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  CONTENTS

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  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  Look Back in Anchor:

  Diane English’s Murphy Brown and the Culture Wars

  CHAPTER 2

  From Rage to Riches:

  Roseanne Barr and

  CHAPTER 3

  Walking and Talking as Fast as They Can:

  Amy Sherman-Palladino’s Gilmore Girls

  CHAPTER 4

  The Vajayjay Monologues:

  The Prime-Time Empire of Shonda Rhimes

  CHAPTER 5

  Sitcom and the Single Girl:

  Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, Liz Meriwether’s New Girl, and Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project

  CHAPTER 6

  A Voice of a Generation:

  Lena Dunham’s Girls

  CHAPTER 7

  Gross Encounters:

  Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City

  CHAPTER 8

  Crime Family Values:

  Jenji Kohan’s Weeds and Orange Is the New Black

  CHAPTER 9

  Body Politic:

  Jill Soloway’s Transparent

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PHOTO CREDITS

  INDEX

  To my parents, Rebecca and Stephen Press, who kept our house stocked with books and never uttered the words “Too much TV is bad for you.”

  INTRODUCTION

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  Mary Tyler Moore became an icon of single working womanhood on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

  Growing up in the seventies, I devoured The Mary Tyler Moore Show and That Girl reruns. I couldn’t have explained why back then, but the chutzpah and ambition of those characters were a big part of it. Both shows featured young women chafing at their limits. Sometimes I felt they were winking at me, as if to acknowledge the ridiculousness of their predicaments. But as much as I loved them, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and That Girl were innocuous reflections of the ferocious changes shaking up our culture.

  During the second half of the twentieth century, American women expanded their ability to control reproduction, to pursue careers, to decide when (or whether) to marry, and to end marriages gone bad. Looking back at those decades of change and turbulence, I’m amazed by how little of this translated to the TV screen—and how few women had creative control over the shows America watched. Marlo Thomas recalled that while working on That Girl, she was usually “the only girl in the room.” Although the sitcom revolved around her character, it was up to Thomas to nudge the male writers and producers toward a more accurate and realistic rendering of a liberated young woman’s life.

  The idea for this book started clattering around in my brain in the spring of 2015. If you had to pick a triumphant moment for the twenty-first-century surge of revolutionary TV made by and about women, that would be it. More than a dozen new female-centric series created by women premiered in 2015—as many as had emerged in the three previous years combined. At the 2015 Emmys, Inside Amy Schumer won Best Variety Show, and Jill Soloway accepted an award for directing the series she’d created, Transparent. The same year, at the Golden Globes, four of the five nominated comedies, Orange Is the New Black, Girls, Jane the Virgin, and Transparent (which won), were made by women. On the drama front, Shonda Rhimes reigned over ABC’s Thursday-night lineup with three hit series, making her one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood.

  For most of TV history, broadcast networks had focused on series that could deliver a mass audience to advertisers, with particular emphasis on eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old guys. Entertainment executives, who were mostly men, seemed to believe viewers wouldn’t put up with complex female leads, even as audiences lapped up series about cranky or difficult men. Women couldn’t be chubby, dark-skinned, or too far north of thirty, either. In the early years of the twenty-first century, though, those tightly held beliefs began to loosen. The TV industry was in crisis, threatened by an onslaught of cable and digital outlets. Where once ABC, CBS, and NBC divided up the entire American viewing populace among themselves, now they had to fend off an ever-multiplying number of rivals. The crisis became a moment of opportunity; cable and digital executives grew more receptive to programming that appealed to niche populations, and anxious broadcast networks took a few more risks in response. As a result, women began to enter through the ever-widening cracks in the system.

  This is a tale of the extraordinary women responsible for an upheaval in pop culture, the reverberations of which continue to shake up the television landscape today. They’ve filled our screens with a throng of unruly female characters and stretched the format farther than we ever imagined it could go. So many aspects of women’s lives (as momentous as female friendship, as mundane as period pain) had never been depicted with any depth on a small screen because network executives believed that these things were inherently dull or off-putting. Nowadays, we take it for granted that we’ll be seeing female experiences depicted provocatively and hilariously on our screens—courtesy of a bevy of irreverent female writers, producers, directors, and performers.

  Shonda, Jenji, Mindy, Lena, Tina—all those loud, visible female showrunners have made television feel like an equal-opportunity dream factory. Most of the young female TV writers I’ve interviewed came of age watching series such as Gilmore Girls, My So-Called Life, and Grey’s Anatomy, and took for granted that Hollywood would make space for them. However, despite the recent spate of high-profile, Zeitgeist-defining shows conceived, written, and starring women, television remains a male-dominated industry. Anecdotal evidence suggests that female showrunners earn less than their male counterparts, and there are still far fewer women in those positions of power. According to a report by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, out of all the series on the air in the 2016/17 season, only one in five broadcast TV creators was female. It’s only slightly better at the supposedly more adventurous cable and streaming outlets, where 26 percent of creators are female. The report notes something else, though: shows with at least one female creator hired far more women writers and cast more women in major roles. It’s an ever-expanding circle in which powerful female showrunners can enable others to create cultural images and narratives that inspire the next generation of powerful women.

  This book celebrates the modern era of female-driven and female-focused television, which I trace back to the twin disruptions of Roseanne and Murphy Brown. After all, when you’re living through what seems like a golden age, it’s important not to take it for granted, to remember that things weren’t always so golden, that it took decades of struggle and perseverance in the face of preconceived ideas and outright exclusion to get here.

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  The founding mother of the American TV sitcom, Gertrude Berg, is almost completely forgotten nowadays. In the 1920s, she created the radio sensation The Rise of the Goldbergs, a serial about a Jewish family (broadcast at a time when Nazism was emerging in Europe), and then retooled it as The Goldbergs for the early days of television. Writing, starring in, and producing the comedy series from 1949 to 1955, she retained creative control while playing a matriarch with a shtetl accent. The Goldbergs became one of CBS’s top ten shows in postwar America. A cross-promotional
dynamo, Berg spun out of this franchise live shows, books, a line of housedresses, and a movie.

  A former chorus girl and movie actress who spotted the possibilities of television as her ingenue options waned, Lucille Ball negotiated with CBS executives about creating her own comedy series. They were hesitant to cast her Cuban husband, Desi Arnaz, as her costar, so the couple convinced them by forming a production company and taking a live prototype of I Love Lucy on the road. The ensuing series about a zany, enterprising redhead and her exasperated bandleader husband was the number one show in America for most of its six years on the air. Ball ignored the prevailing norm of having an all-male writing staff and hired Madelyn Pugh, who remained with her for the entire run of the series. That women’s point of view showed itself in Lucy, a willful figure who constantly rebelled against her husband’s orders. Ball and Arnaz made the canny decision to produce I Love Lucy themselves, and to shoot it on film. (In those days, TV shows were generally performed and broadcast live and not preserved on tape.) Such innovation later allowed them to syndicate the series, keeping Lucy on television screens for decades and making Ball a role model for generations of funny ladies—not to mention a wealthy woman.

  Although the Pill had hit the market in 1960, and Betty Friedan’s million-selling The Feminine Mystique helped kindle second-wave feminism upon its 1963 publication, liberated women were rarely glimpsed on TV. This all changed when That Girl premiered on ABC in 1966. Rising starlet Marlo Thomas had proposed a series based partly around her experience as a young actress living in Manhattan on her own. She wanted to call it Miss Independence but lost the battle. Thomas formed her own production company, Daisy Productions, and sought out female writers, but as a sign of how constrained things were for women, she was never credited on-screen as producer. “I ran the show, I signed the checks,” she later said, “but I chose to play down my power, so as not to be too threatening” and risk scaring off the “best and brightest men in comedy.”

  Despite its breezy tone, That Girl was groundbreaking in its depiction of a young single woman focused on her career and her desires, rather than on reeling in a husband. “You did not have to be the wife or the daughter of somebody, or the secretary of somebody . . . you could be the somebody,” Thomas has said. Although the network heads worried that audiences would be turned off by all that female independence, the show was an instant hit, a sign perhaps of changes in society that TV had ignored. As Thomas recalled in her memoir, Growing Up Laughing, “[T]his girl, who seemed like a revolutionary figure to the men in suits who did the research, was not a revolutionary figure at all. . . . There were millions of ‘That Girls’ in homes across America.” As the show wound up its five-year run in 1971, the network, still resolutely misunderstanding That Girl’s appeal, proposed the traditional “happy ending”: a wedding. Rejecting this conventional closure for something truer to the energies roiling the era, Thomas insisted that That Girl conclude with the couple en route to a women’s lib meeting.

  After a successful run as spry housewife Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Tyler Moore, along with husband Grant Tinker, formed MTM Enterprises to produce The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Its 1970 launch coincided with That Girl’s final season—almost as if the baton were being passed from one TV icon of single working womanhood to another. But unlike Thomas, Moore didn’t feel the need to tiptoe around male hang-ups about empowered women: her authority was never in question, on-screen or behind the scenes. Her character, Mary, called her boss “Mr. Grant” and sometimes hesitated nervously to ask for what she deserved, but that didn’t stop her from forging ahead. It didn’t stop Moore, either, her power and ownership emblazoned in the very title of the series. “You never forgot for a second that she was in charge,” director Alan Rafkin once wrote. The show’s producers hired an unprecedented number of women—at one point, a third of the writers’ room was female. Scribes such as Treva Silverman and Susan Silver delighted in pouring their own experiences with dating, double standards, and workplace wrangles into the mouths of Mary and Rhoda, Mary’s equally single best friend.

  During a conference on Women in Public Life held at the University of Texas in November 1975, Gloria Steinem imagined what aliens from outer space might make of American women if all they had to go on was TV and movies, as Jennifer Keishin Armstrong relayed in her book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted. “First of all, they would be convinced that there were twice as many American men as there were American women. It would be quite clear that we slept in false eyelashes and full makeup. Some of us would be taken to be a servant class of some sort. If we lived alone, we would almost have to be widows, at least until recently.” This absurdly out-of-date picture, Steinem pointed out, was being challenged and changed by The Mary Tyler Moore Show, along with Norman Lear’s new series, Maude.

  Although ideas from the women’s movement permeated mainstream America throughout the seventies, their impact on prime time remained minimal: there were Mary and Rhoda, there was Maude, and there was the working-mom sitcom One Day at a Time (co-created by actress Whitney Blake), but that was about it. Behind the scenes, things were equally unequal. A 1974 Writers Guild of America report revealed a shocking statistic: only 6.5 percent of prime-time shows that season had hired even a single woman writer.

  It wasn’t until the early eighties that women really started to write and run more shows. That’s when writing partners Barbara Corday and Barbara Avedon finally got Cagney & Lacey on the air. They had been trying to pitch a buddy movie about two female police detectives since the mid-seventies. Corday’s producer boyfriend Barney Rosenzweig had originally suggested the idea, inspired by a book she’d given him: Molly Haskell’s feminist film critique From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. After multiple false starts and cast changes, Cagney & Lacey landed on the air in 1982 and became a hit for CBS, winning not just a huge audience worldwide but also a run of Emmy Awards.

  Corday argues that people were excited by Christine Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey not because they were fighting crime but because viewers wanted to see wise older women muddling through their complicated lives. Cagney was a hard-drinking and sharp-edged single chick; the more nurturing Lacey was a working woman with a supportive husband. “What people wrote letters about most were the bathroom scenes, where two women actually sat and talked about everything in their lives,” Corday says. “Eavesdropping on those conversations—it sounds silly, but it was very groundbreaking for women. There was nothing else like that on television.” The show followed through on its feminism behind the scenes, too, hiring dozens of female writers and episode directors. Among those writers was Ronnie Wenker-Konner, mother of Jennifer Konner, the future co-showrunner of Girls, which would ultimately push intimate women’s bathroom conversations farther than Cagney or Lacey could have imagined.

  Many of the women who pioneered prime time did so in partnership with men, usually their husbands. Y chromosomes just seemed to make male network execs feel more comfortable. That was true for Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, Barbara Corday, Whitney Blake, Golden Girls creator Susan Harris, and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. Bloodworth-Thomason honed her skills writing for M*A*S*H, Rhoda, and One Day at a Time before launching a production company with husband Harry Thomason to create sitcoms such as Designing Women, a southern hothouse of female workplace repartee. Corday suggests that a lot of women writers back then clung to the creative side: “They didn’t see themselves as businesspeople, and their husbands did.” Even so, she says, “Barney and I were very aware that whenever we would go to a meeting, the executive would talk directly to him. The two of us would be sitting on a couch, but the whole conversation was directed to one person.”

  One of the first to ditch the male-partner trend and step out on her own was Anne Beatts, a comedy writer who parlayed her Emmy-winning stint on the original incarnation of SNL into a TV deal. Square Pegs, her sitcom about two nerdy girls (one of whom was played by a young Sarah Jessica Parker), premiered on CB
S in 1982. A cult classic, Square Pegs unsuccessfully pushed for an all-female writers’ room. Says Beatts, “I only wanted to hire women because it was about the experience of young girls in high school, but the network made me hire a token male writer.” (That token male, Andy Borowitz, would go on to create The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and to found The Borowitz Report.)

  Much more common was for series to hire a token female writer, as if too many women might turn the room into a kaffeeklatsch. “When I started, the networks and studios were run by men, and they tended to gravitate toward male material, toward male writers and showrunners,” says Jenny Bicks, who launched her career in the early nineties, eventually ending up as a writer on Sex and the City and then as showrunner for Men in Trees, The Big C, and Divorce. Being “the only woman in a room of, like, twelve or thirteen men” was the norm, something that Bicks experienced time and time again. And if trying to carve a path through prime time has been challenging for white women, the difficulty was multiplied for trailblazing women of color such as Yvette Lee Bowser (Living Single, Half & Half) and Mara Brock Akil (Girlfriends, Being Mary Jane).

  Female TV writers grew accustomed to thinking of other women as their competition for the tiny number of slots available—because they were.

  * * *

  Chances are you have only a vague idea of what a showrunner does. The word came into common usage in the late eighties and nineties. Before that, the person in charge of a TV series was called the executive producer, and he (almost invariably a he) was typically a business-minded type who managed the production and commissioned writers to churn out scripts. Slowly but steadily, though, decision-making power slipped into the hands of TV writers. You started out as a staff writer and worked your way up to executive producer, with the result that, on any given show, there could be a horde of people with various “producer” titles running around. The person who had overall control of the set came to be called the showrunner—and increasingly, writers assumed that powerful role. Writing tends to attract socially awkward introverts with shoddy math skills, but suddenly the nerds were managing multimillion-dollar productions.