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WORK TITLE: Stealing the Show
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1966
WEBSITE:
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
married to the British rock critic Simon Reynolds.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1966; married Simon Reynolds; children: two.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. Author. Editor. Vanity Fair, television correspondent. Worked formerly as the chief television critic at Village Voice; as entertainment editor of Salon; as an editor and writer at Los Angeles Times.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including New York, New York Times, Slate, Vogue, Cut and Guardian.
SIDELIGHTS
Joy Press is a Los Angeles-based journalist, editor, and writer. She is the television correspondent for Vanity Fair television. She has worked as the chief television critic at the Village Voice, as entertainment editor of Salon and as an editor at Los Angeles Times. While at the L.A. Times, she commissioned television and book coverage and wrote and reported features. Her writing has appeared in New York Times, Slate, Vogue, Salon, and Guardian. Press is married to British rock critic Simon Reynolds. They have two children.
In Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television, Press offers readers a behind-the-scenes look at what it means to be a woman in show business. Noting the recent rise in female-centered television shows, such as Transparent, Orange Is the New Black, and Jane the Virgin, Press documents the work that female writers, producers, actors, and directors put in to get here. With over fifteen years experience covering television, Press has decades of reporting, research, and personal relationships to draw upon. Kristine Huntley in Booklist described Stealing the Show as “an inspiring, eye-opening look into the way women are creating groundbreaking, original content.”
Press focuses on thirteen female showrunners and the shows that launched their careers. Included in the history are interviews with the women Press writes about as well as the writers and actors they invite to work on their shows. Though she gives nods to the earliest of female television stars, such as Gertrude Berg and Lucille Ball, the main history spans a timeframe of thirty years. Press starts the book with a discussion of trailblazers Diane English and Roseanne Barr in the 1980s. Highlighting the fact that these female-focused shows were highly successful, Press notes that the female leads displayed independence, ambition, and brashness. Next in Press’ history is Gilmore Girls and Grey’s Anatomy. She writes about how these shows focus on traditionally female themes, such as family dynamics and female empowerment, and romance, in the workplace. She explores the ways in which women embrace or ignore sexuality, as seen in the contrasting female characters in 30 Rock. She also highlights the importance of female-only friendships, such as those depicted in Broad City and Girls.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the book as “an urgent and entertaining history of the transformative powers of women in TV,” while a contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote: “Press’s chronicle of a pop-culture movement should inspire a new generation of women creators.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2018, Kristine Huntley, review of Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television, p. 11.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2018, review of Stealing the Show.
Publishers Weekly, January 1, 2018, review of Stealing the Show, p. 50.
ONLINE
New York Times Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com/ (March 19, 2018), Lisa Schwarzbaum, review of Stealing the Show.
Tablet, http://www.tabletmag.com/ (April 30, 2018 ), Marjorie Ingall, review of Stealing the Show.
Joy Press is the television correspondent for Vanity Fair. As a journalist, author and editor , she has been covering TV for more than fifteen years. She served as the chief television critic at The Village Voice, then as entertainment editor of Salon and as an editor at the Los Angeles Times, where in addition to commissioning television and books coverage, she wrote and reported features on the medium. Her writing has appeared in publications including New York, The New York Times, Slate, Vogue, The Cut and The Guardian. She lives in Los Angeles with husband Simon Reynolds and two children.
Joy Press has been writing about TV for more than fifteen years. In the 2000s, she was the chief television critic at The Village Voice. She later served as entertainment editor of Salon and then as an editor at the Los Angeles Times, where in addition to commissioning television coverage, she wrote and reported features on the medium. She has contributed to publications such as The New York Times, Slate, Vogue, Salon, and The Guardian. She lives in Los Angeles.
BEHIND THE BOOK: JOY PRESS
March 01, 2018
Joy Press's new book, Stealing the Show: How Women are Revolutionizing Television, tells the story of the relatively recent rise of female showrunners in TV and the cultural history that predated their success. Press goes behind the scenes to unspool the uber-masculine narrative of TV's so-called "Golden Age," and the taboos surrounding the discussion of sexual harassment in the TV industry before #MeToo began to change the conversation.
OA sat down with Press—a cultural journalist, a former TV critic for the Village Voice and editor at The Los Angeles Times —to talk about the challenge of writing this book in the post-election moment of Donald Trump and #MeToo, about the stories she left out, and about why TV makes people so mad.
OA: You write in the introduction about the ideas starting to float around in your head in the spring of 2015. What moments or people or shows got you thinking about writing this book ?
JP: I had been writing about TV since about the year 2000. I'm a feminist and I thought a lot about gender and class and race. That was one of the lenses that I looked at TV through. But it wasn't really until… I think it was 2011. There was a moment when it seemed like there was something happening. There were a whole bunch of shows coming at the same time. There was "New Girl," "The Bitch in Apartment 23," "Two Broke Girls," "Suburgatory," some other shows that didn't survive. And I knew that Lena Dunham's "Girls" was coming out and I saw a little bit of it and it was great. I think shortly after that, Mindy Kaling was working on her show. It felt to me that something new was happening at that point.
By 2015, there started to be some articles and books about "The Golden Age of Television." The Golden Age was being defined in terms of male watchers and uber-masculine characters in the "Sopranos" mold. Of course, I loved those shows, "Breaking Bad," and all that, but it seemed to me that the history was skewed. I wanted to look at why women were being left out of the history, and why women had few opportunities on television, both behind the scenes and also as interesting protagonists.
OA: How did you pick the shows that you decided to feature?
JP: It was a really hard process. My original conception of the book was much more of a survey. I wanted to go back to the dawn of TV to "The Goldbergs," created by a woman, Molly Goldberg, that made the transition from radio to television. But at some point, I realized that I wanted to make it stories, a really readable narrative, and that I would have to just choose a handful of women. I decided to focus it more on the modern era. And I tried to choose shows where the creators had different experiences and put it in cultural context.
OA: I was surprised to read a sympathetic portrayal of Lena Dunham.
JP: I'm fascinated by the effect that Lena Dunham has on people. Like Roseanne Barr, some of the same things that make her a singular figure are also the things that create problems. I think that there is a willingness on Lena Dunham's part to make herself absolutely vulnerable that also drives people crazy and made her an easy target from the very beginning. I wrote an early piece on her before "Girls" came out. I just have never had an experience like this, where I had a never-ending stream of people in my office to vent. I actually had a bunch of young women, come in to say, "I love the show so much." And, older women too, but often the older women would be like, "She worries me, it's disturbing. It's amazing but…"
It was almost like a riposte to television history. The whole history of television is executives saying, "No, that female character is too unlikeable, that female character is too obnoxious, that female character, no one's going to relate to that. That female character is not sexy enough, is too chubby, is too…" Here in this one character was the anti-television-heroine. It was like, wait, it worked fine with Tony Soprano as the anti-television-hero. I think it was Lena who said to me, "People get more upset about stuff that this 'Girls' character does than people who murder and kill and cheat and betray on these other shows." People are happier to identify with Walter White than they are with this young woman in Brooklyn who's just repeatedly shooting herself in the foot.
“There is a willingness on Lena Dunham’s part to make herself absolutely vulnerable that also drives people crazy — and that made her an easy target from the very beginning.”
OA: Why do you think people get so mad about television?
JP: They're in our houses. And we're watching them over a long time. It's not a two-hour movie that you go to, and you hear people talk about it for a couple of weeks, and then it disappears. These are TV shows that people are watching over years. There are some people who have probably spent more time hanging out with Lena Dunham than they have hanging out with their friends. Shows on cable are often only ten episodes, but if the show is good, then it's a direct connection. You're really feeling the life of this character.
OA: I loved the "Gilmore Girls" set scene.
JP: When I reached out to Amy Sherman-Palladino, she was like, "I don't know if I have time." In the time between when she agreed to talk to me and when I met her, it turned out this reboot was brewing. She was in a complete panic. Anyway, while we were talking for like two or three hours around the corner from her house, her husband, who does the show with her, was texting her as he was working on the screenplay. It was pure luck that I was able to revisit the show that I thought was history. Never in a million years did I think I would get to watch "Gilmore Girls" shooting.
People were so joyous about it. Some people talked about the original set being a pretty stressful place. They were doing everything on a low budget and Amy Sherman-Palladino had incredibly high standards and was incredibly detail-oriented. The scripts would land at the very last second, and everybody would have to memorize these crazy bouts of dialogue. So this time it was really different. People just seemed to be happy, like at a school reunion that you really want to go to. That reporting was extremely enjoyable to do.
“The whole history of television is executives saying, ‘No, that female character is too un-likeable, that female character is too obnoxious, that female character no one’s going to relate to. That female character is not sexy enough, is too chubby, is too...’”
OA: The political landscape changed from when you started writing the book to when you finished it. How did that change your writing process and the shaping of the narrative; if it did?
JP: Yeah, it's pretty crazy. The book was about two-thirds finished when the election happened. As I was writing the book, I was feeling like we were proceeding in a direction of progress. I thought the book was going to come out under a female president. The story started in the culture wars of the 80s, and here we were in this great golden age of women's creative endeavors. And suddenly, when Trump defeated Clinton it was like somebody dumped a giant jug of ice cold water on my head. I just thought, "Wait. Does this book make any sense? What's happening?" I was like a zombie for a month or so, like a lot of people. I thought, "I don't know how I'm going to write this book." But I had a deadline, so I basically just kept writing.
As I carried on, I realized, "Huh, actually, in some ways we circle back to where I started the book with "Murphy Brown" and "Roseanne." Many of the things that were happening in the news and that the Republicans were announcing they intended to do were exact echoes of things that were happening in the late 80s and early 90s. And yet, there were all these shows, all these different female characters and experiences. It occurred to me that [these women] were what had inspired and revolted Trump voters. They were part of "The problem with America." And they were also potentially part of the resistance, which was something we were all talking about after the election. It gave me a completely new perspective on the importance of what I was writing. I'm certainly not going to inflate the importance of television shows, but these are shows that have the ability to seep into people's imagination and their sense of self.
OA: You also completed the book in advance of the #MeToo movement. Did the topic of sexual harassment come up when you were talking to women, or was it in the backdrop of their experiences?
JP: [When #MeToo happened] the book was completely copy-edited and proofed. I went back literally right before it went to press, and added a little bit throughout, just because it seemed bizarre not to make a reference to it. When you are a journalist, you're used to being able to write about things that happened yesterday, or this morning, and so, when you're writing about something and it's set in stone, and everything is changing at such a quick pace, it feels very strange.
When I talked to women, or not just women, that was the one conversation that no one wanted to have. And I realized afterwards, after all of this came out that in some ways that was the absolute darkest topic within the industry. Women would complain about money, they would complain about being described as difficult, or being called a bitch, or being the only woman in the room. And occasionally, someone would describe an experience in a writer's room that bordered on sexual harassment. But it was more just people being assholes, or people being a little bit sexist, or just being jerks. There were only a few times that anybody mentioned anything that bordered on sexual harassment, and I would ask, and there was always… there was just evasion. I realized afterwards that that was really the one line that you could not cross.
OA: What are some of the differences between being a journalist and writing a book?
JP: You can't approach the book process in the same way because there is a finite end and you have to figure out a way to shape the narrative so that it's satisfying. And as has been proven by, as I said, the fact that the #MeToo revelations happened after I was done with the book: it's frustrating. I would love to go back and interview all these people. But, in the book process, at a certain point you have to commit, and as long as you have a satisfying narrative, it's okay to stop.
OA: What was the thing that you left out of the book that you missed most when it was gone?
JP: Some of the stuff that was most fun that didn't get in the book was the historical research about some of the older showrunners of another era. I ended up squeezing what could have been another book into the introduction. I would have loved to talk to more of those old-school showrunners. Their experience was very different from the women who are just coming up now.
Follow Joy Press on Twitter at @JoyPress
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Sophie Haigney covers metro news for The San Francisco Chronicle. Previously she wrote about arts and culture for The New York Times and The Boston Globe. She also writes book reviews and the very occasional travel piece.
“TV is like an empathy machine,” that’s why, says Joy Press, women have been stealing the show
Author Joy Press on how women are “Stealing the Show”
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Mary Elizabeth Williams
March 8, 2018 11:58pm (UTC)
When author Joy Press began writing "Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television," in 2015, we were already in the midst of a watershed era for females in popular entertainment. But Press couldn't have predicted how the 2016 election and the 2017 groundswell of the #MeToo movement would shape the narrative even more.
Drawing on both cultural context and interviews with groundbreaking show runners like Diane English, Jill Soloway and Shonda Rimes, the result is a work that's part oral history, part analysis and part guidepost for where we go from here. It's also a truly entertaining peek backstage into some of the greatest television shows of the past 25 years.
Salon spoke recently to Press about culture wars, female anti-heroes and how Shondaland brought "vajayjay" into the lexicon.
You begin the book with "Murphy Brown," which feels incredibly full circle given that now "Murphy Brown" is coming back. And you end it with "Transparent," and you have to say, "Oh, by the way, Jeffrey Tambor." How did you manage writing this while so much was unfolding in real time?
There’s a moment you have to stop. And the world wasn’t stopping. There was only so much I could do to keep it current. The world just keeps going on, and it certainly is in terms of women. It's proceeding in all kinds of interesting and exciting directions.
People have said, “Oh, you’re so prescient that you saw all this coming.” I certainly didn’t see all of this coming. But there was very much something changing in terms of female creativity on television. That has only been borne out with more and more shows and more and more creative female showrunners and gender non-conforming showrunners.
"Murphy Brown" and "Roseanne" felt like a very important [starting] mark for me. It felt like a moment in which two extremely strong female characters and female creative forces had shaped the conversation in television in a way that very few had done before — and since — in history of female television.
Then when the 2016 election happened, I was personally knocked for a loop. I was supposed to have finished the book by then, and I thought, I need to rethink this whole thing. What am I doing? What do these shows mean? I started to feel like, “Oh, actually, this really takes on a very different meaning.”
As Trump took office, a lot of the rhetoric was the same. I saw those things that I had found in the period of my research on the nineties culture wars. It was eerie.
It was funny reading the first chapter and being thrust back into that moment when the idea that the White House could care about a TV show seemed both huge and also absurd.
It is very weird. The thing about "Murphy Brown" is that it goes back to a moment where everybody was watching the same thing. "Murphy Brown" and "Roseanne" were hugely popular. You have these very seemingly inflammatory figures. Yet, they were very, very popular. A huge swath of America loved those shows. The vice president of America basically pointed to Murphy Brown as responsible for the downfall of the American family, and Americans watched.
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I also want to talk about where we are now. With shows like "Orange is the New Black" and "Transparent," it’s been women who have revolutionized the way that we watch television. It has been women who have been the driving forces behind the changeover in platforms like Netflix and Amazon, overwhelmingly. You go down the litany of these shows: "Fleabag," "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." These shows that are driven by women both in front of and behind the cameras transformed the way we watch television.
A lot of the most exciting, innovative shows in the last five years have been created by women and been created by people of color, because there are voices that have been largely shutouts. I think television was largely guarded traditionally by male gatekeepers. It was fairly hard for women to get their vision on the air.
Jenji Kohan was a veteran TV writer and had not really managed to make anything work on network. She had various pilots. She had a show that didn’t really take off. She just didn’t seem to work within that system. When she created "Weeds," this was a moment when HBO was ascending with all of these very macho dramas. She set out to create a female anti-hero. So she created this great series based on a soccer mom who was dealing weed.
And the home that she was able to find for it was very much nipping at HBO's appeal but had not managed to really make a mark with serious drama and with serious quality original programming. Showtime took a chance on "Weeds" and Jenji Kohan, and really built their slate of shows around shows created about women. They had "Nurse Jackie," "The Big C."
And then Kohan did the same thing with "Orange Is The New Black" when she signed Netflix. They really didn’t exist yet as the network for original programming. "Orange Is The New Black" helped make Netflix this binging sensation.
When it hit everywhere, everyone was tweeting about it and obsessively talking about it. And that was exactly what they wanted. Women have benefitted from the fracturing of the network model, as more streaming platforms have occurred. You also have a lot of women come in through side doors. "Broad City" created their own content; Issa Rae created her own YouTube show.
There’s been a way in which the exclusion of women from really being able to get their voices into mainstream network television benefitted them to make the shows they want to make, make them really original and weird and get a really strong sense what their vision. It’s sort of kind of like, “Well, I might as well just do what I’m going to do.”
But then let's talk about Shonda and what she’s done for television, because she has also really transformed it and in a very mainstream way. She has transformed our classic appointment, sit down on a Thursday night with my girlfriends television.
Shonda is a really singular figure. Looking at how it unfolded, it almost feels like a stealth attack on television. She was a successful screenwriter. She studied at USC and she had done some very successful movies and she wanted to get into television and was developing some shows for ABC. But "Grey's Anatomy" was not a show that ABC had high expectations for. It seems like it was just one of a bunch of shows that they had on their back burner. And it was an incredible hit.
Shonda was very much aware of what she likes and what she hadn’t seen on TV and was really kind of determined to do that as a pushback. She was clearly very, very strategic with her partner Betsy Beers. I just couldn’t believe what she was having to fight for on a daily basis, just basic things about being a woman in the world, being a sexual woman in the world, being a sarcastic woman, being ambitious. Every step, there were these crazy battles, having to fight to use the word vagina or to use anatomically correct words for woman’s body when these were supposed to be doctors and gynecologists.
Which is how we wind up with the vajayjay.
Vajayjay, yes. The birth of the word vajayjay was just, “Okay, we’re just going to come up with something so silly.”
It was a combination of this very creative strategy and just fantastically watchable television that was a huge hit. What you find in television is that money talks. If the show is successful, as with "Murphy Brown," as with "Grey's Anatomy," then you have leeway. You have a lot of room to play. Shonda continued to use that to break new ground without it feeling like something different was happening. It just was entertaining. There were certainly the people watching it maybe seeing things they hadn’t seen before, and identifying things that they’ve experienced that they had never seen on television.
But it wasn’t shouting at you saying, “Look at me! I’m creating a revolution in television.” It felt like a dramatic show that you had to watch and everyone wanted to talk about. Rimes really built an enormously powerful empire on the quality and watchability of her shows. In the background, she was clearly aware every step of the way of how much she had to fight for these little moments, including the questions of female ambition and having characters who didn’t want to get married, who didn’t want to have babies, whether it was on "Scandal" or "Grey's Anatomy." It was so unnatural for a female heroine to choose a job or a work or herself rather than have the focus of the story of the romantic happy ending. I think those are the shifts that she is constantly pushing for on her shows.
Which is a recurring theme in your book. We have stories about things that half of us live through, and yet have to be fought for again and again and again and again and again and again.
I didn’t realize how many things I hadn’t seen until I saw them. It’s invisible until we make something visible. And then you say, “Wow, how was it possible that this has never been on television before? How was it possible that this has never been depicted? Or depicted in this way?” So many clichés in television and on pop culture, so many things that we’ve seen over and over again and yet, there’s a crazy range of experiences.
I think that also puts an awful lot of pressure on the creators of these shows. I saw that a lot in the way that people talked about something like "Girls," where they wanted to see it represent everyone. I see it to some degree with something like "Insecure." There is so much hope and expectation placed on these shows because there aren’t enough of them. We’re hungry to see more and not just to see our own experiences, to see different experiences.
What you’re talking about is the intentional female gaze. When you see it, it is so shocking. When I see these films and television shows that are created by women, it just feels like coming home after a really, really, really long day.
There was a moment that I talk about briefly in the book, in "Transparent." There’s a middle-aged female mom character, and she's just come home from a school function and she’s just exhausted and she stands at the refrigerator naked, tired and fed up.
It’s startling when you see it because it is a concrete moment when you think, “I really don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman of that age in something that feels so real.” It feels really revelatory and at the same time it feels really upsetting to realize how blinkered what we absorb from television is.
What’s been happening in this #MeToo conversation has had a similar effect, where all kinds of experiences that women have bottled up have come out and that moves into the public domain. It’s the same thing. You start to realize the things that have not been publicly talked about and how much had been suppressed and how universal it is.
It’s the same kind of feeling when you see something on television and you think, “I’ve never seen a woman look like that. I’ve never seen a sexual experience quite like that. I’ve never seen a woman thinking to take it that way.” It’s really comes down to the feeling that a tiny fraction of human experience has really been put out there for us. TV is like an empathy machine; it opens the door to experience and walks in other people’s shoes.
For so many of us, we have walked in white men’s shoes for so long they feel like our own. And then when we actually walk in our own shoes, it’s like, “Oh my god, this is what shoes are supposed to feel like!"
White straight men are the default. That’s not to say that no straight white man ever created great female characters. They have. And they have mentored female showrunners. But I think in this case, I feel really strongly that the culture does need a wider range of voices.
I do feel optimistic at this moment. It feels like a really interesting moment when women are extremely conscious, and are making everyone around them extremely conscious. When I would ask people why there's such a small proportion of female showrunners and female directors and female leads, and the answer seemed to be unconscious bias. They’re working with people they feel comfortable with and they’re buying shows that seem interesting to them. That just happens to be about the characters that remind them of themselves when they were young. I think those biases are now conscious and out in the world.
You don’t know what you’re missing until you see it in front of you. So now we’re starting to see it. We’re seeing like traces of it and we have characters like Mindy Lahiri and Hannah Horvath and Issa. And it’s like, “Well, okay, so now we know what we’ve been missing. We know we have a little trace of a sense of what’s possible.” I can’t imagine how we put that genie back in the bottle.
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television
Kristine Huntley
Booklist. 114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p11.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television. By Joy Press. Mar. 2018. 293p. Atria, $26 (9781501137716); e-book, $13.99 (9781501137730). 791.4.
Journalist Press takes readers inside the minds and writers' rooms of the pioneering female showrunners who have created some of the most iconic shows in recent memory. In a profession that has largely been dominated by straight white men, female scribes not only had to fight their way into writers' rooms but they also had to persevere with their own projects against networks that primarily sought out shows with male protagonists. Diane English and Roseanne Barr were trailblazers in the late 1980s with their respective comedies: Murphy Brown, which focused on a driven career woman, and Roseanne, which centered on a working-class family led by a caustic matriarch. On the drama side, Amy Sherman-Palladino's 1990s mother-daughter drama, Gilmore Girls, and Shonda Rhimes' thrilling, emotional, buzzy Grey's Anatomy both had a significant cultural impact. Between interviews with the showrunners themselves as well as the writers and actors they employ, and even a set visit to Jill Soloway's seminal Amazon dramedy, Transparent, Press gives television lovers an inspiring, eye-opening look into the way women are creating groundbreaking, original content.--Kristine Huntley
YAJS: A lively, accessible read for both television lovers and YAs with writing aspirations of their own. KH.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 11. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771736/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f655e156. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771736
Press, Joy: STEALING THE SHOW
Kirkus Reviews. (Jan. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Press, Joy STEALING THE SHOW Atria (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 3, 6 ISBN: 978-1-5011-3771-6
A veteran cultural critic examines the rise of female-centric TV and the pioneering women showrunners behind their successes.
Groundbreaking female characters and their stories have become fixtures in American TV in recent years, but their presence hasn't always been welcome. Press (War of the Words: 20 Years of Writing on Contemporary Literature, 2001, etc.)--former TV critic at the Village Voice and entertainment editor at Salon and the Los Angeles Times--draws from decades of interviews, research, and reporting to create a vibrant behind-the-scenes look at the some of the most prominent women creatives in the industry and the role they played in bringing women-focused narratives to the forefront of modern TV and culture. She devotes the first chapter to Murphy Brown and the revolutionary sitcom's creator, Diane English, one of the first female showrunners to prove that a woman could lead a successful show. English set an important precedent for future women showrunners and their unapologetically brazen TV heroines--Grey's Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes, an industry trailblazer whose portrayal of unabashedly ambitious, sexually formidable, "unlikable" women of all different races, ethnicities, sexualities, and abilities transformed the TV landscape. Rhimes' "color blind" casting helped her build her Shondaland TV empire and effectively normalized the idea that nonwhite, nonmales can be successful on-screen, behind-the-scenes, and in real life. In the most intriguing and intimate chapter, Press examines Transparent creator Jill Soloway, whose real life served as inspiration for her award-winning show about a family who recently learned that their parent is transgender. With a keen eye and a sharp writing style, the author presents the argument that, despite the limited power of TV and the current political backlash facing women, increased representation on-screen has the potential to inspire a cultural revolution not unlike the current revival of the feminist movement. The author also profiles Mindy Kaling, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, and Jenji Kohan, among others.
An urgent and entertaining history of the transformative powers of women in TV.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Press, Joy: STEALING THE SHOW." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520735678/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4cfb5dcb. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A520735678
Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television
Publishers Weekly. 265.1 (Jan. 1, 2018): p50.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television
Joy Press. Atria, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-1-50113771-6
Women have run successful TV shows for decades, but they still routinely face bias and unreasonable obstacles in the industry, as Press (former Salon entertainment editor) details in this powerful narrative that expertly weaves reporting, analysis, and anecdotes. The author profiles 13 female showrunners and their most notable works, starting with Murphy Browns Diane English and ending with Transparent's Jill Soloway. What comes across in Press's 30-year timeline is how little has changed: barriers are erected and women clear them time and again. English calmly battled network executives over details (such as how long Murphy Brown was to have been married in the show), while Soloway had to shed a reputation for being "difficult," which Press notes "is the second-ugliest word for a woman in Hollywood to hear next to 'unrelatable.'" The shows have grown bolder and more complex--as for example in the blunt frankness of Lena Dunham's Girls or in Weeds' Nancy Botwin's flirtation with being "an actively bad mother"--but a troubling culture remains: "The fact that forces of repression are now emboldened and energized," Press writes, translates to a "vital and urgent" need for "diverse and unconventional voices." Press's chronicle of a pop-culture movement should inspire a new generation of women creators. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television." Publishers Weekly, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 50. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522125015/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=61cde676. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522125015
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A scene from “Girls,” with Riz Ahmed and Lena Dunham.
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Mark Schafer/HBO
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By Lisa Schwarzbaum
March 19, 2018
STEALING THE SHOW
How Women Are Revolutionizing Television
By Joy Press
Illustrated. 311 pp. Atria Books. $26.
A jaw-dropper of a plot twist overtook Joy Press in the course of writing “Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television.” This versatile Los Angeles-based culture journalist began her project — reporting on challenges and successes in the careers of a handful of contemporary star female showrunners — inspired by the remarkable number of outstanding female-centric series that were on the air in 2015. These included “Inside Amy Schumer” (which won the accommodating Schumer an Emmy for best variety sketch show); “Transparent” (which won its creator, Jill Soloway, an Emmy for directing); and the Golden Globe comedy nominees “Orange Is the New Black” (created by Jenji Kohan), “Girls” (the signature work of Lena Dunham) and “Jane the Virgin” (developed by Jennie Snyder Urman). Meanwhile, the powerhouse producer Shonda Rhimes dominated network television on Thursday nights with “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal” and “How to Get Away With Murder” (created by “Grey’s” supervising producer Peter Nowalk).
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A scene from “Inside Amy Schumer,” with Amber Rose and Amy Schumer.
Credit
Ali Goldstein
Not unrealistically, the happy publication tie-in that Press expected and hoped for as her work got underway was the election of Hillary Clinton to become the first female president of the United States; the Democratic candidate’s triumph would be the history-making climax of a campaign supported by many of the same industry women Press was interviewing. Dunham, for one, stumped indefatigably on Clinton’s behalf. Rhimes and her producing partner, Betsy Beers, made the video that introduced Clinton at the 2016 Democratic convention. Diane English, who dreamed up the conversation-setting feminist sitcom “Murphy Brown” in the Reaganite 1980s, backed a pro-Clinton super PAC.
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We know the Big Reveal. By the time the author, a former TV critic for The Village Voice, finished her book, Donald Trump had become the first fake-reality-TV character to occupy the Oval Office. “What looked like the forward march of progress turned out to be one of history’s grand zigzags,” Press says in her realistically dismayed introduction. And so began the rising up of a new, very real, very raw female impatience with the same-old, same-old ways of gender inequality in politics; and in the workplace; and in the arts, media, industrial life, military life, factory life, corporate life and even in cartoon-superhero life, what with lady heroes condemned to run around in constricting bustiers.
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A scene from “Orange Is the New Black,” with Jessica Pimentel (left) and Dascha Polanco (center).
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Cara Howe/Netflix
The rising up continues. Nothing on the air seems quite so funny or delightful anymore, and the scripted shows meant to shock, provoke and amuse, whether about trans sexuality within the family (“Transparent”), murder as oh-hello (“Scandal”) or weird sex stuff that women are jolly about (“Broad City,” made by Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer), don’t cause nearly as much shock as the testimony of real women talking about what they experience during working hours.
The litany of imbalances sounds repetitious only because gender inequality repeats itself daily, while the latest headline-making abuses are discussed as if fantastic plot twists in an outrageous soap. And so, between the long-ago year of 2015 and now, the agitation continues, hashtags flying, with ramifications for pop culture and the business behind it that go considerably beyond the scope of Press’s investigation.
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In other words, “Stealing the Show” at times feels a little bereft of urgency.
Then again. Here is a collection of women who have managed to make television on their own terms, embodying proof that it can be done. Press gives a properly respectful nod to Gertrude Berg, who wrote, starred in and produced “The Goldbergs” from 1949 to 1955, calling her “the founding mother of the American TV sitcom.” She makes quick, appropriate bows to “I Love Lucy” (and Lucille Ball), “That Girl” (and Marlo Thomas) and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (and its namesake). She learns from Barbara Corday, who, with her writing partner Barbara Avedon, launched the breakout female-cop-buddy drama “Cagney & Lacey” in 1982, that the seed of the show’s idea was inspired, in a roundabout way, by the feminist critic Molly Haskell’s essential critique “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies.”
But the reporter really kicks into gear with a rich chapter on “Murphy Brown,” followed by a corker of a look-back at the making of “Roseanne” and the backstage chaos that was the price of working with a personage as unique as Roseanne Barr. (Both shows are getting reboots in 2018; it’s a good time to hear what Murphy’s fictional newsroom and Roseanne’s fictional blue-collar family have to say.) Press lingers with an unabashed fan’s delight on the set of “Gilmore Girls” and talks at length with the creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, who now runs the Golden Globe-winning new Amazon Studios comedy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” The author is particularly interested in (and good at describing) the varieties of sexual identities available to women on shows created by women, from the “frumpy and absolutely fine with that” asexuality of Tina Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, on “30 Rock” to the skewed, joyous affection between the characters of Abbi and Ilana on “Broad City,” who “delight in each other like voracious lovers, with each going to absurd extremes to help the other.”
And if, in the end, Press can’t quite sustain the optimism that spurred her book proposal, she comes by her anxieties honestly. “When I started, the golden age of female TV seemed like a permanent advance; now it feels significantly more precarious and embattled,” she writes. The fearless, furiously funny satirist Samantha Bee — creator of the tonic weekly idiot-skewering show “Full Frontal” on TBS — falls outside the scope of her survey. I like to think Press gave the blazingly politicized comedian her privacy so Bee could plot in secret to save us all from the televised apocalypse.
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Lisa Schwarzbaum, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance journalist.
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Running the Show
A new book looks at the women—in particular, the Jewish women—who are changing television
By Marjorie Ingall
The blaring neon cover of Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television by Joy Press is scattered with the names of the high-powered women—producers, directors, and writers—profiled inside: Diane English, Roseanne Barr, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Shonda Rhimes, Liz Meriwether, Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Jenji Kohan, Jill Soloway, and Abbi Jacobson & Ilana Glazer. If you are me, you immediately start counting. And yup, seven of those 12 are Jewish. Given that Jews constitute less than 2 percent of the American population, what are the odds?
Joy Press, who has been a TV critic for the Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, and now Vanity Fair, said she was surprised herself. “I don’t think I was explicitly thinking about writing about Jewishness,” she told me in an interview. “Truthfully, it was kind of surprising and fascinating how much of it came through in these women’s shows. There’s historically been a fear that Jewishness would be off-putting to a general audience…and for whatever reason Jewish women were seen as really off-putting. In the book, I mention the adage ‘Write Yiddish, Cast British,’ and if you look at the history of television, you’d be shocked how much it’s true. It’s a way for Jewish writers create characters that feel specific to them, while knowing they wouldn’t be able to get away with a Jewish actress or character. There is something unmistakably Jewish about the patrician family in Gilmore Girls, for instance. And Jill Soloway said, ‘I spent a whole career trying to hide Jewish women in shiksa characters.’”
It was not always thus. The godmother of the sitcom was explicitly, openly Jewish: Gertrude Berg, a constant presence on radio and TV from 1929 to 1956 and the winner of the very first Best Actress Emmy in 1950. “But she was this aberration that would never be referred to again!” Press said with a laugh. “The beginnings of television had ethnic characters who just disappeared in favor of white picket fences.”
Jewish men have long been sitcom creators and writers, but women showrunners who are not Gertrude Berg have been few and far between. In the book, Soloway describes to Press about how male power is handed down: “You can picture the older male director who hires the freshman director,” she says. “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.’”
Press told me, “I’m not aware of Jewish men making a big effort to bring in Jewish women. And the older women who did make it in couldn’t get helped on board by other women because women weren’t in a position to bring them in! Now, though, things are different.”
Why? “The fracturing of the traditional network system has been enormously helpful to women,” Press said. “There’s been this explosion of female-driven shows in the last five years, and even, frankly, since I started working on the book in 2015. I couldn’t keep up! Today there are lots of cable and streaming networks that are really eager for content and are not looking for the massive broad audience that CBS, NBC, and ABC need, which means that a lot more niche TV shows are seen as OK. Which is funny since women are 50 percent of the population! But women are a niche.” And when creators are spared the process of jumping through the hoops of creating network TV, where weird edges and quirk and ethnicity are generally shaved off in the development process, “weirdness and Jewishness become OK,” Press said. “And these great characters created by Jewish women have climbed in through the side door.”
The popularity of TV shows created by women begat more TV shows by and for women: “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,” Press writes. “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.”
Much of the fun of Press’s book, too, is in the weird edges and quirk and ethnicity. Her interviews with Roseanne Barr and writers of the first Roseanne show (the reboot happened after Stealing the Show went to press) are particularly delicious. Barr, Press notes, arrived in Hollywood by way of “a mental hospital, a commune, a feminist bookstore, and as a stay-at-home suburban mother.” Her grandmother, Bobbe Mary, ran an apartment complex in Salt Lake City full of Holocaust survivors (“‘I entertained like mad, because I was afraid if I didn’t everyone would start to talk about the Holocaust,” Barr said) and her mother “was the beautiful girl of our Jewish community and I was her fat daughter who chewed on my own hair.” On set, Barr screamed at everyone, stormed off repeatedly, and burned through staff. A very young Amy Sherman-Palladino worked on Roseanne—she wrote the episode about Darlene’s first period—as did a pre-Buffy Joss Whedon, who said of his stint: “Welcome to my dream and my first heartbreak.”
Press writes, “The level of backstabbing intrigue resembled the royal court of Henry VIII…At one point, [Barr] decided to make the writers wear numbers around their necks rather than address them by name. Sherman-Palladino was number two.” John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf were asked if they’d be willing to continue the show without Roseanne; they refused, and the self-styled domestic goddess stayed in the picture.
Filming was nearly as chaotic on Gilmore Girls, with its breakneck dialogue (in Press’s words, “like a Ramones song transposed to television or a Hepburn-Tracy movie on speed”) and exhausting pace. Sherman-Palladino even “snipped frames so that the dialogue overlapped or characters seemed to move faster.” She rewrote almost all the dialogue she didn’t write herself, because the whole show reflected her singular voice…and of course, her micromanagement made everything run late. Sounding very much like Mrs. Maisel, she told the network executives who kept hocking her: “You can fire me, or you cannot ever call me again. Those are your two choices, because it is like talking to my mother once a week. I am sorry you are tragically disappointed, but I am working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and I literally can’t work any harder than I am.” (Of course, Press delves into the jarring Jewishness of the show’s purportedly WASP characters—Lorelei’s catchphrase is inexplicably “Oy with the poodles already,” and at one point, there’s a misbegotten chuppah in Lorelei’s yard in the most goyish Connecticut small town of all time.)
The book touches on the ambivalence many people feel toward Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham. (Fun fact: Dunham did standup comedy at 14, as a student at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn. Her act’s opening line: “Hi, I’m Lena, and I’m an alcoholic. Just kidding. My dad is.”) Press herself sounds squarely in Dunham and Schumer’s corner. She notes that people seem to have a hard time separating these performers from the unlikeable characters they play. “People respond in a different way to Larry David’s obnoxious, narcissistic, provocative characters, for example,” she told me. “I think in Lena Dunham’s case we have a lot of opinions about how women should behave, and when they don’t act that way, we’re furious. Lena Dunham said that people get more upset about stupid things Hannah does than when Walter White kills people. Hannah is self-destructive and problematic in every way, and we’re uncomfortable that she’s so comfortable with her body. That’s the worst thing for some people: How dare they not be thin and be OK with it!” (I’d argue that in Schumer’s case, she’s not OK with it, and her mixed messages and the sanctimony resulting from her own ambivalence are what infuriate other women. And I’d argue that the level of privilege that Dunham and Schumer repeatedly fail to grasp that they possess, in actual real life, is why many women loathe them. But I’m grateful that Press’s book reminded me of the brilliance of Schumer’s early skits—her furious, feminist parodies of Twelve Angry Men and Friday Night Lights in particular. And I agree that Schumer and Dunham are lambasted by the left and right to a degree that male comics never are.
My very favorite section of the book is devoted to Abbi and Ilana of Broad City. Press writes in an antic, manic, clause-dense way that seems to reflect the anarchic joy of the show itself. She calls the best friends “superheroines and cartoons” who “seem to exist in a world built for them alone.” Where Dunham’s Girls torture and betray each other repeatedly, “Abbi and Ilana delight in each other like voracious lovers, with each going to absurd extremes to help the other…in [one] episode, after the water shuts off during a party, Ilana removes Abbi’s turd from her nonworking toilet and duct-tapes it to her stomach to smuggle it out of the apartment without anyone knowing. She proudly declares herself Abbi’s ‘doo-doo ninja.’” I will miss this show desperately.
Broad City positively revels in its Jewishness. Ilana’s mother, Press notes (as have I) is one of the great, positive depictions of Jewish motherdom in all of TV. Played by Susie Essman, “she is a Jewish mother with no negative connotations,” Press said. “She’s full of chutzpah and advice but so loving and accepting.” Press and I sighed happily as we reminisced about the episode set during Ilana’s grandmother’s shiva: Ilana’s mother, while admiring Abbi’s Italian leather purse, discovers Abbi’s strap-on dildo, demands answers about what it is, and promptly cheers for Abbi for pursuing her own sexual pleasure. (Ilana likewise screams, “This is the happiest day of my life!” At her grandmother’s shiva.)
Press points out that because Jacobson and Glazer came to TV via their own videos on the web (true of Tablet’s beloved Rachel Bloom as well), they hadn’t internalized the death-by-committee ethos of network TV. They had a strong sense of who their semi-autobiographical characters were, and they didn’t have cliched sitcom-writing habits to unlearn.
Press may not want to speculate why her book is teeming with Jewish women, but hey, I will:
1. Judaism has historically prized both humor and literacy. That’s why there are a lot of funny Jewish writers of all genders.
2. Hollywood may still be a boys’ club, but it has also, since its inception, been a place where Jews could get a foot in the door (like comic books and music, and unlike vast swaths of the business world).
3. Jewish women have usually viewed themselves as outsiders and observers: Scorned by WASP-y prom king royalty, bedeviled by unruly bodies and unruly hair, big-nosed and loud and smart and pushy. If you see yourself—and others see you—as an aggressive oddball anyway, maybe that helps you be less wounded by rejection?
Regardless of the whys, the reality is that the snowball of women content creators has achieved sufficient mass for women writers and directors to be able to help other women rise up in greater numbers. Press’s epilogue describes the Woolf Pack, a group begun by writer Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City, The Big C, The Greatest Showman) under the umbrella of the Humanitas Foundation, a nonprofit that supports “writers who create contemporary media…to explore what it means to be a human being.” Stories centered on women, people of color, and LGBT folks certainly qualify. Woolf Pack members now include Jenji Kohan, Shonda Rhimes, Mindy Kaling, Ava Duvernay, Lena Dunham, Mara Brock Akil (Being Mary Jane), DeAnn Heline (The Middle), Danai Gurira, and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro (the very Jewish and underrated UnReal). At one lunch, Bicks announced, “If this place got bombed, there would be no more female showrunners.” She added “Which would probably make a lot of people happy.’”