The Rise of the Female Showrunner and Hollywood’s Woolf Pack

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 am 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 25 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.”

“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.”

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.

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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.”

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From Stealing the Show: How Women are Revolutionizing Television. Used with permission of the publisher, Atria Books. Copyright © 2018 by Joy Press.