movie producer who has executive-produced TV series such as Hot in Cleveland and Good Girls Revolt.
The major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) have not made consistent strides in terms of gender parity. (The CW is an exception, with a majority of series run by women.) A recent analysis in Variety found that of the new scripted shows being made for the 2017/18 season, just 29 percent of the broadcast showrunners are female and only 35 percent of the lead actors are female. Yet the old network system’s dominance is over, as hundreds of cable and streaming networks lure away viewers. Even Rhimes turned her back on the old network system in 2017, leaving ABC for a multiyear production deal with Netflix.
The death of network primacy is a manifestation of the shattering of consensus in American culture as we retreat into belief bubbles and demographic niches. Cable channels and streaming services are open to taking more risks and courting viewers who have been neglected by the old network system, all of which means more chances for women to steal the show. Jenji Kohan’s Orange Is the New Black helped bring attention to Netflix’s programming; Netflix went on to deliver Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Jessica Jones, Grace and Frankie, Lady Dynamite, Glow, and imports Fleabag, Anne with an E, and Chewing Gum. Amazon followed its Transparent success with pickups for One Mississippi, Good Girls Revolt, Z: The Beginning of Everything, I Love Dick, and Amy Sherman-Palladino’s series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Traditionally sedate female networks made room for more challenging fare (Queen Sugar at Oprah’s OWN network, UnReal at Lifetime), and executives at Hulu showed staunch support for female showrunners.
Even cable network HBO, which had a historically grim record of airing series created by women, stepped up its game and made a home for its first female African American auteur with Issa Rae’s Insecure. A Stanford grad and aspiring screenwriter, Rae was frustrated by the lack of black sitcoms on the twenty-first-century airwaves. “When 30 Rock started, I really appreciated it because Liz Lemon is awkward, and I identified with her,” she told New York magazine. “But it was frustrating that there were no characters like her that looked like me.” Like Lena Dunham and the Broad City duo, Rae snuck into the industry through a side door, writing and starring in lo-fi Web series such as The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl before attracting mainstream Hollywood attention. After a fizzled collaboration with Shonda Rhimes, she created Insecure.
Melina Matsoukas knew she was the right visual storyteller for Insecure from the moment she laid eyes on the pilot script. It mirrored Matsoukas’s own life “as a young black woman having to navigate through worlds where we don’t always fit in,” and evoked friendships between women that resonated deep in her bones.
“We are telling stories about women and people of color on the show,” Matsoukas says, “so that diversity on-screen should lead to more diversity behind the camera as well. It’s really about being in charge of that gate. I’m like, who’s allowed to come through that door? We have a small grip on that handle now.”
* * *
Imagine a Los Angeles restaurant dining room filled entirely with women, clustered around ten tables, as if at a wedding banquet. Only, they’re not dressed in glitzy gowns; they’re dressed for work. These women call themselves the Woolf Pack, and they are some of Hollywood’s most powerful showrunners.
Fledgling UnReal showrunner Sarah Gertrude Shapiro has planted herself next to television empress Shonda Rhimes at a table that also features Vampire Diaries co-creator Julie Plec and Liz Tigelaar, showrunner of Casual and Life Unexpected. The conversation at this particular table occasionally veers toward kvetching about things such as how difficult it is to hire female directors, but Tigelaar finds herself rapt in astonishment. “I was so struck by the fact that we could all sit there and complain that we should be getting more or should be further,” she admitted later, “but what everybody at this table has accomplished is amazing. It just feels so nice to know that you’re with women who are showrunners, who are doing this crazy thing that you’re trying to do, too.”
The Woolf Pack (the name a tip of the hat to Virginia Woolf and her quest for a space for female creativity, aka “a room of one’s own”) has been meeting sporadically for the last several years under the aegis of the nonprofit Humanitas Foundation, which presents prizes to television and film writers who nobly explore the human condition. After being nominated for an award for The Big C, Jenny Bicks suggested getting more women involved in Humanitas, and a posse of female showrunners began to meet.
Bicks says it began as a small, informal gathering: “I remember women, one by one, getting up and telling their stories, and it was incredibly liberating because, as showrunners, directors, anything in charge, we spend so much of our time trying to play by rules that were not set up by us. We have very few people we can trust, people we can turn to and say, ‘This isn’t okay, right?’ ” As the group expanded by word of mouth, Bicks continues, “We shared our fears and our anger and our projects.” They also raised money for the Hedgebrook women’s writing retreat and traded tips on mentoring and hiring. “Very few of us had female mentors. If you are a showrunner who started when I did, there were a few women, like Diane English, but it was pretty much all men.”
Bicks recalls a Christmas lunch at which she announced, “If this place got bombed, there would be no more female showrunners.” She adds, “Which would probably make a lot of people happy.”
DeAnn Heline, co-creator of The Middle, says that at her first Woolf Pack gathering, each woman took a turn answering questions such as “What was your greatest victory?” or “What was the craziest thing an executive ever said to you?” It was a rare moment when she was able to compare notes with her peers, she says. “You can ask Shonda or another showrunner, what did you do in this situation?”
Although the stalled statistics suggest there’s still a steep climb ahead for female showrunners, Tigelaar sees an industry in which an increasing number of women are finding a
foothold. “Looking at the numbers, maybe it seems bleak and like the uptick hasn’t happened yet. But the feeling of being in it is real,” she says, her voice vibrating with optimism. “I think it’s a great time to be a woman in television, and I look around at that [Woolf Pack] lunch and, I’m like, look at what my friends are doing: they’re all badasses! I think doors are being kicked open.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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Writing a book is a deeply solitary experience on one level, requiring thousands of hours alone in front of a computer, begging words to arrange themselves on a page. But writing this book was also a communal experience. I spent many happy days driving to Pacific Palisades and Sherman Oaks and Echo Park to listen to creative women talk about what they do and how they do it. I could not have written this book without the many interviewees—more than a hundred—who took the time to speak to me on and off the record. Not everyone I interviewed made it into the book by name, but all of their wisdom contributed to the finished product. I’m also appreciative of the many publicists and assistants who made these interviews happen. Alison Rou, Erin Kellgren, and Christina Brosman all went the extra mile for me, as did Lisa Vinnecour.
I also had a lot of help from my friends and colleagues. I want to thank Alice Short, Martin Miller, and Elena Howe, editors who assigned me related stories or otherwise supported me at the Los Angeles Times, where I worked when this book was born. Thanks also to Meredith Blake, Amy Kaufman, Greg Braxton, Gina McIntyre, Rebecca Traister, Deborah Vankin, Emily Ryan Lerner, Lisa Jane Persky, Tom Ceraulo, Yvonne Villarreal, Carolyn Kellogg, Mary McNamara, Liz Brown, Sarah Schrank, Christopher Noxon, Amy Reiter, Laura Miller, Danielle Nussbaum, Sharon Mizota, Oliver Wang, Sarah Hepola, Ivy Pochoda, Michelle Dean, Colleen Conway, and Jason Grote for providing me with contacts, title suggestions, or other vital aid.