April 19th, 2007
by
Ide Cyan
I’ve been adding TV episodes written and/or directed by women to the Women eligible for 2008 SF Awards entry created by Madeline F. on the FSF Wiki, and I’ve noticed a few interesting things regarding the presence of women behind the scenes.
First, I’d already started noticing that a pretty good number of episodes of Supernatural were written by women, which is a good thing, despite this being a show that’s so much about a return to a pre-BTVS, pre-X-Files, men-fighting-monsters set-up. And some other shows do give more than a token number of creative credits to women, like Jericho, for instance.
But this entry is really about the losers, the shows that don’t include women as writers or directors, or only on extremely rare occasions.
The new Doctor Who series is going all-out in its third year, by having a whopping two-parter (beginning this week-end) written by Helen Raynor, who had been working as a script editor for the series, before getting her first genre writing credit on the spin-off, Torchwood (which had more women penning episodes in its debut season than Doctor Who has since its revival!).
And here are some recent SF/F television series that have had entire seasons between 2006 and 2007 without one single episode either written or directed by women!
The Dresden Files
Stargate: SG-1
Stargate: Atlantis
(If you know about more examples, please say so in the comments.)
A really special mention should go to Stargate: Atlantis, for having only two episodes to be either written or directed by women, over its three 22-episode seasons so far. (These episodes are S1’s “Home”, dir: Holly Dale, and S2’s “Instinct”, written by Treena Hancock and Melissa R. Byer.)
And I had to go back to Stargate: SG-1’s seventh season (the last season was its tenth) to find an episode directed by a woman, series star Amanda Tapping.
The Dresden Files just finished its first 12-episode season, though, so perhaps there’s hope for it if it is renewed.
Having strong female characters on TV is a good thing, especially since, unlike in books, where the characters end on the printed page before the audience meets them, it does offer work to women in the acting business, but when there are no women getting work behind the scenes, especially in the pivotal creative control positions, it isn’t only representations of women that might suffer, but women’s place in SF itself.
Any endeavour towards feminist SF cannot only be about fictional representation. (The recent Hugo vaccuum exemplifies that problem.)
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Filed under Awards & Recognition, TV & Film, Writers & Artists, feminism | Comments (15)
Actually, that little revelation about the SG franchise makes my knee-jerk dislike of it seem a bit more rational. Then again, it makes me sad for the legions of female fans of the show. They’re such an important part of the series’ success, but they’re tragically under-represented within the creative dynamic. But before I criticize too harshly, I suppose I should look up the stats on how many “Farscape” episodes were penned by women. I loved that series, and have no idea how gender diversity might have impacted its creation.
From what I can gather from episode commentaries and my fan’s POV of the TV-making process, “showrunners” tend to have the most power in the creative process: they’re the ones who’ll plan ahead, and “break” the season down. They’re the ones who’ll give the show its general direction, and supervise all the important decisions, leaving episode writers to fill out the blocks of storytelling (or stand-alone episodes, in the case of more episodic, less arc-oriented series), subject to their approval. So it’s important to note who the showrunners are, and how rarely, especially in genre TV, those people are women. The role of showrunner usually comes with the title of executive producer, but, as far as I can tell, not all executive procuders are showrunners. Actors and script editors and consultants and so forth also have significant creative impact, of course (Robert Holmes and Eric Saward on Dr Who and Chris Boucher on Blake’s 7 come to mind), but showrunners, well, run the show, and many of them double as writers and directors, making their input unmistakeable.
Joss Whedon was, obviously, showrunner on BTVS, with Marti Noxon becoming co-showrunner in S6 — she was also in charge of the short-lived Point Pleasant, which she co-created. (Now she’s working for Grey’s Anatomy, a medical drama created and run by Shonda Rhimes). Russell T. Davies is the showrunner on the current Dr Who, and Peter Mohan is doing Blood Ties. Chris Carter ran The X-Files and the first season of Millennium, whose second season was run by Glen Morgan and James Wong. JMS ran Babylon 5, and wrote almost every single episode. Those are the some of thes ones I can cite off the top of my head. Rob Thomas does Veronica Mars, and Amy Sherman-Palladino created and ran Gilmore Girls until last season, and Barbara Hall did Joan of Arcadia… Verity Lambert produced the initial episodes of the original Dr Who, back in 1963. To name a few more women who have been central to the creative process of a few series. Oh, and Ali Marie Matheson co-created The Collector with her husband.
In the UK, writers get a lot more credit for television series — all the episodes of the current Dr Who series, and of Torchwood, get a “by [name of author]” credit following the episode title, clearly implying authorship.
Farscape, which I loved, was run by David Kemper. The majority of Farscape episodes were written and directed by men, but it had, although not very many, some episodes in all four of its seasons that were either written or directed by women.
I’ve grown to enjoy Stargate (mainly because I followed Claudia Black when she joined it, after Farscape’s cancellation, and because of a severe dearth of outer-space-and-aliens SF to compete with it), but I find the reoccurrence of the names of the same men over and over, and the near-complete exclusion of women, quite staggering.
I went back and bolded the episodes that were written (or co-written) and/or directed by women on the FSF Wiki’s List of Farscape episodes (which I’d been filling in a while ago, creating individual entries). If I haven’t made any mistakes, that’s a total of 13 episodes out of 88 with women getting at least one of the major credits, averaging three per season, or 14.7% of Farscape episodes, but you’d have to halve that percentage to make it proportional (because of the two types of credits per episode).
The one thing to be said in the defense of the Dresden Files is that so far, 10 out of 12 episodes were penned by the man who wrote the series of novels it is based on — there has not been as much opportunity, given that, to bring women in. (Not none, obviously, but less.)
That said, I’m not that surprised that most of the series I actually follow and like in the world of television have at least a third of their episodes penned by women.
Jim Butcher is credited for his novels, but the actual episodes of the show were scripted by: Peter Egan, George Mastras, Laurence Walsh, Curtis Kheel, Jack Bernstein, Hans Beimler & Robert Hewitt Wolfe, David Simkins, and Barry M. Schkolnick.
I’m really glad you’re filling in the TV stuff. I kinda hoped there would be female writers on TV, but I couldn’t think of anyone but Marti Noxon… And I couldn’t think of any female directors of movies at all, which had me mildly depressed. Kudos for finding “Blood and Chocolate.”
Still, appalling lack of women at the top of the entertainment industry.
Trying to find recent or upcoming genre movies by women is difficult. Many of the directors of earlier genre works have had to move to TV or to other projects in mainstream drama.
Barbara Hall has recently finished filming a project titled “Demons”, which seems to be a pilot for a TV series about an exorcist, but there isn’t much information about it out there.
There’s a movie titled “Witches” listed on Angela Robinson’s IMDb page for 2007, but almost no information about it whatsoever.
I bolded Battlestar Galactica woman-writer episodes but haven’t added to the awards page yet. Note that Jane Espenson wrote a BSG with Anne Cofell.
What I’m noticing from looking at Xena, Buffy, BSG, etc., is that there are a reasonable number of women screenwriters, although still too much of a minority, but where are the women directors? (And what happened to Toni Graphia, the woman who was a co-producer on BSG?)
A wikipedia tip — you can look through Category:Women screenwriters to find other women. Look while you can, because “Women X” categories are always under threat in wikipedia. (There was just a long struggle to resurrect “Women writers”.)
… There are lots of women directors, by the way. FSFwiki Category:Directors lists some SF directors who are mostly women and if you browse through wikipedia category:Directors you see lots of women. (Note the absence of wikipedia category Women directors.) It’s harder for women directors to get funding for first major picture, distribution deals, and follow-up funding after the first film for second, third, etc. I can’t remember the cites for that — it’s been years since I read on this. Maybe out of Chicago’s “Women in the Director’s Chair” film festival, which is an awesome program (widc.org). No… !!! I see that WIDC is shutting down. Goddammit.
[...] this week at Feminist SF – The Blog!, Ide Cyan has a post about some trends she’s noticed while adding women TV writers and directors to a list of women eligible for 2008 SF awards. [...]
Someone added a SGA season 3 writing credit for a woman: Holly Henderson, for “The Game”, who wasn’t listed in the TV.com episode guide I’d consulted. (The IMDb credits her for the story, not the teleplay.)
Jane Espenson wrote the Battlestar Galactica episode The Passage and co-wrote Dirty Hands with Anne Cofell Saunders.
I believe Anne is now writing for Eureka. Johanna Stokes has written four episodes for Eureka.
Smallville has Caroline Dries writing on staff and has had the mighty Doris Egan in the past. I see Tracy Bellomo in the credits also but don’t know whether that name is m or f. Same with Kelly Souders.
Women writers on Supernatural: Sera Gamble, Raelle Tucker, Catherine Humphris.
It’s not as bad as it seems. Though I would love to see more women directors in tv.
Most of those are names I’d been adding to the Wiki, you know.
Julie Gardner is co-executive producer of Torchwood and Doctor Who.
Also, although JMS did write very many episodes of B5, during the first two seasons quite a few were written by D. C. Fontana (the D stands for Dorothy).
[...] -The Losers, a post by Idle Cyan over at the Feminist SF Blog talks about the shows that don’t have any episodes (or very few) directed and/or written by women: First, I’d already started noticing that a pretty good number of episodes of Supernatural were written by women, which is a good thing, despite this being a show that’s so much about a return to a pre-BTVS, pre-X-Files, men-fighting-monsters set-up. And some other shows do give more than a token number of creative credits to women, like Jericho, for instance. [...]
[...] was reading this post in the archives of Feminist SF–The Blog! about the lack of women writing and directing [...]