1/14/2019
The Pool - Arts & Culture - Women Can Tell More Than Just Confessional Stories On TV
TV
Women can tell more than just confessional stories on TV 4
MIN
Calling for more female voices in television doesn’t have to mean more semiautobiographical stories. It could mean sexy aliens or psychopathic assassins, says Rachael Sigee By Rachael Sigee
In February of this year, female UK scriptwriters wrote an open letter addressing the issue after it was revealed that only one of ITV’s announced 2018 dramas had a female lead writer. A Writer’s Guild report, this year, showed that only 14% of prime-time TV is written by women. It’s a pretty shoddy situation for the supposed Golden Age of Television. This week, TV writer Danielle Ward pointed out on Twitter that there is one area where female voices are sounding more strongly: those writers/performers creating autobiographical works. Fleabag, SMILF, Girls, Insecure, Catastrophe, Chewing Gum, Derry Girls, The Bisexual, The Mindy Project, Broad City – these are revolutionary https://www.the-pool.com/arts-culture/tv/2018/42/Female-writers-on-television-more-than-personal-autobiographical-stories
1/4
1/14/2019
The Pool - Arts & Culture - Women Can Tell More Than Just Confessional Stories On TV
female voices of the television world. And these shows (in my humble, television-glutton opinion) are brilliant. They are smart and funny and groundbreaking and authentic, and all of them are showing audiences something that they haven’t seen before on TV, whether that’s a woman masturbating to an Obama speech or celebrating getting her period when she thought she might be pregnant. But they also mostly fall into the category of semi-autobiographical, confessional writing, whose writers have mined their lives, loves and losses to create relatable entertainment. They are brave, but it feels like they have to be. In order to be greenlit, a female writer must lay herself bare. She must expose and reveal and shock. As Ward begged, “Can we please get past the idea women can only tell ‘personal’ stories rather than, you know, making stuff up with our huge imaginations,” comedy writer Gabby Hutchinson Crouch replied, saying: “I WANT TO WRITE COMEDY NARRATIVES ABOUT WITCHES & SEXY ALIENS & THE APOCALYPSE & HAVE ACTORS ACT THEM.” When a woman on screen plays a character she has created and written, actor and character often become interchangeable – our response is to ask how true it is to her life. Did Lena Dunham really pop her eardrum through OCD behaviour? Did Michaela Coel really claim to be dating Stormzy to make an ex-boyfriend jealous? Did Issa Rae set fire to a corner of her apartment? But when we watch Peep Show, we don’t ponder whether it was David Mitchell or Robert Webb who accidentally ate a dog. We take it as given that the sitcom might be inspired by real events and people, but that the writers have exaggerated, magnified and even invented.
“
Being informed by your own life, your own experiences and your own identity can be wielded as a powerful tool to tell stories, but it does not have to be your story that is told
https://www.the-pool.com/arts-culture/tv/2018/42/Female-writers-on-television-more-than-personal-autobiographical-stories
2/4
1/14/2019
The Pool - Arts & Culture - Women Can Tell More Than Just Confessional Stories On TV
Consider the run of shows that US television creator Michael Schur is responsible for: The Office, Parks And Recreation, Brooklyn 99 and The Good Place. While no doubt informed by his life experiences, the common thread of these shows is human interaction and group dynamics. Schur is not the socially awkward middle-manager of a paper company, a relentlessly dedicated local government official, a rule-bending NYPD cop and he’s not dead. But he could still create narratives about all of these situations. Being informed by your own life, your own experiences and your own identity can be wielded as a powerful tool to tell stories, but it does not have to be your story that is told. And we do have some proof that women can write stories that are not lifted straight from their own lives, none more so than in Phoebe WallerBridge, who has demonstrated that she can both write a self-obsessed, sexually frustrated millennial whose experiences draw on her own, and a psychopathic assassin with a penchant for giant helium balloons. Killing Eve felt resolutely female in voice and gaze, but it also felt fanciful and camp. Its authenticity lies in how characters react to one another and speak to each other, not in how true it felt to life in a Russian prison. Similarly, Jennie Snyder Urman’s Jane The Virgin is able to portray a believable Latinx family who struggle with finances, life goals, love triangles and immigration issues, as well as placing it firmly in TV land, as they also face evil twins, faked deaths, accidental inseminations and faceswapping mafia bosses. Calls for more female voices do not necessarily mean endless Lena Dunhams, but this is often how they are interpreted. Desiree Akhavan, who created Channel 4’s The Bisexual, has commented that, after her debut feature film, Appropriate Behaviour, most of the offers coming from film studios simply wanted to remake that story again. Instead, they might mean a writer like Charlie Covell adapting graphic novel The End Of The F***ing World, or Melissa Rosenberg bringing Jessica Jones to Netflix. They mean tackling the vast difficulty that women have in funding their work. In literature, there have been some wildly successful female writers of genre fiction that does not take the form of semi-autobiography – women like JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood, https://www.the-pool.com/arts-culture/tv/2018/42/Female-writers-on-television-more-than-personal-autobiographical-stories
3/4
1/14/2019
The Pool - Arts & Culture - Women Can Tell More Than Just Confessional Stories On TV
Octavia E Butler, Deborah Harkness and Stephenie Meyer. But it doesn’t translate to television, where the biggest genre shows – Game Of Thrones, Doctor Who, Star Trek – are mostly written by men. Special effects, CGI, outlandish costumes and extravagant sets mean increased budgets, and we know that women struggle to get even shoestring ideas on to the screen. Men are seen as the documentarians of culture, the observers of society, the great storytellers of history, while women are seen as the journalkeepers and the diary-scribblers. But we must create space for both, because female writers can be just as visionary, creative and surreal as their male counterparts, whether it’s witches and sexy aliens or a world with equal pay… imagine that.
@littlewondering
Sign up Love this? Sign up to receive our Today in 3 email, delivering the latest stories straight to your inbox every morning, plus all The Pool has to offer. You can manage your email subscription preferences at My Profile at any time ENTER EMAIL
SIGN UP
OR SIGN UP WITH FACEBOOK Photo: Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag and Killing Eve
https://www.the-pool.com/arts-culture/tv/2018/42/Female-writers-on-television-more-than-personal-autobiographical-stories
4/4