Stealing the Show Read online

  Today showrunner is an elastic term that can encompass varying degrees of creative and managerial control over a TV series. That might mean developing the original concept, overseeing a cast and crew, shepherding a writers’ room, consulting with directors, editing episodes, maintaining a budget, and negotiating with studios and networks. The showrunner is the visionary in chief, operations manager, and financial officer all rolled into one.

  “Being a showrunner is a terrible job,” declares Jane Espenson, who wrote for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, and other series before graduating to the role of showrunner on Caprica and Husbands. “Suppose you are a writer who is happy at your keyboard and you’ve risen through the ranks because you write really good scripts. Now you are running the show. You may not feel like schmoozing the actors and keeping the network happy. It requires so many different skills, and most of them are not the ones that got you that job.”

  By the first years of the new millennium, thanks in large part to the rise of the Internet, it had become increasingly common for viewers to follow TV with the auteur-focused intensity of a French cinephile rifling through Cahiers du Cinéma in the sixties. Television fans rabidly dissected and debated their favorite shows on online bulletin boards and blogs, with a forensic attention to plot and character that would birth a new and distinctively twenty-first-century form of critical discourse: the recap. I first experienced this kind of TV nerd frenzy through the cult of Buffy creator Joss Whedon. It had never occurred to me to scour a show’s credits until I stumbled onto Buffy boards and encountered fans who could instantly distinguish between an episode written by David Fury and one written by Marti Noxon. That same degree of narrative close analysis became a hallmark of fan fervor over shows created by HBO’s flock of Davids: The Sopranos showrunner David Chase, The Wire’s David Simon, and Deadwood’s David Milch.

  Showrunners were now treated as visionary world-builders. The hungry maw of the Internet demanded a constant diet of insider information, and showrunners became celebs in their own right, doling out teasers and tidbits. What better spokesperson for a series than the person who created it? Talk to anyone who works in TV, however, and you’ll discover that television production is immensely collaborative. Even the most multitalented genius can’t do it alone. There’s often some sort of showrunning partnership, such as the one forged by Shonda Rhimes with Betsy Beers, or Tina Fey with Robert Carlock. Beyond that, each episode depends on the work of a hundred or more people: casting, lighting, sound, costumes, set design, shooting, editing.

  Nearly all series also rely on writers’ rooms. This refers to a collection of people who usually sit in an office brainstorming plot points and dialogue, and then go off to write full episodes individually. Some showrunners spend most of their time in the room with the writers; others (particularly those who also star in their series or juggle multiple shows) assign head writers to manage the process. On some sets, the procedure is organic and communal; on others, the showrunner (or sometimes the head writer) takes the raw material generated in the room and rewrites it to give the scripts a uniform voice. Some rooms glide smoothly through the seasons, while others are fueled by panic, anguish, and ego. As Tolstoy might have said had he lived long enough to visit a television set, “Every unhappy writers’ room is unhappy in its own way.”

  The gonzo workplace behavior of some critically acclaimed male showrunners mirrored that of the macho antiheroes in their dramas, as if the set were a stage for them to play out their own psychodramas. “It’s almost like a war situation,” writer Terence Winter said of working on David Chase’s The Sopranos. Director Tim Van Patten echoed this savage sentiment: “If David finds your Achilles’ heel, he will go for it, at war or play.” Deadwood and Luck creator David Milch has been described as a brilliant, generous, and addictive personality driven to create a chaotic environment. Even after Milch was known to have lost many millions of dollars to gambling, HBO continued to work with him and publicly sing his praises.

  Tina Fey once generalized that while men tend to go into comedy to misbehave, “the women I know in comedy are all dutiful daughters, good citizens, mild-mannered college graduates. Maybe we women gravitate toward comedy because it is a socially acceptable way to break rules.” Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, and Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer may impersonate women behaving badly, but behind the scenes they are hardworking perfectionists. There’s less room for reckless behavior when an entire gender is being judged on the basis of how one performs, as Roseanne Barr discovered.

  “The history of women in television is: if women are ‘difficult,’ they don’t work again,” says Norma Safford Vela, who wrote for Roseanne and other hit shows. Conversely, men who perpetrate foul workplace behavior rarely get their comeuppance (though that began to change in the fall of 2017, when a wave of sexual harassment revelations forced a number of powerful men to resign, in Hollywood and beyond). Safford Vela recalls having footballs thrown at her head on one set; in another writers’ room that she describes as “a frat boy world,” a producer pinned her to the floor and taunted, “Violence against women!”

  Showrunning requires the commanding style of a general leading an army into battle. “You have to be really good at making decisions,” says Ayanna Floyd, who wrote for Private Practice and Empire before developing series of her own. “You might literally make ten decisions in a matter of minutes and if you’re not good at that . . . it can kill a show.”

  But what happens when female assertiveness is mistaken for aggression or bitchiness? Before they created the hit series The Middle, DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler ran a show they heard might be canceled. So Heline called the network president to clarify. Heisler, who overheard the conversation, recalls, “She couldn’t have been more straightforward and professional, but later we were told that DeAnn was being uppity.” Actors and executives began telling the duo they’d acquired a “difficult” reputation when “all we did was passionately fight for what we believed as any showrunner worth their salt would.” Heisler says that the out-of-control or hostile behavior of the gonzo male showrunner simply isn’t an option for women: most successful female showrunners “run a pretty tight ship, and they get their scripts in on time because, if you’re a woman, you have to be reliable.”

  Many of the women I interviewed for this book are very thoughtful about the kind of atmosphere they cultivate behind the scenes. Transparent creator Jill Soloway, who lost out on jobs after being tagged as “difficult,” leans toward a kind of soft power that relies on communal creativity: “Gathering the crew and saying, ‘I just want to let everybody know that nobody is going to get in trouble today, nobody is going to get called out for making a bad choice. I don’t know what’s going to work, but let’s see what happens.’ ” After working on toxic sets for many years, Weeds and Orange Is the New Black showrunner Jenji Kohan says her goal is simply to “run a healthy show, where everyone is good at what they do and kind to one another. And when they’re done, they go home.”

  In this book, I’ve chosen to chronicle a handful of women who’ve risen to prominence by bringing unique female characters to the small screen, but this shouldn’t diminish the accomplishments of the many others not mentioned here who fought their way through the industry. Nor do I mean to suggest that only women can evoke powerful female characters; Buffy the Vampire Slayer mastermind Joss Whedon staked that fallacy in the heart. Another major TV landmark, Sex and the City, is absent from this book because, although largely written by women, it was created and run by guys: Darren Star and Michael Patrick King. It is worth noting that King’s first real TV break was writing for Murphy Brown, and Whedon got his start on Roseanne.

  * * *

  When I embarked on this book, there were more women running shows than ever before. This rise of twenty-first-century female-centric television coincided with an unexpected resurrection of feminism.

  Not so long ago, young women had distanced themselves from that F-word, the te
rm seemingly a sour relic from a long-ago liberation movement. But by 2015, describing yourself as a feminist was not just legit but also trendy: You could pledge allegiance to lady blogs such as Jezebel, Feministing, and The Hairpin, which served up politics, pop culture, and confessional essays. You could commodify your dissent by purchasing THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE T-shirts and SMASH THE PATRIARCHY tote bags. You could find icons such as Beyoncé performing at an awards show in front of giant letters spelling out FEMINIST, and Harry Potter star Emma Watson speechifying about gender equality at the United Nations.

  This mainstreaming of feminism dovetailed perfectly with the new wave of woman-powered television, shows that offered varied representations of female life and often engaged with serious issues such as abortion, equal pay, and violence against women. This period also overlapped with Barack Obama’s progressive two-term presidency.

  The Obama White House advanced LGBTQ and women’s rights. An avowed feminist, the president appointed two women to the Supreme Court and created a White House Council on Women and Girls to make sure all policy treated women fairly. Michelle Obama traded First Lady primness for stirring eloquence, using her pulpit to support girls’ education. (“Compete with the boys,” she told young women at one public event. “Beat the boys.”) And Hillary Clinton dusted off her suit jacket after the bruising 2008 presidential primary and became a hard-driving secretary of state, one of the most potent and respected figures in world politics. At every level of American society and culture, women were more visible, and more visibly empowered, than at any other time in our history.

  “Small advances spark resistance, resistance that in turn provokes propellant bursts of reactive fury,” Rebecca Traister wrote in Big Girls Don’t Cry, her account of the 2008 campaign. And so it was in 2016, when Donald Trump took the presidency. Fueled in part by the reactive fury of misogyny—who will ever forget the venomous way he spat “such a nasty woman” during the final moments of the final presidential debate on October 19, 2016, as if closing his deal with the American electorate?—Trump’s election was intended as a blow to the cause of women (as well as people of color and sexual minorities of every kind). The accumulation of small but significant cultural gains during the 2000s—gains that were not just mirrored but arguably amplified on television shows such as the ones celebrated in this book—triggered a thousand-ton backlash.

  Whether it was Shonda Rhimes’s “color-blind” approach to casting her hugely popular dramas or the gender-fluid complexities explored in Jill Soloway’s Transparent, television was transmitting a vision of an America that was racially vibrant and sexually progressive, a vision that turned out to be too far ahead of the actual reality of much of America, which was still attached to traditional values and traditional inequities of power. Not only were these series creating female characters living realities that Trump would undoubtedly consider nasty but some of the showrunners were actually on the campaign trail in 2016 stumping for Hillary.

  Excavating the culture wars era of the late eighties when researching the parts of this book that deal with Murphy Brown and Roseanne, I felt almost dizzy as I realized we’d come full circle: all the way back to “the Backlash,” as Susan Faludi dubbed it at the time. The drive to roll back women’s reproductive rights, negate affirmative action, and defund the National Endowment for the Arts and PBS, and the attempt to insert Christianity into the classroom—it appears that the Moral Majority is back, with a fresh coat of white paint.

  Just as Murphy Brown and Roseanne were prime targets for the religious right’s venom in the early nineties, now the alt-right has fixated on Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer as the poster girls of “cancerous” feminism. These women represent so much that is horrifying to Trumpites: they not only loudly support causes such as gun control and trans rights but also exude confidence in their intelligence and a comfort with their bodies, apparently unconcerned with male approval. An enclave of Trump supporters clustered at a subreddit called “the_donald” encouraged haters to flood Amazon with one-star reviews of Schumer’s memoir (and, later, did the same with Netflix and Schumer’s comedy special). Breitbart covered Lena Dunham’s every move with obsessive attention because, as then-Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos explained to Bill Maher, “The Democrats are the party of Lena Dunham. These people are mental, hideous people.”

  From single mom Murphy Brown to Girls’s single mom Hannah Horvath—these are the antiheroines of the middle American imagination, the women whom deplorables love to deplore and who make Red-staters see red.

  Events overtook me during the writing of this book: what looked like the forward march of progress turned out to be one of history’s grand zigzags. When I started, the golden age of female TV seemed like a permanent advance; now it feels significantly more precarious and embattled. Most likely, this period will prove to be another chapter in the long saga of cultural combat to decide what kind of country America will be. In a way, it makes the creative force waged by these women all the more crucial.

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Look Back in Anchor:

  Diane English’s Murphy Brown and the Culture Wars

  Diane English and Candice Bergen embrace while shooting the final episode of Murphy Brown, May 1998.

  Eighties America was in the throes of a culture war. Ronald Reagan and the religious right were hacking away at the social advances of the sixties and seventies. Before he was first elected president, Reagan had ripped the Equal Rights Amendment out of the Republican platform while backing an amendment to outlaw abortion along with certain forms of birth control. Once in office, he slashed funding for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and demonized poor black “welfare queens.” Meanwhile, Senator Jesse Helms and Reverend Jerry Falwell targeted artists for “indecency.” Assaults on abortion clinics mounted.

  Despite all these attempts to unravel the gains of feminism, shoulder-padded women charged into the workplace throughout the eighties. Madonna and Janet Jackson ran roughshod over the Billboard charts with pop-feminist singles such as “Express Yourself” and “Nasty.” Geraldine Ferraro became the first female candidate from a major party to run for vice president. More and more women were choosing to delay marriage, or stay single altogether. A 1985 Virginia Slims poll revealed that 70 percent of female respondents felt they could have fulfilled lives without marriage, and a Woman’s Day survey found that only half of married women said they would marry if they could choose again.

  Yet a stream of sociological studies trickled into the media that seemingly undermined this surge of female independence. They warned that working women were lonely and unappealing to men, their biological clocks ticking as loudly as time bombs; that there was a “man shortage”; that divorce was imperiling the American family. Newsweek, in its 1986 cover story about the “Marriage Crunch,” sounded the alarm that a forty-year-old single woman was “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than to tie the knot. Conservative columnist Mona Charen wrote in the National Review that feminism “has effectively robbed us of one thing upon which the happiness of most women rests—men.” Hollywood’s version of the emotionally destitute career woman arrived with the 1987 blockbuster thriller Fatal Attraction, starring Glenn Close as high-powered Manhattan book editor Alex Forrest. Seemingly independent and sexually dynamic, Alex morphs into a needy psychopath when her married lover tries to end their affair: “I’m thirty-six years old; it may be my last chance to have a child!” She is eventually put out of her single lady misery by her lover’s virtuous homemaking wife, who (spoiler alert!) guns Alex down.

  According to Susan Faludi in her landmark book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, the 1987/88 television season represented the “high-water mark” of the antifeminist wave in pop culture. The professional organization American Women in Radio and Television decided not to present its annual award for ads that featured women positively because none qualified for the category that season. On prime-time television, only two
out of the twenty-two new dramas featured adult female leads. In a New York Times article entitled “TV Turns to the Hard-Boiled Male,” about the rise of macho characters in prime time, Cheers creator Glen Charles offered up his show’s puckish hero, Sam Malone, as “a spokesman for a large group of people who thought [the women’s movement] was a bunch of bull and look with disdain upon people who don’t think it was.” That season, TV networks bet on the machismo renaissance, greenlighting shows such as Houston Knights (rugged cops), The Oldest Rookie (older rugged cops), The Highwayman (rugged cop of the future), and High Mountain Rangers (rugged wilderness cops). All of them flopped.

  Then, in the fall of 1988, two of the most brazenly feminist sitcoms ever to grace prime time premiered just weeks apart: Murphy Brown and Roseanne would rule American remotes for the next decade, redefining our ideas of “family values” and inciting unprecedented controversy.

  Murphy Brown was a career-focused single woman, an abrasive forty-year-old broadcast journalist “living like a man and making no apologies for it whatsoever,” as series creator Diane English noted. The character’s name was deliberately masculine, like Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest. English liked to describe Murphy as “Mike Wallace in a dress.” Wearing chic, loosely constructed suits like prêt-à-porter armor, Murphy had little time for polite small talk, let alone flirting or love affairs; she channeled all her energy into exposing corporate criminals and government scandals. Murphy, in other words, epitomized the kind of career woman who sent the religious right into convulsions. Immensely popular and wildly provocative, she was a heroine you either admired or abhorred.