In The Mindy Project writers’ room (clockwise from left): Alina Mankin, Jeremy Bronson, Chris Schleicher, Wigfield, Jeremy Tramer, and Miranda Berman.
“Have you ever done an interview where someone puts their makeup on?” she asked a reporter the following day, as she sat at her desk in The Mindy Project offices, applying mascara to her lashes. This scene, as it turns out, was not unique. Wigfield routinely brings her entire makeup regimen to the office, says Matt Warburton, the showrunner. “She’s famous for doing a certain amount of her personal grooming in the writers’ room. It’s freed us all up to bring our home rituals in,” he said. “It’s like a giant bedroom in there.” The writers’ room is perhaps the second most famous aspect of the television production experience, particularly in the case of comedy writers, where it’s essentially a joke foundry. Each funny idea is infinitely malleable, and writers can spend 12-to-14-hour days sculpting and shaping a comedic narrative until it gleams. Inside the room at The Mindy Project, which is closed to visitors when work is in progress, Wigfield has a reputation for telling stories, and for “always trying to improve the product,” says her colleague Jeremy Bronson, a supervising producer on the show. “Tracey is also a big laugher,” he adds “and that makes writers’ rooms not only more fun, but I think they yield bet-
ter material when people give it up and laugh. And she is definitely one of those people.” There is something in Wigfield’s high level of comfort in the writers’ room that points to her experience as a student at the all-girls Immaculate Heart Academy in Washington, New Jersey, an experience she has said “prepared me to be the only girl in the room.” In a commencement address she gave in June 2014, Wigfield described for an Immaculate Heart audience the extent to which women are underrepresented in her field. “Only 30 percent of television writers are women—and when you talk about comedy television, that number drops to 10 percent,” she said. She has, on occasion, “spent time in writers’ rooms filled with men”—although not at The Mindy Project, where the female to male ratio is four to six, nor in the final days of 30 Rock when the ratio there was five to seven. Partly, she said, the problem is that “not that many women are attempting to become writers . . . maybe because comedy writing is scary. You have to be bold, and loud, and not care when you confidently say a joke and no one laughs.” “Being in a community of all women [at Immaculate Heart],” she s p r i n g 20 15 v b c m
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